Can we take a closer look at this?
OK Pick any American city that has a crime problem. Pay a hundred thousand police officers to storm the city. Post a police man on every corner. Lock up every suspect in a prison. Crime will go down.....duh.
But does it solve the underlying problem?
How long are the police going to need to be there?
What is the strategy for removing them?
They are expensive!
Our plan?
We are building schools. To educate and win the hearts and minds of the youth of Iraq. (So is our Republican plan to keep police on the corners and people in jail until the population gets their western diploma?) 14 more years? Train the Iraq soldiers to imitate the imperial policing methods of our soldiers?
So when they say the surge worked what exactly worked?
Crime went down...there is artificial stabilization.
But what really worked?
People fail to recognize that their is an exponential factor in policing a population like this. For every civilian who is killed or every person who is locked up there are sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands who are impacted...and not in a positive I hope the Americans win kind of way.
The other side that people fail to look at this context is the opportunity cost of what we could have done instead of a surge. That should be the real measure.
6 comments:
That is exactly what Obama said, the surge worked to fix the crime/violence problem but that is not doing anything for the underlying problem of a lack of infrastructure.
As soon as we remove the surge of troops, the problem of violence returns immediately.
It is a farce, pull out right now and let the country settle into what it is going to be. Whether we ait or do it right now, the same ending will occur, all we are doing is delaying it.
WHether or not the surge "worked" (which is such a fuzzy term), we can't keep our nation's troops in Iraq for the rest of time. The country seems more stable, they have troops and police whom our troops have trained so maybe it's one of those "this is the best it's gonna get" scenarios. Let the Iraqis take care of themselves finally and repurpose that wild spending in Iraq to something of value in our own country.
I concur. If the surge worked, time to bring a significant number of troops home (or transfer them to Afghanistan).
Couldn't have said it better myself!
But if we pull out of Iraq, it will foil our beloved government's plan to take over the universe...
Because the majority of people in our nation are people who need immediate satisfaction, the surge appears to have worked. It's so unbeliveably short-sighted that I have a hard time wrapping my brain around it.
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