Is anyone surprised?
U.S. officials believe extremists are attempting to regroup across northern Iraq after being driven from strongholds in and around Baghdad, and commanders have warned they expected Sunni insurgents to step up attacks in a bid to upstage the report.
Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, the commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, said last month that he proposed reducing American troop levels in Ninevah and predicted the province would shift to Iraqi government control as early as this month. It was unclear whether that projection would hold after Tuesday’s staggering death tolls.
A fifth-grader could have predicted this. We’ve been doing the same thing in Iraq for years. Sure, the tactics have improved dramatically where we have our soldiers, but we have never had enough troops, and we will never have enough troops. We work on an area, and then the insurgents move to another area. Nothing has changed.
Early in the war, hawks like McCain argued that we needed more troops. Bush ignored them and the commanders on the ground (ho only listened to the ones that told him what he wanted to hear). Despite Bush’s incompetence and a flawed strategy, McCain and others stuck with Bush. Then they supported this foolish surge.
This situtation will not be resolved militarily. How many times do we need to be reminded about this?
