Joe Galloway: Costs all around to prolonging the war

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/nation/17067636.htm

Costs all around to prolonging the war
By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
McClatchy Newspapers

It will be costly and painful to prolong the war in Iraq for another 21 months so that those who started it can hand off the harder decision of how to end it to the next occupant of the White House.

President Bush isn't extending and expanding the war in a search for victory. His dream of victory in Iraq cannot be achieved. Not by sending 30,000 more American troops. Not by making parts of Baghdad temporarily safer by billeting American troops in violent neighborhoods and pushing the slaughter into the northern and southern suburbs - or into the Green Zone where U.S. and Iraqi officials live and work.

Not by letting American soldiers bear the brunt of combat, targeted not only by our enemies, the Sunni Muslim insurgents but also by our supposed allies, the Shiite majority and the murderous militia of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. In March, more American troops died in Iraq than Iraqi soldiers.

This is a search for a fig leaf to cover the emperor’s nakedness - a way for Bush to go home to Texas with a ringing but hollow declaration that "Iraq wasn't lost on my watch."

That this can be achieved only by fomenting a nasty, divisive and unnecessary showdown between the White House and Congress is just one more cost.

Another very high cost will be borne by the U.S. Army, whose soldiers got the word from Defense Secretary Robert Gates this week that their combat tours are being extended from 12 months to 15 months, effective immediately.

The cost to the Army National Guard will be high, too. The Guard got the word this month that 13,000 of its part-time soldiers will be recalled to active duty for their second combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan - although they'd been promised only one active duty tour every five years.

The cost will be highest of all, however, for the families of those soldiers who've already waved farewell to their loved ones two or three times.

more...

Bush 41 did the same thing to Clinton with Somalia, he sent in troops and left the incoming President holding the bag!!!!

this article is very on the mark. It makes very clear why he demanded the surge rather than any other option that was agreed by most of those around him, including from what i understand, the generals in Iraq. It would have forced him to admit defeat any other way. They don't just plan on handing it off though, they will do their very best to try to blame the defeat and the disaster that already exists there on the Dems. Make no mistake about this intention on their part.

The problem is that things are well out of control for them right now, but they still have the stall mechanism. They are hellbent on using it as long as possible, that's why i want to see these subpoenas issued immediately, they have no sincere desire to negotiate, but they have a very real motivation to string things out as long as possible.

calls them the way he sees them, and I invariably agree.
As for the stall mechanism, they've been doing it for so long, I wonder if people get discouraged from ever breaking that well-oiled machine. :( I know Congress is trying...