Call it “completion anxiety.”
It’s the movie director who keeps shooting, and then keeps editing what he’s already shot, and then goes back for just a little more shooting, and a little more editing, and on and on. Meanwhile, the release date keeps being postponed, and the studio execs are going crazy.
It’s the college student who’s just one term paper short of getting her degree, but who can never quite manage to type the words “The End.” If her frozen fingers hold the real world off for a little while longer, and then a little while longer – well, she can live with that.
It’s the Broadway producer who keeps his brand-new play in “previews” for month after month. If there’s never an Opening Night, he never has to face those Opening Night reviews.
It’s the commander in chief who keeps saying “We’re still adjusting.”
Call it completion anxiety – or call it tactics. Cynical tactics, or desperation tactics. But tactics nonetheless. Which is how we keep hearing that it’s still too early to draw any conclusions about how the latest strategy is working in Iraq.
“The surge isn’t at full strength yet,” the president and his people keep insisting. “We won’t know how it’s working until the surge is at full strength.” That’s months from now, of course, and until the administration has exactly the number of troops they want, deployed exactly the way they want them, it wouldn’t be fair to pass judgment.
Not a totally outrageous position – although after four long years of failure, this blunder bunch is hardly in a position to demand patience. But even if they were, it would still require our confidence that, at some definable point in the future, the administration would say, in essence, “Now we’ve got what we need. Now you can judge.”
But what if that point never comes? What if the administration never has exactly the number of troops they want, deployed exactly the way they want them? What if the surge is never quite at “full strength”?
It was going to be this summer, wasn’t it? We could start evaluating the surge by the time summer came; that’s what we were told.
Then it was September. The extra troops won’t even have all arrived until the start of summer, we were told. So let’s not draw any conclusions until September.
And now you have the likes of Ray Odierno, trying to push Judgment Day back even further.
“The surge needs to go through the beginning of next year for sure,” the man in charge of day-to-day U.S. military operations in Iraq declared just the other day. “What I am trying to do is to get until April so we can decide whether to keep it going or not.”
So not only do the troop levels and the deployment tactics have to be exactly what they want before we can decide whether the surge is “working.” But those troops – at ideal levels, in ideal deployments – also have to be there long enough for commanders to decide whether the surge is working.
And how long is “long enough”? Until the surge is working! Bet your bottom dollar it’ll play out just that way: Until we’re making progress in Iraq, it’ll be too soon to determine whether we’re making progress in Iraq.
Worried yet? It gets worse.
Quick now, which is it? If we’re making progress, that means we can start pulling out sooner? Or if we’re making progress, that means we get to stay longer?
You can’t remember, can you? That’s because you’ve heard both versions. We stay longer if it’s working. We stay longer if it isn’t.
Worried now?
Rick Horowitz is a nationally syndicated columnist. Contact him by writing to rickhoro@execpc.com.
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