Friday, April 13, 2007

Not Another Czar

Are you kidding me? The President thinks it will help things if he appoints a "war czar" to "cut through the bueracracy" and help manage the war effort. 'Cause you know all those other czars have worked out so well. We surely would still have a drug problem if we didn't have a drug czar (enter Jon Stewart "who appointed this guy sarcasm czar?"), oh wait.

I can't find the link but I think Matt Yglesias is on to something in pointing out that the administration is constantly trying to put forward some charismatic figure that's supposed to solve the problems in Iraq and divert attention from their own bungling.

As Yglesias and Fred Kaplan at Slate have noted, that's not the problem in Iraq. The problem is not the pentagon's organization or beauracracy, it's the mission itself. The military is good at fighting wars, not building governments or conducting occupations. To do occupations correctly we'd have to get rid of this 'light, lean, and fast' mentality, and start putting a lot more boots on the ground. It might not hurt to start giving civillian casualties a modicum of the import we give to our own casualties. It's not hard to see, looking at the numbers, why other peoples would think we value an American soldier (who chose to join the Army) something like 100 times more than an Iraqi civillian (who made no such choices). When we drop a bomb likely to kill thirty or more civillians (requiring the Sec Def's authorization, so we know this stuff happens) so that we can blow up a truck that MIGHT be used against some of our soldiers, that tells you something.

And the fact that four generals have refused the post tells you something about how they view our situation in Iraq. I believe the military has a word for it: FUBAR.

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