Re: The war for the war

[Greyhawk]

I like the caveat you put up front at your place. As I read the Woodward WaPo stories I thought "Damn good story - I wonder how much of it is true?" I suspect the answer is somewhere between 90-100 percent. Trouble is in many cases I can't tell you which part is or isn't.

I'll still probably get the book. Many people will. I wish Bing West's Strongest Tribe would sell as well - but I only saw one of those titles when I stopped at the local Kroger for milk on my way home today.

Here's a long story from the New Yorker on the "surge development" topic, too. It's a Petraeus profile, but it offers a LOT of background on the surge, with emphasis on the lower-than-Joint-Chiefs guys who made The Plan.

Note this quote from the New Yorker:

Bush told his National Security Council staff, as one of them recalled it, that he feared that if the U.S. did not change its strategy the war would be lost. On another occasion, according to this former official, Bush declared that there were few things he cared about more than the health of the United States military, but losing in Iraq was one of them.

...and this one from Woodward:

Mullen told Keane he had become acutely aware of the strains on the Army and the Marine Corps. Military families were shouldering the strain, and the military was losing quality officers.

"Mike, all of that's true," Keane said. "But this is true every time we fight a war of any consequence." Wars break armies, and they have to be put back together, he said. That's the price of war. But the price was worth it. "You've not talked one time about winning here, Mike. Not one time have you mentioned 'I want to win in Iraq.' I mean, do you?"

I think a probable truth can be inferred from that, and it is ugly but necessary. Keane was exactly right: wars break armies. That should be part of the decision process for the leaders of a nation preparring for war. Once that decision - that great and terrible decision to go to war - is made, it is (if not inevitable) an entirely predictable consequence of that decision. To argue that we must stop at some later point because "the army" is breaking is absurd and disingenuous - it's a pre-war consideration mis-applied to a post-war world. For politicians to claim otherwise is an insult to the intelligence of all concerned.

The truth we can infer from the above passages is that Bush understood that.

By the way, as the media narrative shifts to credit the guys who made the plan while the phrases "President Bush's surge" and "listen to the Generals" vanish into yesterday's news, you'll have another signal that we won.