Surge

That blog entry before this was the first in almost a month, so I feel it was a little messy and rambling, but I needed to get something out there (Talk amongst ya'selves..). I promise to keep the next batch short and to the point, with some taut prose.

So I just watched the Bush speech, like I'm sure many political junkies and foreign affairs fans have done. I found it interesting. To the point, and actually rather well-spoken (a point journalist James Fallows has raised is that Bush seems to mis-speak more often when talking to his "Base" than when seriously dealing with a bipartisan audience). He was correct that whatever happens, there will be more violence in Iraq, and so people need to be prepared to deal with that. He also mentioned that America cannot afford to appear to lose in this conflict there: I would agree with him on that point too. As Paul Kennedy pointed out in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, that is the bitter irony of power: once a committment has been made, there is no way to withdraw from that committment without losing relative power. However, often these committments are expensive in terms of blood and treasure, and can likewise diminish power (talk about a prisoner's dilemma). As I have said before, this is why the debate on invading Iraq in the first place should have been taken more seriously - now it is far too late for the politicians to be squabbling on when and how to minimize an American presence there.

But on to this "surge", the new buzzword for 2007. Ultimately, it is a slight of hand and seems to be done for political reasons. The extra troops are troops already stationed in the Middle East - timetables have just been fiddled with. The whole debate over troop levels seems to be too much of an inside-the-Beltway game at the moment. Strategists need to seriously discuss the best means to secure a victory, or at least a stable situation, rather than the political horsetrading occuring at the moment.