Do you need anything from me?

I replied:

World peace, or failing that, maybe some whirled peas?

And his response was:

I do not currently have the resources necessary to overthrow the current US government and re-instate the Constitution, which would contribute to a more stable world order, so I will procure some whirled peas for you.

No one can know for sure whether President Bush’s “surge” of U.S. troops in Iraq will succeed.

For certain? No. But in my opinion it can be stated with a fairly high degree of confidence that it has already failed. It definitely has not met GWB’s benchmarks. Proponents of the surge point out that some other metrics show improvement, and I don’t dispute that, but there are also metrics that have gotten worse. If the surge is not achieving its stated objective, and cannot be shown to be unambiguously beneficial, then it is a waste of money and (more importantly) lives.

GWB will of course try to claim after the fact that it was the right thing to do even though his reasons were wrong. That’s what he’s said about the war in general. I expect that he’ll also say that the plan would have worked if the surge had been bigger. Politicians always say that about failed plans, because there’s no way to refute a counterfactual conditional like that.

A precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces could lead to a bloodbath that would make the current carnage pale by comparison.

I’d go even further than that, and say that it would lead to such a bloodbath. Despite that, I’m still in favor of withdrawing our troops, though perhaps on a two year timetable).

There will be problems when we eventually leave, no matter how long we stay. But if we don’t have a plan and schedule to withdraw our troops, the Iraqi government will not prepare (to the best of their ability) to take effective control.

We can’t stay there forever, and there’s no obvious reason to believe that staying there in force for another n years before beginning a gradual withdrawal of troops will yield any better result than starting such a withdrawal today. In fact, it clearly will yield worse results, in terms of greater US casualties.

The only argument for maintaining our forces there that I find to be even partially credible is that since we broke it, we’re responsible for fixing it. However, that only justifies courses of action that can reasonably be expected to fix it, and I don’t think there actually is any such course of action. Certainly GWB has not proposed one.

Support our troops! Bring them home!