If you were part of the cut-and-run pack that cynically thought the Bush administration's reevaluation of "stay the course" actually meant more of the same, then shame, shame on you. It didn't mean that at all. It just meant more.
Coinciding with the administration's public re-strategerering ... ah, re-stratezing ... re-strategering ... whatever ... was our man in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., announcing "that he may call for more troops to be sent to Baghdad, possibly by increasing the overall U.S. presence in Iraq."
What's more, Casey now says security duties performed by American troops would be assumed by Iraqi forces "no sooner than late 2007 or early 2008," thereby establishing yet another timeline of delay for U.S. troop reductions.
Why more troops, and for a longer time? Well, we're in a "tough fight" there, explained Casey, however Iraq "is not a country that is awash in sectarian violence. The situation's hard, but it's not a country that's awash in sectarian violence," he repeated for emphasis.
You may find the juxtaposition of calling for more troops while asserting those troops are needed because the country lacks an intolerable level of sectarian violence to be a trifle bizarre, but such a finding would only reveal your lack of comprehending delegated BushSpeak and military know-how.
In the first place, as Iraqis have been standing up, we have been standing around, as promised, trying to find them. As the Pentagon reported to Congress just two months ago, "Iraq had more than 277,000 troops and police officers," nearly twice the American forces, yet its government was experiencing a little "difficulty" -- difficulty, not failure -- "in fielding a professional military."
To review, "A quarter or so of a typical Iraqi unit is on leave at any one time," "desertions and absenteeism are another concern," "15 percent of new recruits drop out during initial training," "deployment to combat zones ... sometimes results in additional 'absentee spikes of 5 to 8 percent,'" "much of the Iraqi Army consists of soldiers who are reluctant to serve outside the areas in which they reside," and the "difficulties" -- difficulties, not failures -- "with the Iraqi police, who are supposed to play a major role in protecting cleared areas under the Baghdad security plan, are considerable and include corruption and divided loyalties to militias."
So things are looking up.
Second, it is a myth, a falsehood, a damnable lie that our military and its civilian bosses suffer from a learning disability. As they countered that other nasty insurgency in Vietnam, for instance, they may have encountered difficulties -- difficulties, not failures -- but their situational assessments and expanding insights into what it took to win would have made Clausewitz and Sun Tzu proud.
Again, to briefly review, in 1950 President Truman approved $10 million to help battle Indochinese communism, soon followed by more assistance, as well as the deployment of 123 non-combat troops. A decade later there were 746 advisors on the ground. We weren't quite winning yet, but we were learning.
In 1965, in addition to the now 25,000 advisors there, we sent 3,500 U.S. Marines to mop things up, joined six months later by the U.S. Army's 173d Airborne Brigade. By 1965's end we had 184,000 ground troops in Vietnam. By 1967 Gen. William Westmoreland delighted in reporting that "I am absolutely certain that, whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing." Four days earlier, the president had declared "We are inflicting greater losses than we're taking.... We are making progress."
By 1968 we had nearly a half-million troops in Vietnam, including 24,000 who had been returned for a less than voluntary, second tour of duty.
All told, about three-million Americans served in Vietnam, more than 58,000 of whom failed to return alive, not to mention nearly a quarter-million dead South Vietnamese soldiers, more than a million dead North Vietnamese and liberation-front soldiers, and somewhere between two- and four-million dead civilians.
But it all worked out in the end. Today's Socialist Republic of Vietnam is making gigantic strides in the production of cheaper tennis shoes, coming soon to a Wal-Mart near you, and its "Finance Ministry has just produced a draft personal-taxation law, expected to be approved by January, that offers more tax breaks for the wealthy than the United States does."
So the Vietnamese are learning. And we is too -- every day, every hour, with every little victory in Iraq.