The Surge is Incomplete at Best, and Disastrous At Worst...

There is a time to persevere in the pursuit of a goal, and then there is a time to shift direction away from sure defeat. A wise individual knows the difference between the two. It is now time for the Bush administration to do the latter in Iraq, and finally begin being honest with himself and with reality. The majority of the American public thinks the war is and was a mistake, and opposes further U.S. involvement. The November 2006 election was essentially a referendum on the Iraq War, and the verdict was unequivocally negative. But on Wednesday night, Bush took his middle finger and threw it up in the American public's face. There's no other way to describe the decision to add 21,000 more troops to the mix.

The war has stretched on for nearly four years, costing the American taxpayer billions of dollars per month. Some experts predict that the war will end up costing us more than $1 trillion. Thousands of American soldiers have died, tens of thousands more wounded, many of them catastrophically so. And I still have not heard a viable estimate of the amount of Iraqis who have died or been injured as a result of this war. Yet, with all of the resources that have been dedicated to the war, we not only lack a coherent goal or end-state that we are trying to achieve, but we lack the resources to continue persevering while we scramble to find a realistic one.

To distract attention from these realities, Bush and his supporters dismiss criticism of the surge strategy as defeatism, and any talk of drawdown as options for failure. And that is all they say! "The stakes are too high in Iraq to lose." "Failure now would embolden the terrorists." These are straw-man arguments. As Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NB) so passionately pointed out on "Meet the Press" last Sunday, no one opposing the troop surge is advocating defeat in Iraq. But we do have to accept that more of the same is not getting the job done. And we have to acknowledge that the mission to be accomplished in Iraq is going to require so much more than military muscle. That mission is one that will require diplomatic strength, political compromise, and skillful mediation.

Some say that it's impossible to focus on the latter three goals without establishing some baseline level of security. Perhaps. But one thing is for sure. The sooner we begin planning and implementing a diplomatic and political strategy in Iraq, the sooner we'll be ready to move on in Iraq to disengagement. So why not think about it, and strategize it? This near-term fixation is what got us into trouble in the first place with the postwar situation in Iraq--the lack of research and lack of planning. So why not learn from that mistake?

The real mistake in my view is simply adding more troops to the conflict without any strategy or plan for solving the underlying issues that are leading to sectarian strife and civil war. No amount of troops will be able to address those issues. And while a short-term surge in troop levels might assist the forces in Iraq in stabilizing the place, the surge will not do anything to solve the conflicts that are giving rise to the violence in the first place. In other words, a troop surge is just a Band-Aid.

Bush has said that he plans to "double the number of reconstruction teams" in Iraq in order to disseminate experts who will aid the process of Iraqi reconciliation, but there is no clear explication of what that means. There needs to be very serious, and clear-cut strategies for addressing the political problems, otherwise a troop surge is just more of the same. Perhaps the President needs to dispatch a special envoy or set of envoys to take charge of the diplomatic side of things. Or maybe he needs to be clearer about what he intends to do to help speed the reconciliation process that is so central to the future of Iraq and our eventual disengagement. Without this, a simple troop surge is just more of the same.

A Very Happy New Year!

Today for many is a day of recovery from hangovers. For me, it's feeling more like a day of reflection, or of hope, even. As hokey as that sounds.

I won't bore you with my personal aspirations for the coming year, nor my endless list of New Years resolutions. (I'm still pretty much 0-29 in sticking to my New Years resolutions anyway.) What I will say is that I hope this year finds us making strides forward with the world's problems. I hope we begin being honest with ourselves, about our good decisions, and our not-so-good decisions, our vices and our virtues (in no way meant to conjure parallels with the Taliban), and our strengths and our weaknesses. I also hope that we as Americans can begin to find an opportunity for peace. Let's hope the war ends this year, and let's hope that Iraq begins to find some stability. Let's hope that the Darfur situation begins to calm down finally. Let's hope that corporate leaders will begin to find ways to make health care more affordable and accessible. Let's hope that the forces of peace, equality, reason, and human compassion can finally make some headway against the pervasively dominant forces of fundamentalism, vengeance, intolerance, ignorance, and belligerence. (All of the latter negative qualities are made more dangerous when mixed with utter stupidity, which is unfortunately also rampant these days.)

But most of all, my New Year's wish for everyone--from heads-of-state to grassroots activists, from the consumer to the journalist--is for the rare, but priceless, attribute of objectivity to begin making a comeback.