TheMillerCircle.org

I thought all of the excuses and methods for reviving our belief that victory can be achieved in the Iraq war had been exhausted. Except of course for George Bush, Dick Cheney and William Kristol. So, I was unprepared for the New York Times Op-Ed piece by Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack last week claiming that their recent trip to Iraq gave them confidence that we just might win the war. O’Hanlon and Pollack are with the Brookings Institute, a Washington think tank that is generally more liberal, but not in this case. What was truly astonishing about this article and almost preposterous to realize was that the two authors claimed to have credibility because they had criticized the president’s handling of the war on earlier occasions. Fortunately we have Frank Rich who, in his op-ed piece for the NYT today, has set the record straight about Pollack, who had an earlier appearance on the Oprah show to hype the war and Rich also points out that both O’Hanlon and Pollack had, on other occasions, prolonged the agony of defeat by seeing little positive signs here and there to feed into the Bush and Cheney war machine propaganda.
But the very height of incredulity about the O’Hanlon and Pollack article, that could send an ordinary citizen into a seething frenzy, was their utter failure to acknowledge what this success they point to really means. They did not point out that the surge Bush promoted was meant to change the tactic of the war by eliminating the insurgents in a very small circle of Baghdad and that the highest death rate of American soldiers since the war began can be attributed to the fact that the Americans are going it alone on this mission. If we succeed in stabilizing this sector of the city, it will mean nothing unless Bush is willing to send in hundreds of thousands of more American troops because the Iraqi government under Maliki has no interest in coming up with their component, which meant putting Iraqi soldiers in place of Americans to finish the job. That is not happening, nor will it happen with this government. Yet, Maliki, for all the criticism that he has been getting from U.S. sources, must be relishing his role as a fence player. Why not let the Americans shed their blood beating back the Sunnis and perhaps the small number of al-Qaeda insurgents and, assuming that they will not have the stomach to do that forever, then step in and make peace with the Sunnis, get rid of al-Qaeda and settle down to a Shiite-dominated central Iraq, leaving the north and the south to more or less find their autonomous futures.
When will the American public realize that it is the people who are most vociferous in demanding that we "support the troops" that are in fact, through their behavior and denial, causing American deaths on the battlefield, none of which were or are necessary and none of which will change the tragic outcome that awaits us. The war is not over, but the outcome has been known for some time and only a handful of people, which unfortunately includes those who started it, believe that anything worthwhile can still be accomplished. Our national nightmare continues.

The bridge that lies at the bottom of the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis was supposed to be part of a $ 1.6 Trillion needed repair to our national infrastructure. That amount is roughly what the Iraq war will cost us when you add up all the expenses including the very costly chronic care needed for the injured, brain damaged soldiers. Is there anyone who believes that our failure to address these serious infrastructure problems is unrelated to the disastrous on-going war in Iraq? If so, there is a bridge I would like to sell you.