The New Road

Panicking politicos

Condoleeza and one of her British counterparts were in Iraq to talk to the government officials about how they should actually... you know... form a government. I heard some audio bits on NPR of their trip and at one point the British representative gives this desperate sounding 'please'; "Please! The Americans have lost over two thousad people, we have lost over a hundred. A... A... A hundred and fourty thousand troops here... helping to keep the peace..." You can listen to it yourself.

Somebody should let this guy know that the secret to being a good negotiator is not to sound like your nuts are in a vice, even if they are. The Brit is showing that the situation is clearly worse than the Bush administration is letting on. There is no reason for the Iraqi politicians to hurry up. They have been at this for thousands of years, so what difference is a few more days going to make? And we have no leverage there. We can't invade again. We can't disband the government. We have already withheld reconstruction funds. And the only real leverage we have, which is leaving, is not on the table because Bush keeps chanting every day that we will stay.

All roads lead back to Rome on this. The problem with the insurgency is that we aren't sending in enough troops to do suppression. Why? Because sending them in now means admitting mistakes which is something this administration is unwilling to do. So they live in an unreality bubble where we are always on the 'virge of victory!' That same perspective is killing us on the political side with Bush not effectively using the only leverage we have, our presence there, as a tool, because he doesn't want to admit that we may have to leave before we achieve 'victory'. Whatever that means.

Oh, yeah, and if that's not bad enough. Afghanistan is going to start heating up again. All signs point to the Taliban starting a Spring offensive. While it's unlikely that we would lose Kandahar we could possibly lose the rest of the country and that would obviously destroy all of the work that we have done there.