Anybody Remember This ???

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I like to think of myself as part of the "so what do we do now?" crowd, but it is like drinking gall. We could try what we clearly should have done from the beginning -- put more boots on the ground. We've got 130,000 troops there now. (Remember when the Bushies told us it would be down to 30,000 by the end of last summer?) Gen. Eric Shinseki's "several hundred thousand" prediction looks more prescient all the time. The trouble with that scenario is that it violates the First Rule of Holes (when you're in one, quit digging.) Second, it may be too late.

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From Molly Ivins' Latest: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=16712

I don't remember that being said, so I must have missed it. Anybody here remember that little pledge???

:shrug:

BTW - Great piece by Molly, with one HELL of a last paragraph:

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I suspect what we'll wind up doing is the inevitable "muddle along" until our leaders can lie us out more or less gracefully. (George W. Bush will admit he made a mistake the day the Cubs win the World Series.)

If I were John Kerry, I would be having such horrible nightmares about winning the election -- and actually having to ask an American soldier to be the last man to die for a mistake.

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Ouch...

http://www.charleston.net/stories/062303/edi_23edit1.shtml

The Pentagon had planned to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq from just over 150,000 during major combat to 30,000 by the end of summer. It is an indication of the extent of the damage to the country's infrastructure and the seriousness of the breakdown in law and order that the Pentagon now plans to keep troop strength almost as high as it was during the war.

But that piece was a bit optimistic about troops from other countries:
It's good news that the Pentagon has been promised help from allied nations for peacekeeping and reconstruction work in Iraq. The presence of troops from a number of countries will help to counter the anti-American propaganda of Saddam Hussein loyalists by demonstrating that Iraq is not being occupied by the United States but is in the process of being liberated from dictatorship by a growing coalition of democratic countries.
The advantages of deploying 20,000 to 30,000 troops from countries as diverse as Italy, Spain, the Ukraine, El Salvador, Honduras and, possibly, India are obvious. It will allow some troops of the 1st Marine Division and the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, who have borne the brunt of fierce combat, to go home.

Totally missed that one.

:yourock: