Even The Military Question The GOP's Failed Tactics

As a recent New York Times article "portrays Iraq as edging toward chaos," members of the military are begining to question Bush and the GOP's failed policies in Iraq:

"Growing numbers of American military officers have begun to privately question" the Bush administration's resistance to redeploying U.S. troops out of Iraq. "There is a new belief that the biggest problem that we face is that our forces are the sand in the gears creating problems," said one former Pentagon official. "We are making things worse by giving the Iraqis a false sense of security at the governing level."

--- Think Progress

A WaPo article shows one of the reasons the soldiers' frustrations are becoming evident:

"How can we expect ordinary Iraqis to trust the police when we don't even trust them not to kill our own men?" asked Capt. Alexander Shaw, head of the police transition team of the 372nd ...snip... "To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure we're ever going to have police here that are free of the militia influence."

The soldiers keep getting told that as the Iraqis stand up, the American military will stand down. But this is a failing policy. As long as we are there the Iraqis have no incentive to stand up and, to make matters worse, we are further aggravating the situations between the differnt groups fighting for control within Iraq.

Some of the idots in the right-wing-nut-cheerleader-camp are echoing a simplistic answer that is too little, too late, when they advocate that we should just send more troops to quell the CHAOS in Iraq because that cannot work.

Think Progress explains why:

Currently, the Army has "close to zero combat-ready brigades in reserve" and the National Guard is "in an even more dire situation than the active Army." (63 percent of all Iraq and Afghanistan veterans believe the Army and Marine Corps are overextended.) "The U.S. military suffers from a glaring manpower deficiency," Korb and Ogden argue in Foreign Affairs Magazine. "This massive troop commitment [in Iraq] has put a serious and unsustainable strain on the U.S. military." "The overstretched state of the U.S. military is creating broader strategic problems" because without reinstating the draft, the U.S. may not have enough troops to respond to crises around the world.

It cannot work without reinstating the draft, that is. So, unless McCain and the rest of the GOP are advocating reinstating the draft when he calls for "another 20,000 troops in Iraq" I think they are truely left with only one other course of action:

Redeployment.