teal:
If you support the Bush premises on Iraq, sending significantly more troops is the ONLY real option that gives it any chance. However, that equals more targets, more unadjusted personnel on the ground initially, and almost certainly more US casualties in the short term AND de facto admitting that you have screwed the pooch up until now. An unacceptable political cost for Bush in an election runup. It is very hard to control an enemy who are willing to blow themselves up to kill some of you.
Bush hasn't sent more troops up until now, possibly because Rumsfeld was trying to disprove the Powell doctrine of "overwhelming force" (he hasn't), possibly because of the costs and lead times involved, possibly because of bad advice from his military commanders, possibly because of real troop manpower availibility, or probably, at this time, because of the political costs. I certainly agree that most of the troops and most of the bases in Europe should probably be moved and abandoned with some few exceptions. Let the Euries pay for their defense.
No, we aren't fighting the war correctly because it was an incorrect war. To repeat myself, you start off stupid, it is hard to get smart along the way. Bush did and he hasn't.
The real problem is, we, in fact, had a controllable situation in Saddam's Iraq (I'm not going to argue this ad nauseum AGAIN, but we did, and who cares how much the UN and its minions were stealing, they can't steal fast enough to make up for our war costs, not to mention, it wasn't US taxpayer money) but now we've got "our" tiger by the tail and have no clue how to turn loose. If it wasn't so tragic, it would have been somewhat humorous watching the various entities in our government stammer as they tried to answer the question, "Well, we're turning it over to the Iraqis on 6/30, what if they ask us to leave?"
As I said before it happened, and it is now happening, Bush is seeking political cover, both with Nato and the UN, to make the very probable eventual failure of nation building in Iraq to look less like his fault. Being as objective as I can be about the situation, politically as far as the Mid East goes and as far as terrorism against the US goes, Iraq has made both situations worse, not better. Bush certainly didn't help matters any when he paid off Sharon and Israel recently. One screw up leads to another.
