Redstate

I'm curious about the thinking here. Do you endorse "The Surge"?
For my own answer, I favor a significant boost in troop numbers.

I think what has happened is Bush has finally realized its all or nothing. Many of us knew from the begining that if we were really going to try to defeat the terrorist that it would be long, bloody, expensive, and widespread. in short it always was All Or Nothing. AQ knew this that if we didn't roll up all the terrorist governments and the terrorist supporting governments that at the end of the day there movement would survive and remastisize.

Deploying a extra Carrier (not surging Deploying) 20-50k extra troops I think has little to nothing to do with the Iraq phase by itself. Its all or nothing guys suck it up and prepare its going to get a hell of a lot worse before better. We have been smoking the hives on the limbs only to find the tree to be hollow and full we can either run for the lake or cut her down. All or nothing guys

I don't know if he was the problem or not, but it sure seems like a lot more fresh ideas are being offered to the President without Rummy getting in the way. BTW, are you guys surprised Bush haters aren't supporting a troop surge? lol I'm not. They would love to see us lose in Iraq and that's a fact. If they wanted us to win they would offer more than "cut and run". Enough said. Then you have weenies like Bill Oreilly who make dumb statements like "The Iraqi people don't want freedom, because they won't stand up to the terrorists". Ummm, well I wouldn't either. If they rat someone out, they get killed by a miltia group. Here are 3 steps to winning:

1) Add more troops to Baghdad. Clear out the bad guys and hold the area with US and Iraqi troops.

2) Go after Sadr and militia groups hard.

3) Pressure Maliki to work with allies/moderates in the government to agree to an oil profit sharing deal and create more jobs. The more money Iraqi people have the less likely they will go out and blow things up.

If I remember, the choices were:
Go Strong, Go Long, or Go Home.
The problem here is that sending more troops (Go Strong) implies that we haven't already. In turn, this implies that we went to war without the goal of complete military victory.
Who in their right mind, wages war without trying to win? Who in their right mind, would correspondingly sacrifice their soldiers?

I see all this as frittering around the margins because the situation is not as bad as most people make it out to be except for the US politics.

3000 troops lost in 3 years is tragic for each an every brave individual and their families, but a drop in the bucket for a major war effort by any historical military standard. The US lost a roughly similiar number of KIAs on the first day of the invasion at Iwo Jima. How did we come to define 1000 deaths a year as "losing the war"?

Lots of Iraqis are being killed by other Iraqis. They have long standing issues that we are neither responsible for, nor that we can resolve. How did we end up defining victory as creating peace between two factions that have been at war for hundreds of years? Having the extremists on both sides blow each other up is bound to alienate the middle against them over time, as well as create attrition for the extremists themselves. Other than the Kumbaya Factor, what's the downside?

Meanwhile we have a whole string of successes in Iraq -- from toppling Saddam, killing Uday/Qsay, drafting a constitution, ratifying it by popular vote, electing a new government notwithstanding it's frequent dysfunctionality.

The big question in Iraq is how America decided we were losing.

This war has come to be viewed not as a military/strategic conflict but one driven by domestic politics. Everything gets filtered through the Bush Lens. There is a constituency which will defend the way the war is fought because they want to protect Bush, and another that actively wants to see an American defeat in order to hang it around his neck. Unfortunately the latter group is in ascendency.

Bush has to do "something" to change the political chemistry so that we are not forced to discontinue the fight as happened in Vietnam. Maybe that something is the surge. My only hope is that they slip some changes in the ROE in on the side. But for Bush to come back from this process with no changes at all is simply not politically tenable at this point.

When, as a young sargeant, I first began helping plan operations for intelligence and combat patrols, my instructors told me to always think twice about adding troops. Every additional troop deployed is also an additional target. I was trained to consider, in addition to the asset value of another pairs of boots on the ground, the liability of another body to protect and/or conceal. Additional troops in Iraq mean additional targets for enemy action. This is asymetrical warfare, so one thing we don't need are a lot of additional targets. Our major problem in Iraq is that we have not been able to upgrade our intelligence services. Without good up-to-date intelligence, more troops means more targets.

DaMav is right Historically speaking the Iraq phase of the WOT is a unbelievable success. And the only reason why it has been turned into a failure is un-checked politicaly motivated attacks and the ME setting unacheivable bars to meet.

That un-checked part is my main to only beef with Bush. A presidents main job in war is not stradegy thats generals work it is first and foremost Rally the PEOPLE then keep them rallied. He started good but quit early and in my view has been AWOL on the job.

C Low,
I'll second that without placing all the blame on our prez.
Karl Rove has misguided what should have been Bush's 'Rally of the American People'.
Blame the MSM all you wish but it did appear to the public that Bush was attempting to minimize the cost of the war, the cost in Billion$ and the blood of our young heroes.
Americans have wanted to understand the sacrifice and to participate but they haven't heard that call from our Recruiter in Chief.