WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 — The Marine Corps is pressing to remove its forces from Iraq and to send marines instead to Afghanistan, to take over the leading role in combat there, according to senior military and Pentagon officials.
…and this is what I said a year ago.
- We’ve got to get out of there. Now. It would be far cheaper and safer to simply give Iraq the money it needs to rebuild. Send the National Guard home where it belongs, let half of the regular Army rest, and redeploy the other half to Afghanistan. I’m no military strategist, but this is obvious.
If this was obvious to me a whole year ago, with no military experience whatsoever, what took the experts so long to start coming around to the same conclusion?
I can already anticipate the counter argument. The Marines, and not the Army, would be redeployed to Afghanistan, so we aren’t leaving Iraq. Yeah, but this is the first acknowledgment that the business in Afghanistan didn’t get finished, and because the Marines always lead the fight, they must be followed by the Army. The surge represented no change in strategy. This does.