Gates' unannounced stop in Iraq began Thursday, and throughout the visit he took a decidedly stronger tone, warning the troubled nation's leaders that American patience is wearing thin and urging them to quickly unite their warring factions.

Gates had plananed to take a look Friday at a key piece of the Bush administration's new anti-insurgency strategy, a joint US-Iraq security post where American and Iraqi forces live and work together to try to stop the violence ripping Baghdad.

That tour, however, was abruptly canceled...
--"Gates: Iraq Progress to Set Troop Levels," Lolita C. Baldor, Associated Press, posted on Yahoo!news April 20, 2007


So, it would appear that Secretary of Defense Gates had a photo-op trip planned much like Sen. John McCain's, showing all the terrific progress the new security plan has made in Baghdad.

After the trip was suddenly canceled, his spokesman said it was because his earlier meeting had run long.

Uh-huh.

More than likely, it was something else, like maybe the day before:


Bombs ripped through several mainly Shiite districts in Baghdad on Wednesday, killing at least 158 people and wounding scores more, police said, in the worst wave of carnage since President Bush announced three months ago that he would deploy additional troops to pacify the Iraqi capitol.

...The attacks followed brazen bombings that demonstrated the insurgents' ability to circumvent the U.S. and Iraqi security plan for Baghdad, and renewed fears of reprisal killings by Shiites.  Last Thursday (April 12), a truck bomb collapsed a popular bridge over the Tigris River and a suicide bomber penetrated the fortresslike Green Zone, blowing himself up inside the parliament cafeteria, killing one lawmaker.

"After two months of the security plan in the hot areas of the city, the attacks have moved to the cold, quiet areas to make them hot, while the hot areas burn," said Nasar al-Rubaie, a lawmaker who heads the parliamentary bloc loyal to anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.  "These target everything that has life in Iraq: universities, schools, neighborhood centers, markets, gas stations and bus stations.  But the occupation forces and the government stand still, doing nothing and let the terrorists play."
--"Bombers Defy Security Push, Killing at Least 158 in Baghdad," Karin Brulliard, Washington Post, April 19, 2007


Of course, they're not doing NOTHING.  American forces outnumber Iraqi forces by an eight-to-one margin, and their casualty rates since this so-called "surge" began have been double that of the Iraqis. 

But an act of terrorism is not about damage and destruction, as much as it is about PERCEPTION.  Terrorists of any stripe know exactly when to target their attacks so as to make the six o'clock news and get the most spectacular media attention.  The targets chosen by the bombers in Iraq are high-profile and are designed to unnerve the populace and make them despair.

McCain should have realized, after what he went through as a Vietnamese media-manipulated POW, that any time you make some sort of public display like he did, it then behooves those who want to destroy you to immediately prove you wrong.  Which they have done only too well.

Does this mean that we should stay the course and stick to Bush's brilliant plan, so that we can outlast the bad guys?

Not necessarily.

Our presence only gives them a great recruiting tool, and provides them with a strong force to push against.  Remove that force and much of the air will go out of their balloon.

Does that mean peace will instantly reign in Baghdad?  Of course not.

But of all the things I've read about what would happen if we leave, the one that made the most sense to me came from an 18-year old Marine Pfc.  I read this months ago, but it stuck in my mind.

He said, "If we pull out, the Shiites will take care of al-Qaeda.  They hate al-Qaeda and they will take care of the situation.  We may not like the WAY they take care of it, but they will take care of it."

In an insightful Boston Globe article yesterday called, "The Risks of Staying vs. Leaving Iraq," Barry R. Posen, who is the director of the Security Studies Program at MIT, went through what he considered six major predictions of disaster made by war-supporters, and broke them down, exposing their fallacies.

Like the Pfc., he doubts that al-Qaeda will take over Iraq, considering how much they are hated by the Shiites, and right now in the Anbar, there are definite signs of moderate Sunni tribal leaders, sheiks, and imams joining together to fight against al-Qaeda.  The two could even join forces, I think.  Stranger things have happened in the Middle East.

He reiterates what the Iraq Study Group, Secretary Gates himself, the Democratic Congressional leadership, most of the diplomatic community, and world leaders all over the globe have been saying for months:  that if we make it clear that we are  pulling out, the Iraqi government is going to have to get off its ass, gather its forces to protect itself, and run its own country.

As long as Bush keeps promising that we will "stay until the job is done," then the Iraqis can continue to drift, screw up, and mess around, turning over more and more responsibility for their own country's security and maintenance to an exhausted American military stretched so thin they're yanking up Air Force personnel to do dangerous Army support assignments with little or no combat training, among other travesties.

Posen points out that the threatened genocide touted by war-supporters would not happen if we did not keep insisting that mixed neighborhoods remain mixed--the Iraqi government offers money for people to return to those neighborhoods--but you can't turn back the clock.  Every time a family attempts to resettle their homes, they wind up dead or run off again.

It would make more sense for the American forces to help disenfranchised Iraqis to relocate to safer areas and settle in there.

Another point Posen makes is that, much as we fear a larger conflict spilling over and igniting war with Saudi or war with Jordan, the truth is that those other Middle Eastern nations don't want to fight.  If they all knew the Americans were leaving, as Saudis have asked, then they will be under a great deal of pressure to get a regional summit together and work out diplomatic and political solutions that could hold the worst of the violence in check.

Neither Iran or Saudi wants the other nation to attack their oilfields, for example.  They would be far more likely to negotiate some sort of stand-off similar to that between the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

Posen concludes by saying:

Four years of experience strongly suggests that the costs to the United States of persisting in Iraq will be significant.  Whatever success is achieved there, the end result will not be the stable liberal democratic vision of the war's suppporters.  Rather, after lots more killing, exhaustion may set in, partial deals may be struck, and factions may retreat to tend their own battered gardens.

Call this what you will, but it cannot justify the costs incurred.  And this outcome will not differ significantly from what will occur if the United States begins to disengage now.


In other words, we can stay TWENTY more years, like the Russians did in places like Yugoslavia.  Soon as we leave, WHENEVER we leave, the inevitable--whatever that is--is going to occur.

And we can't stay in these troop-level forces much longer than a few more months anyway, because we just don't have enough warm bodies to provide Bush the cannon fodder he seems to crave.

We're always going to be there, to some extent.  Bush/Cheney fought this war for oil and as part of their Sacrifice on the Alter of Halliburton, so we're always going to have somebody around there to guard the oilfields. 

We've just all got to get that through our heads. 

You don't build gigantic military bases to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars if you plan to turn them over to the Iraqis.  I guarandamntee you the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal could not care less whether the Iraqi Army has, say, indoor swimming pools like those they're building at some of these bases.  They don't even care if the Iraqi Army is ARMED.

And, American Special Forces troops are going to be active in Iraq and probably Iran and everywhere else in the Middle East from now on, for the same reasons.

But we can't continue these levels of COMBAT TROOPS that Bush keeps demanding.  They're just not there.  Petraeus knows it.  He knows there aren't enough troops to do what he knows needs to be done on a counter-insurgency level, because he wrote the damn book, literally, on the subject.  But he's a good soldier, an ambitious soldier, so he will do his best.

Are people like Posen's views the end-all and be-all?  Of course not.  No one has all the answers.  But as time drags on and the gushing river of blood continues to flow in Baghdad and surrounding areas--both ours and Iraqis--we have got to face the facts that the Bush administration has not had one single solitary good idea about ANYTHING since taking office, and most certainly not in the management of this horrible war.

In fact, the security plan that McCain swears is working and FOX news swears is working and all the happy little neocons swear is working if we just wait and just be patient for, I dunno, maybe the much-repeated SIX MONTHS (we've been hearing that since March of '03, when they were sure the war would be over by then)--anyway, it would appear that--

Right in the middle of Baghdad, Peter does not seem to have any idea what Paul is doing.

According to the Associated Press, U.S. soldiers are building a three-mile wall up to 12 feet high in Baghdad to supposedly protect a Sunni neighborhood from surrounding Shiites. 

Flatbed trucks and giant cranes lift the 14,000-ton barriers under bright lights at night. 

Kind of an Iraqi gated community.  There will be big security checkpoints at the gates to keep good guys in and bad guys out, they say.

But U.S. Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the top spokesman for the coalition forces in Iraq, was quoted Wednesday as saying, not only was he unaware of any plan to build walls in Baghdad, but that our intention is to UNIFY Baghdad, you see.  The tactic, he said, was not a policy of the Baghdad security plan.

At the same time, Capt. Scott McLearn of the U.S. 407th Brigade Support Battalion, said they started building the wall on April 10 and would continue until it was complete.

You know.  The wall that doesn't exist.

In fact, the U.S. Army has built many walls in Iraq for security purposes, including a huge sand berm that Petraeus himself had built around Tal Afar to keep the bad guys out when he was the CO there.  Americans pulled out.  Bad guys climbed over the walls.

In fact, remember that market that was blown up in Baghdad on Wednesday, in a car bomb so huge that almost 200 people were killed outright and another 150 wounded?

Turns out the Americans had built a wall around that market already.  And set up a check point outside.

The bomber just drove into the checkpoint and blew it up.

This is Bush's Brilliant Plan B to save Iraq, at work.

Thank God we at least have a secretary of defense now who will speak truth: Get your act together, Maliki, or we are pulling out.

No matter what Bush swears and no matter what his butt-kissers like McCain insist, all video to the contrary.

In the meantime, it would be the Christian thing to do...while we are praying for the 32 devastated families who lost loved ones at Virginia Tech...well, we need to remember that we have now lost more than 3,300 of our men and women soldiers and Marines in Iraq, and in the same week that those kids and that professor died in Virginia, TEN TIMES THAT MANY died in Iraq.

They all had loved ones, too.

Maybe we should pray for them, as well.