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« Hey... | Main | Why Bush's Foreign Policy Is Screwed Up »

Prescient

A few months ago, T. M. Lutas made a bold prediction in the comments section of one of my blog posts:

Out of the 18 Iraqi provinces, 3 kurdish ones have their greatest security threats being foreign incursion from Turkey and Iran. Terrorism is successfully kept out. 4 arab provinces are under local management and we rarely, if ever, do anything there. That's 7 down, 11 to go with the rest of the provinces in various stages along the road towards handover. I fully expect that when the balance is 10:8 instead of 7:11 that we're going to see a sea change in coverage because "a majority of Iraq is under local control and relatively quiet" and all the MSM is going to realize that if they don't get on the right side of this quickly, the deluge of broken credibility will very likely worsen and shorten their personal careers significantly.

I expect at least 3 more provinces to get handed over between now and the height of campaign season 2008. I'd like to think that at least 6 more would make the transition by then (obviating the need to explain Kurdistan's special situation in the stats). The defeatists have to change the natural progression of Iraqi government and security institution building and do it soon or they're going to be in deep trouble in 2008.

Well, he called it right.

Iraq's army and police could be ready to take over security in all 18 provinces by the end of this year as the U.S. military moves toward a less prominent role in the country, U.S. officials said on Thursday.

"We look at it every month. We make recommendations. I think that if we continue along the path we're on now, we'll be able to do that by the end of 2008," Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, the No. 2 commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said when asked when Iraqi forces could take the lead in all provinces.

Harry and Nancy are no doubt very disappointed, since we refused to surrender to the enemy as they were demanding all last year.

Posted by Rand Simberg at January 18, 2008 12:17 PM
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Maybe my math is shaky, but right now the count is 9:9, and the general is only predicting what _could_ happen in eleven months, not what has already happened. These kinds of promises have been made before and not happened. So let's wait until it actually happens before saying that it has happened.

Posted by Walter Lowenthal at January 19, 2008 10:42 AM

The Army may not survive until 2009, which is the concern.
About 1/4th of the trigger pullers are now walking wounded
which means for heavy operations the Army is now combat
in-effective. Sure they can keep re-organizing and putting
the healthy into forward battalions, but, if the Iranians cross
the frontier, we don't have the ability to stop them
if it runs 30 days.

Posted by at January 19, 2008 10:46 AM

"The Army may not survive until 2009, which is the concern.
About 1/4th of the trigger pullers are now walking wounded
which means for heavy operations the Army is now combat
in-effective. Sure they can keep re-organizing and putting
the healthy into forward battalions, but, if the Iranians cross
the frontier, we don't have the ability to stop them
if it runs 30 days."


The above post is total nonsense, to call it gibberish would be to insult gibberish.

I never imagined a hypothetical human being could squeeze so much stupid into so few characters.

Assuming your first fairy tale as so, air power alone could utterly and completely anihilate any Iranian invasion force.


Not to mention there is simply no way the Iranians could assemble such a force without plenty of advance warning.


Posted by Mike Puckett at January 19, 2008 04:06 PM

The iraqi's assembled an invasion force and invaded kuwait
without anyone in the Bush administration noticing.

And this particular Bush can't even be bothered to read
the intelligence briefings


Posted by at January 19, 2008 10:18 PM

I bet a six-pack (of cider since I expect to win) that our "dear" at-at-at is in fact nothing but a slightly customized version of Eliza.

At-at-at has now failed the Turing test, I'm pretty sure its creator(s) does as well ^_^

Posted by Habitat Hermit at January 19, 2008 11:07 PM


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