How's the war going?

Whether you believe in the war or not, you have to acknowledge that it is not going well. Sy Hersh catches us up on what is actually happening in a New Yorker article entitled, "UP IN THE AIR". I really urge you to click through and read the whole article. It seems that the plan is to withdraw a number of ground troops and emphasize air strikes. The problem is that there is no real plan or strategy for conducting those air strikes. In fact, the idea is eventually to have Iraqis deciding which targets to bomb. Reasonable people are, of course, concerned that this will result in tribal conflict, the settling of old scores and that sort of thing.

Bush's rigid attitude is also discussed. Here's an excerpt:

Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.

Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.

The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: “I said to the President, ‘We’re not winning the war.’ And he asked, ‘Are we losing?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ ” The President, he said, “appeared displeased” with that answer.

“I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.”
...
Many of the military’s most senior generals are deeply frustrated, but they say nothing in public, because they don’t want to jeopardize their careers. The Administration has “so terrified the generals that they know they won’t go
public,” a former defense official said. A retired senior C.I.A. officer with knowledge of Iraq told me that one of his colleagues recently participated in a congressional tour there. The legislators were repeatedly told, in meetings with enlisted men, junior officers, and generals that “things were fucked up.” But in a subsequent teleconference with Rumsfeld, he said, the generals kept those criticisms to themselves.

We are really in a terrible predicament when the generals will not tell the White House what's really going on in a war we are fighting. That is simply an incredible state of affairs. And very scary.