The day after 16 American servicemen died when their helicopter was shot out of the sky near Fallujah, a group of American soldiers tossed handfuls of candy from their Humvees to the Iraqi children who lined the road.
"Don't touch it, don't touch it!" the children squealed. "It's poison from the Americans. It will kill you."
The Humvees rumbled past, and the candy stayed in the dirt.
It's Fallujah, not elsewhere, but that just shows we underestimated the tribal/regional risks.
I'm not a big Rumsfeld basher -- while I suspect he's a jerk as a manager, I've long felt that a Republican administration will be more able to right-size the military than others, and Rumsfeld has seemed incessant about that.
But occupation is not attack, and our military seems to continue to be dangerously clueless in at least parts of Iraq...
As Krugman says today:
But whether or not you think troop losses are important, there's growing evidence that our Iraq strategy is unsustainable. The immediate issue is manpower. Some politicians are calling for a bigger force in Iraq — but even our current force levels can't be maintained.
In September the Congressional Budget Office analyzed how many U.S. soldiers could be kept in Iraq without extending tours beyond one year. The conclusion was that force levels would have to start dropping rapidly about five months from now, and that the forces in Iraq and Kuwait would eventually have to shrink by almost two-thirds. As the report explains, the Pentagon can use various expedients to maintain a larger force in Iraq, but all of these expedients would threaten to undermine our military readiness.
...Just as the federal government is in no immediate danger of running out of money, our forces in Iraq are in no danger of outright defeat. But in both cases, current policies appear to be unsustainable: we can't go on like this indefinitely. And things that can't go on forever, don't.
