Family commitments kept me from catching the President’s speech live last night. However, I was able to catch up this morning thanks to the miracle of Tivo and a quick skimming of a few blogs.
My thoughts:
- I’ll give the President a little credit for admitting a mistake…sort of.
- The President does have a point in that a stable, moderate Iraq is better for our interests than an instable country largely torn between extremist groups.
- I can accept the idea that we have been understaffed in Iraq. I’ve long speculated that we probably didn’t muster enough force to be able to control and enforce stability after the overthrow of Saddam’s government. However, what I heard in the speech sounded an awful lot like “we’re going to throw more troops at the problem and talk sternly to the current Iraqi government”…but otherwise no real changes to the current, failed strategy. I would have liked to hear how the overall management of the reconstruction of Iraq would change…and I didn’t hear that.
- The recitation of “the world is a big scary place, and it will get scarier if we don’t act” position could have been worthwhile…but I still haven’t heard anything about why this allegedly new strategy will work when our efforts have seemed rather impotent over the past couple of years.
Bottom line — I can agree that it’s important to “win”, and that doing so will still require more resources…and probably more bloodshed. However, I lack the faith that the relevant decision makers will show the insight to turn the situation around. Without that faith, I can’t help but think that the situation, from our perspective, will continue to deteriorate. Given the choice of cutting our losses, or waiting for things to get worse….well, the former is better than the latter, IMO.
However, some fresh new ideas, new leaders, and a bit of creativity in turning around a bad, deteriorating situation would have been better than either of those options.