I can read the statistics about car bombings; the problem isn't literacy, it's relevance. The surge's objectives, stated by the idiot-in-chief himself, were to secure the country for the purpose of progress, not as an end in itself. We simply don't have the troops or money to keep that sort of massive occupation going endlessly.
No one with half a brain doubted that sending thousands of additional troops into some area would help with overall military security. The line that we dirty liberals have parroted over and over is about "no military solution, only a political one." Oh wait, Petraeus said that too. And now, the questions to ask are:
- Is our country safer as a result of the billions of dollars we're spending and young men we're sending to their deaths over there? Petraeus says he doesn't know.
- Has the added security led to the political reconciliation it was intended to achieve? no, not at all
- How many of Bush's own benchmarks have been met?** not enough, with no disbanding of the militias, no law on oil revenue-sharing amongst factions, no real reconstruction (power is still off most of the time in most of the country; clean fresh water is scarce, leading to a recent cholera outbreak...etc) and on and on...Now the goalposts are being moved, they just hope for some semblance of local peace amongst the tribes
- **General James L. Jones, USMC (ret.), Chairman, The Report of the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, September 6, 2007
- **U.S. Government Accountability Office, Report to Congressional Committees, Securing, Stabilizing, and Rebuilding Iraq: Iraqi Government Has Not Met Most Legislative, Security, and Economic Benchmarks, GAO-07-1195, 9/2007
