A Collect Call From Reality
The US Office of Strategic Services provided materiel to a gentleman named Ho Chi Minh to battle the Japanese in World War II. That certainly worked out well.
The follow on organization, the CIA, provided materiel to a number of people including a man named Osama bin Laden to battle the Soviets in Afghanistan. That worked just as well.
No matter how often, or how spectacularly the concept fails, some people keep returning to the “wisdom” of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
IT IS NOT TRUE! STOP ALREADY!!
As Swopa notes, the experiment with arming Sunnis in Anbar province isn’t working out so well, but they just will not learn.
Swopa, ‘Noz, Steve Soto, Charles 2, and BadTux all see it coming. They all know this is going to end badly, but Major General Rick Lynch thinks it’s a good idea to fight “al Qaeda in Iraq” by providing materiel to Sunni groups like the Islamic Army of Iraq.
Today Rook notes in his post, Under Estimated Again, that the military in Iraq is calling for a surge in the surge – more troops. No word as to where they will come from, but if I had a child in Scouting, I might be worried.
This ignores the change in atmosphere caused by the second bombing at the Askariya shrine in Samarra, which may force the Mahdi Army to end its quiet period and take to the field again to avenge this insult to Shi’ia.
To all of this you have the bombing of the bridges. The late Steve Gilliard did a great job explaining the logistics problems for US forces in Iraq, and on the maps with that post he pointed out the “choke points” on the supply lines. The bridges being blown up are among those choke points. The supply and support options for US forces are being degraded.
We are going to be more dependent than ever on airlift to move goods and people, and they want to add tens of thousands more troops.
We need to get our people out while we still can. I prefer Dunkirk to the Little Bighorn.
9 comments
And I don’t know why she swallowed that camel…
Why does the expression blow back come to mind?
Good catch from Donna, Whig, it slipped my mind about our assistance in multiple forms to Saddam when I slipped into thinking about insurgents.
I hope Gordon Brown gets your people out of the south as soon as possible, Jams, because things are going to get nasty and the Basra area will take a heavy hit. The Shi’ia are not going to be happy about the US arming Sunnis.
I sometimes think “blow back” is our foreign policy.
The ridiculous thing is that they are surprised at the results each time. Like my grandfather used to say “Like throwing rocks down a sinkhole.” You would think that there would someone at these high level strategy sessions that would ask the question as why everyone thinks it will work this time.
Like George in Sienfeld… He became successful when he began doing exactly the opposite of what his first instinct to do was… It worked for that George, maybe it’ll work for W.
It’s their version of the world, Fallenmonk. Policies don’t fail because they are bad policies, there’s always another excuse. Normally you learn more from your failures than your successes, but these people refuse to learn anything.
CD, you’re right. We should listen to them and just do the opposite, because they seem to be total incompetents, so total that is can’t be a random event – they have to be planning on failing.
Blowback is good if your policy is endless war for its own sake.
War, glorious war.
And if you are a weapons manufacturer, you want to arm everyone.
It doesn’t work because it’s a terrible idea that has never worked, and yet they continue to try it. apparently believing that the last group that did it, didn’t know how — except these are the same people who funded the anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan, and who kept supplying Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war.
This is the third time, not counting the side trips in South and Central America with right wing death squads.