Talking Heads: Start Making Sense

Today, on "Face the Nation," former Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the US is losing in Iraq -- and that a surge in troops to protect Baghdad would likely not work. This is life during wartime, December 2006:

"So if it's grave and deteriorating [as the Iraq Survey Group concluded] and we're not winning [as new Defense Secretary Gates said], we are losing...

"I am not persuaded that another surge of troops into Baghdad for the purposes of suppressing this communitarian violence, this civil war, will work,"

Powell did say that he agreed with the ISG and Gates, by the way.

It was a Sunday, so a lot of administration supporters in the audience probably thought that Powell was speaking in tongues. He said that the US is less safe as a a result of Operation Iraqi Freedom:

"I think we are a little less safe, in the sense that we don't have the same force structure available for other problems," Powell said. "I think we have been somewhat constrained in our ability to influence events elsewhere."

Hmmmm.

To prove the politics makes for strange bedfellows, Senate Majority Leader (to be), Harry Reid today said that he would support a temporary surge in troops for Iraq.

True Story: Reid also said that the 2 or 3 month troop surge had to be part of a plan to have the US out by this time next year.


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Filed as: Iraq