[Skybird]

That man is totally disconnected from reality, and he wants to leave the burden of declare defeat to his sucessor. for that he accepts to increase the number of American soldiers being killed or menally, physically crippled. Great leader, that man, and so wise.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...459353,00.html

The worst part is the way in which George W. Bush has conclusively ruptured his country. The president's "New Way Forward in Iraq" will lead America directly into political trench warfare. (...) Two years before the end of his term and in the comfortable knowledge that he doesn't have to face re-election, Bush announced more of the same, and thus ignored everything that experts, the opposition majority, and the US public want.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...459369,00.html

"We understand that people are going to be skeptical," said Whitehouse spokesman Gordon Johndroe on Thursday, adding that he hoped they would "take a look at the details of the president's plan." That's exactly what people did -- and they rejected the details. They rejected the notion that dispatching additional troops to Iraq would require expanding the US military by 92,000 soldiers in the long term -- a project that would cost about $15 billion a year. They also rejected the proposal of mobilizing the National Guard again, as well as the suggestion that parts of Baghdad need to be hermetically sealed off from the rest of the city -- a tactic that already led to "spectacular failure" in Vietnam, as the Los Angeles Times observed. [...] Meanwhile the Democrats are planning to pass a symbolic majority resolution rejecting Bush's Iraq strategy. The aim is to force the Republicans to offer a clear and humiliating assessment of the situation while isolating the president, much as Richard Nixon was isolated during his final days in office. The specter of impeachment was already making the rounds on Thursday.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...459048,00.html

Bush is no longer talking about victory and democracy for the entire region. Instead he is talking about looming instability in Egypt, about Saudi Arabia's intervention on the side of the Sunnis, and the unstoppable rise of the regional power Iran. Bush's only remaining justification for remaining in the region is that of preventing an even larger disaster.
America's army will ultimately become a buffer between the groups fighting in the civil war. A brigade from the 82nd Airborne Division is to be deployed in Baghdad next week, and others will be sent in as soon as possible. While greater security may not automatically be the result, one thing is guaranteed predicts former NATO commander Wesley Clark: higher casualties.
The current generals are just as skeptical as the former generals about Bush's strategy. Bush has always pledged that he would only strengthen troop numbers in Iraq if his commanders on the ground asked for it. But now, he is countermanding the express will of those commanders -- and is replacing them for that reason. The war in Iraq has become Bush's war once and for all.

Bush not only rejected the plan of the Baker commission, and polls saying that 60-70% of Americans do not want to see additional troops being sent, he also ignores much of the new counterinsurgency doctrine developed by Gen. Patraeus who has taken command (or will be taking command soon) in Iraq. I already have reported on him some weeks ago:

"The US military is learning from it's mistakes in Iraq:"
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...455165,00.html

"Nowadays," says Army spokesman Stephen Boylan, a colonel with a moustache who served for several years in Germany, "everyone knows that the road to Baghdad leads directly through Leavenworth."
The best way to fully understand Boylan's comment is to take a grueling tour of the 16 schools, institutes and colleges at the fort where about 2,000 young officers enroll each year for special training. The tour passes through windowless conference rooms, classrooms and lecture halls, and it requires enduring hours of slide presentations and talks by generals, historians, diplomats, Vietnam veterans and soldiers serving in Iraq. It also means wading through documents filled with unfamiliar acronyms, but in the end the visitor is left with the feeling that a revolution is being launched here in Fort Leavenworth, one that will radically change the face of the United States military and the wars it will fight in the future. (...) A revolution is underway that will change the face of the US military -- and with it the wars the world has yet to face.

Interview with Gen. David Petraeus:
"We have to raise our sights beyond the range of an M-16"
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...455199,00.html

There is quite a big cultural change going on. We used to say, that if you can do the "big stuff," the big combined arms, high-end, high intensity major combat operations and have a disciplined force, then you can do the so-called "little stuff," too. That turned out to be wrong. (...) What we simply don't want anymore is to give people a checklist of what to do. We want them to think, not memorize. You know, a lot of this is about young officers. But we have to be clear with them, they have to know: You must be a warrior first, that is true, that's why we exist, we exist in many cases to kill or capture the bad guys. But on the other hand, we have to teach them: You're not going to kill your way out of an insurgency. (...) The fight to Bagdad was not easy. It was very, very hard, real people died and bled and we really blew things up, but -- we always knew how to do that, we have it refined to a very high level, we did combined operations that were really at the high end of our business. In fact, you could say that we practiced that stuff by and large for 25, 30 years while we were waiting for the big roll of Soviet tank armies at the Fulda gap or the northern German plain.
But this other stuff, what we used to call the "little stuff" -- the build-up of civil infrastructures, the fight against low-key separatist violence, the dealing with local leaders, it is very, very challenging because it's non-standard and it's definitely not what we have trained for. The demands are very different. When it comes to insurgency, there is no army on the other side, no battalions, the enemy won't expose himself, it's all about intelligence. (...) It also showed the reality of counterinsurgency operations -- which we capture in the soon-to-be-published manual -- that what works today may not work tomorrow. Tactics and approaches must constantly evolve. You know, it's always easy to blow doors down and go in with the machine guns blazing or throw a grenade in. But when you do that you often risk creating more enemies because of the way you conducted the operation.

The BBC now had these remarks on the man some days ago:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6249565.stm