Apologies to Lewis Carroll

A war born in spin has now reached its Lewis Carroll period. (“Now
here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”)

-- Steve Coll, in The New Yorker "Military Conflict" April 14, 2008

Of General Petraeus and his urge-to-surge, Coll writes:

At best, during the past year he has helped to piece together a stalemate of heavily armed, bloodstained, conspiracy-minded, ambiguously motivated Iraqi militias. Nobody knows how long this gridlock will hold.

As we celebrate the fifth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, one wonders what manner of "success" is this surge. Petraeus has "bought some time" with the purported purpose of achieving certain political aims in Iraq, but mainly he seems to be serving the personal political aims of George W. Bush.

Is it in any way morally defensible to prolong a war to save a sitting President from having to accept his own miserable failure?

Coll's article has a different theme than this post - he raises the point that Admiral Fallon and Army Vice Chief-of-Staff Cody have raised repeatedly over the past year or more -- that the war in Iraq is destroying our military. It's a valid concern and one that Petraeus ignores in his fixed obsession with the lost cause that is Iraq.

Five years later, and it is still the worst foreign policy blunder in American history, with no end in sight. The world waits in vain for an enlightened America to pull herself out of the rabbit hole.

Neil

Technorati Tags: Iraq, Petraeus, Surge, Quagmire, March of Folly, Unjust War

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