| iraq
We are all alone. There’s no other way to put it. With the attack on the Italian installation in Nasiriyah, the Japanese and the South Koreans are now balking on earlier pledges of troops. They haven’t exactly pulled the plug on a possible deployment. But they’re really jiggling the plug in the socket.
The number of troops involved is minor compared to the scope of the operation. Japan had pledged 150 troops and then planned to build that force to 700 early next year. They now say they’re unlikely to send anyone this calendar year. And it doesn’t look much like they plan to send anyone at all. They seem to be, shall we say, letting us down easy.
Meanwhile, the nearly 500 South Korean troops stationed near Nasiriyah have been confined to their compound till further notice. And, as the Washington Post reports, “South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun rebuffed a U.S. request for a substantial increase in the number of troops his government has pledged to send to Iraq, instructing officials at a Cabinet meeting Tuesday to keep the figure to 3,000 or less, according to a spokesman today.”
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In this whole unfortunate business, the White House took our preeminence and mistook it for omnipotence or something near to it. And by treating our preeminence as omnipotence they’ve put our preeminence into question.
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'We could lose this situation'
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
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Two quotes of the day ..
If the policy is to more rapidly Iraqify the situation -- as in Vietnamization during the Vietnam War -- then that is another version of cutting and running. One way to cut and run is to simply say we're pulling out. Another is to prematurely turn over security to Iraqi forces and draw down American forces. That's a near-term prescription for disaster.
Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del)
The United States will fail in Iraq if our adversaries believe they can outlast us. If our troop deployment schedules are more important than our staying power, we embolden our enemies and make it harder for our friends to take risks on our behalf. When the United States announces a schedule for training and deploying Iraqi security officers, then announces the acceleration of that schedule, then accelerates it again, it sends a signal of desperation, not certitude. When in the course of days we increase by thousands our estimate of the numbers of Iraqis trained, it sounds like somebody is cooking the books. When we do this as our forces are coming under increasing attack, we suggest to friends and allies alike that our ultimate goal in Iraq is leaving as soon as possible – not meeting our strategic objective of building a free and democratic country in the heart of the Arab world.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz)
No doubt about it. We are in a really bad position. We should have given our operation a stronger and more
durable international footing when we could act from a position of relative strength in the spring and early summer. We should also have created a road-map for the transition to at least nominal Iraqi sovereignty that was clear, predictable, and rapid.
But things which make sense when done with consideration and from a position of strength don't necessarily make sense when done at gunpoint. Let's not fool ourselves. The calculus at the White House is being driven by an effort to ward off a potential political transition in the United States rather than an effort to lay the groundwork for one in Iraq. This is political -- as many of the original architects of this war are now realizing and ruing.
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US shifts to rapid transfer of power
Iraq's governing council is to meet Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Baghdad, tomorrow to craft a radical change to political plans that would see the rapid creation of a transitional government.
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Iraqi Governing Council...
I have to post this fast. The electrical situation has been hellish today. There's no schedule… in our area the electricity is on 30 minutes for every two hours of no electricity. People suspect it's a sort of punishment for what happened in Nassiryah this morning and the bombings in Baghdad this last week. There were also some huge explosions today- the troops got hit by mortars, I think, and retaliated by bombing something.
Also, Mohammed Bahr Ul Iloom was shot at today. Bahr Ul Iloom is one of the Shia clerics (a 'rotating president') and the father of the Minister of Oil. He was unharmed, it seems, but his driver is wounded. While I'm sure Bahr Ul Iloom would love to blame it on loyalists, Ba'athists and Al-Qaeda, the shots actually came from American troops- it was a 'mistake'. Oops.
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