I'm shocked, but I agree with Katie on this one. What we need is leadership that will actually define what our role is, and determine what constitutes completing that mission, not some random date to leave things a mess.
There is no role for the US in Iraq at this point. The US presence is currently making things worse for Iraqis. It's not debatable. There's no tenable exit strategy. It's not a question of leadership, it's a simple question of tactics and political will.
For the US forces to be effective in Iraq the number of troops would have to *at least* triple. Period. Given current force strengths and mission profiles that's not going to happen using US troops and there is no political will from the rest of the world to provide support in those numbers.
Continuing to put US troops in harms way for literally no reason borders on treasonous.
By setting a date for withdrawl, morale will drop off, and become more of a "why are we here, we're just going to leave anyway" mentality.
Bullshit. Morale sucks now and most enlisted troops are just counting backwards until their tour is over. Setting a timetable for withdrawal would likely increase morale, because knowing you won't be sent back or your tour arbitrarily extended etc is a load off your mind when you're living paycheck to paycheck hoping your kid remembers who you are when you get home.
In addition to that, the opposition will see this as a victory, and they will be right.
They saw day 1 of the invasion as a victory and they were right. This would change nothing. If anything, it's a problem for them as they'd have less motivated fighters in country and a harder time recruiting. Removing easy American targets from the area just means they have to plan much more costly and difficult operations for less PR value.
We're damned if we do, damned if we don't, and I'm quite certain that's how the president feels...at least that's how he should feel.
No, we lost when this war was planned 6 years ago. I said it then, and it's still true now, civilians overrode established war planning doctrine and went into this in love with air power, special forces and technology with no realistic view of how difficult stabilizing the country would be. Powell knew better, nearly all of DoD knew better, the intel community knew better. The only people who didn't were right wing idealists. The Heritage Foundation got their little experiment and it was a dismal failure. There's no fixing it. It's time to cut our losses and focus our energies on using the strongest military force in the history of the world to do something that actually makes us safer.
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