Opinion: Dust-Up: Round II
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Katulis and Rivkin again cross ballpoint pens, this time regarding troop levels: Should we stay or should we go now?
Katulis says if we stay, there will be trouble:
Iraq cannot stabilize without serious action from Iraq’s leadership, and it is self-defeating for the United States to want Iraq to succeed more than the Iraqi leadership does. U.S. troops in Iraq have served with honor and done their share. And the time has long passed for Iraq’s leadership to step up and take responsibility for its own affairs.
Rivkin retorts that if we go, it will be double:
Like most critics of the war, Brian, you demand success within an artificial and unrealistic time frame. Wars, particularly counterinsurgency wars, which are fought in small engagements and patrols rather than set-piece battles, take time to win. If the unrealistic time frames the critics impose on the war in Iraq had been insisted upon in any of America’s past wars, most of which included periods of terrible setbacks, the results would have been disastrous.
Read the rest and spill some of your own ink here.