Martin van Creveld, a professor of military history at the Hebrew University, is author of "Transformation of War" (Free Press, 1991). He is the only non-American author on the U.S. Army's required reading list for officers, but apparently he hates America (and therefore Israel). How else to explain this piece in the Forward, entitled: “Costly Withdrawal Is the Price To Be Paid for a Foolish War.” It goes like this:
“Simply abandoning equipment or handing it over to the Iraqis, as was done in Vietnam, is simply not an option. And even if it were, the new Iraqi army is by all accounts much weaker, less skilled, less cohesive and less loyal to its government than even the South Vietnamese army was. For all intents and purposes, Washington might just as well hand over its weapons directly to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Clearly, then, the thing to do is to forget about face-saving and conduct a classic withdrawal.
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A withdrawal probably will require several months and incur a sizable number of casualties. As the pullout proceeds, Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge — if, indeed, it can do so at all. All this is inevitable and will take place whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice like it or not.
And hey, check out this kicker:
For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C. sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men.
On the one hand, given that we’re supporting torture, death squads creating terrorists, it’s kinda silly to get excited about the fact that we are subverting the notion of a “free press” in Iraq here. On the other, well, you can’t believe a damn thing these people say about anything.
For me, the only serious question to be asked about any Bush speech about it Iraq is how long does it take to disprove its central claims. In the case of tonight’s speech about how we are going to train our way out of this catastrophe, I’d say, “five seconds,” thanks to my buddy Jim Fallows, who, need I remind everyone, did the most thorough pre-war job of laying out the likelihood of postwar chaos and catastrophe, thereby demonstrating the potential value of long-form journalism to our democracy, as well as our political system’s imperviousness to evidence and reasoned argument, alas.