Ludicrous Lugar position on surge
Near the beginning of John Kennedy's Profiles in Courage he relates a story on a Congressman who had campaigned on the promise to reforest a mountain range in his district. A few months after being sworn in he got a letter from a constituent asking where the trees were.
Richard Lugar's suggestion that the surge was a failure is even more ludicrous. He made this assessment only days after the last of the troops got to Iraq and in the middle of one of the biggest offensives of the war. It is hard to make the argument that he has given the surge a fair chance. What is clear is that he has been biding his time to write it off and did not bide enough.
Why Lugar is so eager to lose in Iraq is a mystery. Unlike the Democrats there is little political benefit to him in losing. I suspect he has been listening to too many Democrats who want to lose and is believing their nonsense about the war.
No rational student of warfare should conclude that our effort in Iraq is lost. Such a conclusion is ridiculous on its face. The enemy in Iraq is incapable of winning an engagement and has been rejected in the hearts and minds of the Iraqis. The only place he is winning is in the hearts and minds of Democrats and apparently a few Republicans.
The surge is having a positive effect on the neighborhoods where the troops have been deployed and the operations in Diyala and other places in the belts around Baghdad have deprived the enemy of its bases for launching attacks on Iraqi non combatants.
One of the problems with reporting from Baghdad has been the tendency to use violence as a metric of who is winning. Militarily it is insignificant. To be significant an attack has to effect a military's ability to function in its mission. The only place such attacks are having an effect is in Washington.
J.D. Johannes nails Lugar.
Richard Lugar's suggestion that the surge was a failure is even more ludicrous. He made this assessment only days after the last of the troops got to Iraq and in the middle of one of the biggest offensives of the war. It is hard to make the argument that he has given the surge a fair chance. What is clear is that he has been biding his time to write it off and did not bide enough.
Why Lugar is so eager to lose in Iraq is a mystery. Unlike the Democrats there is little political benefit to him in losing. I suspect he has been listening to too many Democrats who want to lose and is believing their nonsense about the war.
No rational student of warfare should conclude that our effort in Iraq is lost. Such a conclusion is ridiculous on its face. The enemy in Iraq is incapable of winning an engagement and has been rejected in the hearts and minds of the Iraqis. The only place he is winning is in the hearts and minds of Democrats and apparently a few Republicans.
The surge is having a positive effect on the neighborhoods where the troops have been deployed and the operations in Diyala and other places in the belts around Baghdad have deprived the enemy of its bases for launching attacks on Iraqi non combatants.
One of the problems with reporting from Baghdad has been the tendency to use violence as a metric of who is winning. Militarily it is insignificant. To be significant an attack has to effect a military's ability to function in its mission. The only place such attacks are having an effect is in Washington.
J.D. Johannes nails Lugar.
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