STEEL WOLF: The President will play hard to get, but will find himself overcome with the spirit of bipartisanship, and give it a chance. Troop levels will go down, Iraqi security forces will step up. Once the U.S. body counts drops off to nothing, and Iraq stabilizes, the U.S. public will forget all about the 'cut and run' fixation, and be pleased with the progress. That's as close to victory as President Bush is going to get in 2 years, and it's not a bad one. Maybe not as cathartic as getting a declaration of surrender signed on the deck of the Missouri, but it'll be good enough.
HUMINT: you paint a nice picture Steel, but I have to ask about the flow of Sunni foreign fighters from Saudi, Egypt and other countries that we should expect are going to start streaming across the border when the Shiite Death Squads step up the killing of Sunnis around the country? Under Iran's guidance, maybe Iraq won’t devolve completely into a wasteland like Afghanistan under the Taliban but in terms of US national interests, it might as well. Do we know Tehran pulls Muqtada Al-Sadr's strings well enough to prevent him from murdering his way to the top? Or do you think the Iraqi Shi’i are going to establish a confrontational relationship with the Iranian Shi’i to establish a Karbala-Qom spiritual balance? Given that the ideology held by the theocratic government of Iran translates into cycles of upheaval and war, why should we pick sides with the Shi’i? Based on who SCIRI represents how can we consider your scenario plausible? Is the ISG the right group to be getting advice from at all, given their history? The message is loud and clear right now and I don't like what I'm hearing.
Bump