Damn those exceptions
Haven’t you heard the news? Our war in Iraq is going much better than you’ve heard. The trends are up, stability is spreading, Iraqis are returning to the country, and less US troops are getting killed.
It is only due to those damn tofu eating, chardonnay swilling, whale loving, liberal Democrats and hate America first types in the media that you don’t know this.
Yes, everything is going great guns (pardon the pun), except:
Secretary Robert Gates recently endorsed the concept of ordering a pause in troop withdrawals from Iraq this summer,” saying that “the notion of a brief period of consolidation and evaluation probably does make sense.” Gates echoed sentiments from Gen. David Petraeus, who last month indicated that the drawdown may halt after this summer, when troop levels in Iraq reach roughly 140,000.
Except America’s military is hurting. “The surge has sucked all of the flexibility out of the system,” Army Chief of Staff George Casey recently said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “And we need to find a way of getting back into balance.”
“The well is deep, but it is not infinite,” Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We must get Army deployments down to 12 months as soon as possible. People are tired.”
Except that about one in six combat troops returning from Iraq have suffered at least one concussion in the war, injuries that, while temporary, could heighten their risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a recent study, in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Except that a classified Pentagon assessment concludes that long battlefield tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with persistent terrorist activity and other threats, have prevented the U.S. military from improving its ability to respond to any new crisis.
Except that Army Maj. Gen. Thomas Bostick acknowledged that in achieving its recruiting quotas, his service fell far short of Pentagon standards for high school graduates, with only 79 percent, and has had to grant an increasing number of waivers for medical conditions or past drug use or criminal convictions.
Except that the number of “high-quality” recruits has continued a downward slide nationwide since 2004. Recruits in that group hold a traditional high school diploma and score in the upper half of the Armed Forces Qualification Test. Only 44.6 percent did that last year, down from 60.9 percent in 2004.
Except that the population of Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion was in the 26-27 million range. Between March 2003 and today, reputable sources place the total of Iraqis who have fled their homes, both internally and those who have gone abroad between 4.5 million and 5 million individuals. Even if you take the lower figure, approximately one in six Iraqis is either a refugee in another country or an internally displaced person. The comparable U.S. figure would be approximately 50 million Americans.
Except, as Boston University historian Andrew Bacevich recently wrote:
As the violence in Baghdad and Anbar province abates, the political and economic dysfunction enveloping Iraq has become all the more apparent. The recent agreement to rehabilitate some former Baathists notwithstand ing, signs of lasting Sunni-Shiite reconciliation are scant. The United States has acquired a ramshackle, ungovernable and unresponsive dependency that is incapable of securing its own borders or managing its own affairs. More than three years after then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice handed President Bush a note announcing that “Iraq is sovereign,” that sovereignty remains a fiction.
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