Troop Surge in Iraq will deepen Quagmire - by Richard Stoyeck

Troop Surge in Iraq will deepen Quagmire - by Richard Stoyeck: "It looks like President Bush is going to announce a 'temporary increase' in the number of American troops serving in Iraq. The President is adding complexity to a series of wrong decisions he has made since the beginning of the invasion. It is difficult to imagine how a surge in American troops can fix a self-created problem?

We have made the same mistake that five star General Douglas MacArthur warned about with regard to Asia, 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia.' Presidents Kennedy and Johnson didn't heed the advice, and the rest is history. Now once again, we have a President who has involved us voluntarily (the US was never attacked directly or indirectly by the evil Saddam Hussein) in a land war in an Arab country where suicide bombers are as common as a cup of coffee.

The basis of General MacArthur's advice was that life is cheap in Asia. Our country will tire, and the public will to continue the effort will wane before the opposition will tire of losing lives. The same advice applies to the Middle East as it did to Asia. Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and the Mullah's Iran lost several hundred thousand men in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980's, and neither felt the loss. The United States openly backed Saddam Hussein during the war, and prevented an Iranian victory by stepping i"