Heritage Foundation: GOP Pitchman Infiltration and Military Intelligence
The right leaning Heritage Foundation opened a conference on 8/2/07 with yet another GOP pitchman hawking (no pun intended) the success of the surge in Iraq. Rep. McCotter (R, MI) deployed the all too frequent invalid analogies and GOP jingo to put a rose color on the surge.
Opening with a bad analogy between the surge assembling and winning over of small geo units in Iraq tactic of the surge and the towns of Colonial America, he proceeded to mischaracterize Bush’s middle east strategy (get ready for this) as Truman like containment and Reagan like implosion of Iran. This for an Administration who never negotiates as Truman did or talks to the enemy like Reagan did with Gorby. Mixing in boring references to his father being a Truman Republican (please) and false old saws that any change in Iraq tactics was cut and run, that Iraq would collapse if we left, and, Al Qaeda is, by implication, 90% of the insurgency (totally false), he trumpeted with half tones of patriotic vibrato to stay the course. The Congressman is a walking example of false advertising. Too bad Congress is not subject to the Wheeler-Lea Act. Enough fines would be collected to balance the Federal budget.
By contrast, a troika of military historians from West Point (Crane, Stuart, and Gentile) took the stage and argued that progress in insurgency wars like Iraq (or Vietnam) can’t be measured. They exposited two Vietnam metrics used by McNamara of little value. Crane, however, turned tail and provided 12 measures of progress from military (number of enemy killed, casualties taken by US forces) to social (mobility of civilians out of a war zone, number of shops open) to economic (garbage removed, jobs created). The problem with all this is the implication for Iraq policy, i.e. you can’t measure progress so just trust us that we are doing fine. That’s what Congress did from 2003 on which resulted in the mess in Iraq.
Opening with a bad analogy between the surge assembling and winning over of small geo units in Iraq tactic of the surge and the towns of Colonial America, he proceeded to mischaracterize Bush’s middle east strategy (get ready for this) as Truman like containment and Reagan like implosion of Iran. This for an Administration who never negotiates as Truman did or talks to the enemy like Reagan did with Gorby. Mixing in boring references to his father being a Truman Republican (please) and false old saws that any change in Iraq tactics was cut and run, that Iraq would collapse if we left, and, Al Qaeda is, by implication, 90% of the insurgency (totally false), he trumpeted with half tones of patriotic vibrato to stay the course. The Congressman is a walking example of false advertising. Too bad Congress is not subject to the Wheeler-Lea Act. Enough fines would be collected to balance the Federal budget.
By contrast, a troika of military historians from West Point (Crane, Stuart, and Gentile) took the stage and argued that progress in insurgency wars like Iraq (or Vietnam) can’t be measured. They exposited two Vietnam metrics used by McNamara of little value. Crane, however, turned tail and provided 12 measures of progress from military (number of enemy killed, casualties taken by US forces) to social (mobility of civilians out of a war zone, number of shops open) to economic (garbage removed, jobs created). The problem with all this is the implication for Iraq policy, i.e. you can’t measure progress so just trust us that we are doing fine. That’s what Congress did from 2003 on which resulted in the mess in Iraq.
posted by Anonymous | 1:14 PM
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