That is the classical definition of “too little, too late”!

I’m betting that all this was in the original plan & that Rumdum’s been arguing against it for 4 years.

This is actually good news.  My guess is the military has come up with this on their own, not with the help of a Cheney or a Rumsfeld.  Please understand, based on my experience, that many top military men and the military schools are generally quite smart, quite apolitical, and very practical.  I wrote some time ago:

Asking the military, who weren’t trained to build nations and who did their job heroically in the war, to sort out what needs to be done in Iraq or Afghanistan is truly amateurish; such work was never the military’s job.  Not even having a full professional cadre of those who speak the language of our enemies, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Iran to Lebanon – how could this administration even pretend to understand what forces it has unleashed?  The author of “Fiasco”, Tom Ricks, has said we’ll probably have troops in Iraq for fifteen years because of how amateurishly things have been handled.  I grieve for our sons and daughters and our grandchildren who will be forced to handle the mess that will be left behind by this administration.

The only thing that concerns me is the fact that it will take a good time to re-train our military, and they will be stuck there in Afghanistan and Iraq for a long time with a dual role.  The other thing is that such a re-training cannot be the primary mission of the military, which is to do a very difficult job that often involves killing and is messy and not constructive.  So there’s a contradiction here.

But please, understand that it is a positive step.  The job that Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush didn’t understand was (a) nation building, (b) fighting an insurgency, (c) fighting a civil war, (d) dealing with guerillas who wore the same clothing as the populace and lived in their apartments and homes.

Don’t make fun or denigrate the military.  They deserve our heartfelt thanks.  They perform like heroes and have done all we’ve asked of them.

“The Army and Marines are finishing work on a new doctrine that puts the welfare and protection of civilians front and center…”

Yeah, right. Is anyone buying it?

So now it’s the nice cop routine, huh.  Alas, the Pentagon just doesn’t get it. - That people don’t like foreigners coming in and taking over their native land and that the only thing that’ll stop the killing is troops out now.  How to make it happen?  We win the November election, that’s how. 
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