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First Contact with the Enemy
apologies for length - but this article is the best treatment of the key issue of Iraq strategy I've yet seen - it's depressing as hell, yet not too surprising)
No problems on the length and great in-line commentary. In the future please make your comments in hilite text; makes it easier for us to read. Thanks! AoS.
President Bush began 2006 assuring the country that he had a “strategy for victory in Iraq.” He ended the year closeted with his war cabinet on his ranch trying to devise a new strategy, because the existing one had collapsed.

The original plan, championed by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Baghdad, and backed by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, called for turning over responsibility for security to the Iraqis, shrinking the number of American bases and beginning the gradual withdrawal of American troops.
Great plan! For, say, 2008 or 2009. It was not exactly a secret back in March 2005, the first time I heard - to my amazement - Casey dangle the troop reduction thing in public, that Iraq was nowhere close to being ready for a rapid transition to minding their own security business. Right here is the central problem that many lowly but close observers were distraught about from the get-go
But the plan collided with Iraq’s ferocious unraveling, which took most of Mr. Bush’s war council by surprise.

In interviews in Washington and Baghdad, senior officials said the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department had also failed to take seriously warnings, including some from its own ambassador in Baghdad, that sectarian violence could rip the country apart and turn Mr. Bush’s promise to “clear, hold and build” Iraqi neighborhoods and towns into an empty slogan.

Posted by: Verlaine 2007-01-03
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=176773