{"id":1279,"date":"2007-09-06T07:19:54","date_gmt":"2007-09-06T12:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1279"},"modified":"2007-09-06T10:20:16","modified_gmt":"2007-09-06T15:20:16","slug":"repeat-a-big-lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1279","title":{"rendered":"Repeat A Big Lie"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m not sure what to make of Chuck Schumer’s quote<\/a> from yesterday:<\/p>\n

And let me be clear, the violence in Anbar has gone down despite the surge, not because of the surge. The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from al Qaeda said to these tribes we have to fight al Qaeda ourselves<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Forget about political tone-deafness (and any purple-state GOP leader who doesn’t have that quote posted on signs and T-shirts and bumper stickers by week’s end should be cashiered for incompetence) for a moment; the quote betrays (or utilizes) a complete ignorance of history.\u00a0 Convincing the locals to do the fighting for you<\/em> is the mark of successful <\/strong>counterinsurgency warfare; departing from that (as the US did in Vietnam under Kennedy and Johnson, to its eternal chagrin) is a recipe for disaster.\u00a0 Kaplan in Imperial Grunts<\/em> quoted innumerable Special Forces and Marines who said exactly that.\u00a0 Ed put it wel<\/a>l:<\/p>\n

Remember when the criticism of the Bush administration was that they didn’t understand the complex social structure of tribal life in Iraq? Remember when we heard nothing but how Bush and the US were bulls in a china shop, insulting tribal leaders and forcing them into the insurgencies?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Exactly.\u00a0 We’re doing the job right – <\/em>belatedly, to be sure (to our chagrin) but according to fairly clear lessons<\/a> from military history.<\/p>\n

So – is Schumer merely a historical illiterate?<\/p>\n

Or is he (as I suggested on the Hewitt show yesterday) just making sure that the Big Lie – “the surge is a failure” – hits the news cycle before Petraeus comes to town, so that the Administration and Pentagon’s good news actually looks like damage control to those who still get their information from the evening news (and anyone who votes for Chuckles Schumer numbers gullibility as the least of their problems)?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not sure what to make of Chuck Schumer’s quote from yesterday: And let me be clear, the violence in Anbar has gone down despite the surge, not because of the surge. The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from al Qaeda said to these tribes we have to fight al Qaeda ourselves […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}