Atrios writes:
Imagine if 30 people were killed every day by car bombs in US cities. Monday, 30 dead in Denver. Tuesday, 30 dead in San Francisco. Wednesday, 30 dead in Philadelphia. You get the idea.
Now scale that roughly relative to population size. Make that 300 dead per day. Every day. Would the lead story on the evening news be about all the people who weren't blown up that day? No. The country would be completely hysterical.
As he has pointed out elsewhere, the issue isn't that life goes on in a combat zone. Of course it does, but that's not the central story. The central story is that, despite continued efforts, the security situation keeps deteriorating. Go watch that Lara Logan video again, because she's absolutely right. Before we get to read a bunch of stories with the headline: "U.S. Troops Paint School," we need to read a bunch of stories with the headline: "Security Situation Improving."
The problem with "improving the security situation" is that we're an outside force that will never, without wide scale pacification, supress disdain of our presence or an insurgency.
We should not be resting our pull out strategy on "100% stability", but more on an environment of stability. Once the government is working, as well as their security forces, we should have begun to scale back presence and/or cycle peacekeepers.
It's roughly similiar to the quagmire, yeah I know, bad word, of Vietnam - Johnson got us into a helluva mess and kept thinking of it as a "winning" scenario. Kennedy had it right, before he was killed, about getting out of SE Asia back in 63ish.
If it wasn't for the theory that pulling out to soon would leave a vaccum that Iran would flow into, I'd push for a quick pullout, but I'm not ready for a Persian Empire revival.
Gotta love hornets nests, unless you're gonna burn the whole hive up, it's best not to poke it with a stick. Feh!
Robert
Posted by: Robert N. Emerson | April 02, 2006 at 05:22 PM