No End In Sight

NYTimes editorialist Robert Herbert again composes his thinking in such a way as to help me sort through waves of information and keep at bay some measure of the confusion that is always swirling around me as I think about my daughter/soldier fighting a war right now in Iraq. Herbert’s reflections on the President’s Tuesday evening speech could be said to be generous in light of reports from other sources that even the Ft. Bragg soldiers received the President with such reticence as to need prompting for their applause. Herbert writes that “[t]he Bush crowd bristles at the use of the ‘Q-word,’” and by that he meant the word quagmire. I had been more hopeful that the Q-word would mean “quit” and the thought of bringing the troops home, but the President said:

1. We have enough troops to do the job even though there are only 138,000 troops on the ground to secure peace in a country with a population of 26 million people.
2. He won’t send more troops because the generals in Iraq are telling him that there is no need even when Maj. Chris Kennedy of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment makes it clear that there are too few troops to hold the ground once gained at the cost of American lives – a job that needs doing over and over again as insurgents repeatedly reoccupy territories left with too few soldiers to secure them.
3. He won’t name a time for troop withdrawal: Our troops would stay “until the war on terror” is over or “until the Iraqi army is ready to take over” – which could mean forever but will certainly mean an undefined number of years. But we shouldn’t think about Viet Nam or stop to realize that the world is so much more a fearful place today than it was when the President of the United States started a war.
4. And the President said “it was worth it,” meaning he was willing to spend the lives of our children and the future economic security of our nation to mediate a civil war on the other side of the planet.

News:

The President is asking Congress for an additional $2.6 billion to cover shortfalls in the cost of VA medical care. The White House is explaining the need as one arising from having “vastly underestimated the number of service personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan seeking medical treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs.” Read the Washington Post report here.

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war
Iraq
tommi