Shocking and awful
A series of horrific images and a big American black eye
After spending the past year reciting the mantra that the U.S. military footprint in Iraq was adequate, the Bush administration has been forced to concede that the security situation is getting worse, not better. With the Pentagon announcing that it would keep roughly 135,000 troops in the country through the end of 2005, 30,000 more than originally planned, it means that what had previously been called a "spike" in deployments is becoming more of a plateau. The change also throws the troop rotation plan into even greater disarray, forcing the Army to dispatch one brigade of the overworked 10th Mountain Division to Iraq after only nine months of being back home from Afghanistan.
Senior administration officials remain determined to soldier on, however. "One can only imagine what today's news media would have said about Winston Churchill in the face of his dogged refusal to change his strategy in the face of repeated setbacks," said Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy and a chief architect of the postwar plan for Iraq. Yet, looking back on Britain's 17-year occupation of Iraq, Churchill made it very clear that he would have preferred to have done things differently. "I hate Iraq," he said. "I wish we had never gone there." Nobody at the top of the Bush administration is saying anything like that, at least not publicly, and at least not yet.
With Bay Fang and Mark Mazzetti
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