Don't wait for the Iraqis to do it

Michael Goodwin:

Everybody is talking about Iraq, but nobody knows what to do about it. The White House, Congress and the military say all possible ideas are being considered and that "everything is on the table."

I beg to differ. Not everything is on the table. Every idea mentioned is a slight variation of what we're already doing. It's nipping and tucking around the edges while hoping for dramatically better results. I don't think that's going to work. We need to consider something really different if we want to stop the downward spiral.

Maybe it's time to bypass the lame Iraqi military and the lamer Iraqi government and do the damn job ourselves. Let's go in with massive force - 100,000 extra troops - and flatten the resistance and sectarian killers once and for all. Let's crush the bastards and be done with it.

Okay, accuse me of channeling the late Gen. Curtis LeMay, the gruff Vietnam commander best known for saying we should "bomb Vietnam back into the Stone Age." LeMay denied he ever said that, and I'm not looking to unleash a firestorm on Iraq.

I'm simply saying that if a stable Iraq is as important as President Bush says it is, and it is, and if the Iraqi government is as hopeless as it seems, and it is, then we may have no other choice if we want any semblance of victory. I'm not advocating overwhelming force. I'm saying it needs to be considerd.

The problem with all the other options is that nobody in Washington has real confidence they're going to work....

...
That is an alternative that would work, but the moment has probably already passed for it politically. The Democrats would probably squeal louder than they did when Nixon bombed Cambodia.

Comments

  1. Brad Williams12:44 PM

    Sounds like a saner plan than "Go Long". It's interesting that he doesn't want to be accused of "overwhelming force", when that is exactly what he is suggesting by "flatten the resistance and sectarian killers once and for all." How not to be discouraged when the hawks are embarrassed of their own watered-down hawkishness?

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