Can it be? Is it possible?
George Will is obliquely criticizing Dubya?
After last week’s murder of four American civilian contractors in Fallujah, U.S. leadership in Baghdad promised that the response against that city would be “precise” and “overwhelming.” But precisely who is to be overwhelmed, and what will be the metric of success at overwhelming? How many troops will it take to find those involved in the killing of the contractors? And on the basis of what intelligence?
As this is written, headlines speak of 1,200 Marines “encircling” Fallujah, which is as populous as Newark, N.J. It is a sign of things falling apart that common language seems unable to get a purchase on Iraq’s new reality — a civil war defined by the uprising of many Shiites against the U.S. occupation.
… Since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have been told that they are at war. They have not been told what sacrifices, material and emotional, they must make to sustain multiple regime changes and nation-building projects. Telling such truths is part of the job description of a war president.
Can I just point out here that even I, unschooled in war, foreign affairs–or practically anything — predicted right here on my blog a year ago that we’d be seeing a) insurgency and civil war in Iraq and b) a new stronghold for terrorism to fill the vacuum in Iraq. If I could predict that, why couldn’t the Bush administration?
Who says they didn’t predict it? It’s that ‘telling the American people’ thing they have some trouble with.