They'll Spin You Right 'Round

The latest Republican fallacy that's circulating, and amplified by our trusty GOP frontrunner candidate, Rudy Giuliani, is that the mistake Bush was making is that we just didn't send enough troops in the first place. In an interview with Larry King yesterday, he said:

... the United States, which has had 120,000 to 160,000 troops at a time in Iraq, should have gone in with “maybe 100,000 to 130,000 more.”

I'm shocked at how Republicans are pretending this sounds logical. It's as if they are saying to themselves, Well, clearly the American military can never, ever lose at anything, so therefore we must not have blasted them with enough firepower in the first place. Sadly, they seem to forget that the international animosity toward Americans is actually fueled by our troop presence. The fact that we keep slowly filtering in or retaining more troops and it only seems to coincide with bloodier violence should signal that this theory doesn't work.

Furthermore, having 100,000 to 130,000 more troops would have meant a police state for the Iraqis. It seems that we just thought by sending in troops and overthrowing the government, we thought a functioning democracy would magically appear. An important question to ask GOP candidates who claim we came in with too few troops, is what kind of presence they envision for those thousands of troops.

My guess is, an alternative scenario with more troops would look just as ugly.