Today
in Iraq (news - web sites), American officials are having to face their
own verbal and rhetorical Maginot Lines. Our "answer" has been that we
can get out when Iraqi forces are trained, when elections are held, and
when Iraqis themselves win back the country from the "insurgents" or
"terrorists" or "guerrillas" (or whatever we finally determine they
are).
But in only the last two weeks, American generals and
civilian officials are, in fact, admitting that they have their own
similar Maginot Line problems. In Mosul, the Iraqi police force has
"faded away."American generals speak of a "virtual connectivity" of
the insurgents never seen before, as they use the Internet to pass
along techniques, tactics and advice to one another. American generals
now admit that almost all of them are Iraqis; we have created the Iraqi
terrorists who were not there before.
Take only the astoundingly
candid analysis, based in part on an interview with Gen. John Abizaid,
the senior U.S. military commander in the region, by CNN's excellent
Pentagon (news - web sites) correspondent, Barbara Starr, on television
last Sunday.
Starr reported: "Senior U.S. military sources in
the region tell CNN the city of Mosul has been wracked by violence for
weeks. Local Iraqi security forces have virtually melted away, say
those officials. One senior U.S. officer tells CNN, we have no Iraqi
police force up in Mosul today.
"The problem in getting Iraqis
to fight the insurgency may be deeper across Iraq. The military
assessment now is that the U.S. miscalculated Iraqi tribal and
religious loyalties and did not realize Iraqis are likely to fight only
for their brethren ... So in cases like Mosul, they simply will not
fight the intimidation of the insurgents, the U.S. now believes."
And remember, until now Mosul was one of our success stories!
................
The
truth no one really wants to deal with is that this war could very
easily be lost by the United States. All the insurgents have to do is
hang on another year. All we have to do is what the French and the
British did in their colonies: Let themselves be exhausted and finally
destroyed by their hubris, their delusions and their arrogant lack of
understanding of the local people.
No shit, Sherlock!
Could be lost? I'd say IS BEING LOST. Unless exploding mess tents and slit police throats is a sign of victory.
It is even worse than Geyer says.
The population isn't being intimidated, they're working with the
resistance. There are no massacres of civilians, no killing of
neutrals, just people who work for the Americans. Which is truly
frightening. They know who to kill.
Dubya's last exit opportunity is fast approaching: cut and
run
immediately after the elections. Will he have the wit to take it? Stay
tuned. If he doesn't, even the VRWC may not be able to move the
goalposts to a spot where they can claim their chimp is something other
than an ignominious failure. Iraqization is a failure and current
US combat power has reached its limits due to lack of manpower.
At the heart of President Bush's plan to sell Social Security private
accounts is a simple notion: You're always better off investing your
retirement money than letting the government do it.
By doing it
yourself, you can stow some money in the stock market, and over the
long run will get a better return on that investment than today's
Social Security system offers.
The idea is broadly accepted.
That's why the administration's plan to partially privatize the system
sounds appealing to many. But that better return won't always happen.
Just ask Stanley Logue of San Diego.
For 45 years, the defense-industry analyst paid into the system until
his retirement in 1994. But with all the recent hoopla over reform, Mr.
Logue, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, decided to go
back and check his own records. Would he have done better investing his
money than the bureaucrats at the Social Security Administration?
He recorded all the payroll taxes he paid into the system (including
the matching amount from his employer), tracked down the return the
Social Security Trust Fund earned for each of the 45 years, and then
compared the result with what he would have gotten had he been able to
invest the same amount of payroll tax money over the same period in the
Dow Jones Industrial Average (including dividends).
To his surprise, the Social Security investment won out: $261,372 versus $255,499, a difference of $5,873.
