Retired Generals Criticize Bush’s Plan for Iraq

A panel of retired generals told a United States Senate committee today that sending 21,500 additional troops to Iraq will do little to solve the underlying political problems in the country. “Too little and too late,” is the way Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, a former chief of the Central Command, described the effort to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The additional troops are intended to help pacify Baghdad and a restive province, but General Hoar said American leaders had failed to understand the political forces at work in the country. “The solution is political, not military,” he said. “A fool’s errand,” was the judgment of Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who commanded troops in the first Gulf War. He said other countries had concluded that the effort in Iraq was not succeeding, noting that “our allies are leaving us and will be gone by summer.”

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Moqtada's interview at La Repubblica, translated

He feels stalked and goes into hiding. He sleeps no more than one night in the same bed. Some of his most faithful allies have already turned their backs. He has even moved his family to an undisclosed location. Muqtada al-Sadr feels that the end is near. Enemy forces, forces infiltrated amongst his own people! Yet for him it is not about al-Málikí, whom he considers little more than a puppet, so much as about ’Iyád al-‘Alláwí, the former prime minister, whom the Americans have never stopped aiming [to empower]. He [‘A.] is the true director of the operation which proposes to wipe him [S.] off the face of Iraq, him and his Mahdi Army.

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War costs are hitting historic proportions
The price tag for the Iraq conflict and overall effort against terrorism is expected to surpass Vietnam's next year.

By the time the Vietnam war ended in 1975, it had become America's longest war, shadowed the legacies of four presidents, killed 58,000 Americans along with many thousands more Vietnamese, and cost the U.S. more than $660 billion in today's dollars. By the time the bill for World War II passed the $600-billion mark, in mid-1943, the United States had driven German forces out of North Africa, devastated the Japanese fleet in the Battle of Midway, and launched the vast offensives that would liberate Europe and the South Pacific. The Iraq war is far smaller and narrower than those conflicts, and it has not extended beyond the tenure of a single president. But its price tag is beginning to reach historic proportions, and the budgetary "burn rate" for Iraq may be greater than in some periods in past wars.

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  thanks to Bad Attitudes

The GOP in a Quagmire

The sense of impending political doom that clutches Republican hearts one week after President Bush presented his new strategy on Iraq to the nation is stoked by the alarming intelligence brought back from Baghdad by Republican Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota and passed around Capitol Hill.

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Iraq: Beyond the Gallows

Many observers have assumed that Saddam Hussein’s execution was yet another Iraqi “milestone” timed to serve the needs of a struggling American president. Milestone it was, but indications now suggest that this was, on the contrary, a marker that Washington was desperate to forestall. And for good reason: in pressing for Saddam’s execution, Iran appears to have reached over America’s head and graphically demonstrated that it is now the preeminent political force inside Iraq.

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