The New Math

News&Views
The Armchair Curmudgeon
April 1, 2007


In Iraq, do two opposites make one positive?

What is wrong with the “Surge” philosophy..which if nothing else, seems to be the final desperation act of a sinking president with a sinking policy who is forced to pull a last minute rabbit out of a hat only to discover that the rabbit is only partially formed and largely incompatible with everything done before….

The president’s new rabbit concoction contradicts four years of having a diametrically opposed position.

Think about it, over the last four years we heard incessantly that there were plenty of boots on the ground to handle America’s needs in Iraq.
General Shinseki lost his command because he disagreed with Dictator Rumsfeld who preferred robots over soldiers..
And the newly appointed general in command suggested in a proposal to the Chiefs of Staff that we would only need 5,000 troops after Shock and Awe. No armor but an abundance of rose colored glasses!...

To date, no one’s paid the price for being so wrong except for the honest generals who disagreed with Rumsfeld who goes sailing off into the sunset, a hero in his president’s eyes. (Nice job, Rummy!)

Okay, we don’t want to be perceived as trouble makers for throwing the administrations’ words back in their face so let’s move on to the second fundamental change between Baghdad then and Baghdad now: General Petraeus—the architect of the new plan to bring sanity into a war-torn theatre where Civil War rules the day…

But here’s a thought: If General Petraeus’ ideas were so evolutionary and so on the mark, why didn’t we put him into Iraq before this?....Obviously, the reason is because nobody in the chain of command was buying his ideas at the time.

So in this act of last minute panic, the president sees no good alternative posed by anyone—and especially his father—he pulls out all the punches and selects the scenario least compatible with his historical track record. And after this admission of being wrong for four years, he expects us to buy this scenario—even though all the other scenarios he had proposed accomplished no positive progress.

This is a stretch for Congress; it’s also a stretch for Americans.

Why should we believe that after everything we were told is right, we now choose to go in the opposite direction because this has to be ‘right,’too. Hard to understand the logic here.

And I think that’s where most Americans are having trouble.

Here’s what it boils down to: If something was right for four years, how come the opposite action is right now?

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon