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Escalation Architect Bemoans
Label Of ‘Armchair General,’ Claims Iraqi Deaths Are
‘Way Down’
Think
Progress
Monday Aug 27, 2007
This weekend on Washington D.C. ABC affiliate’s Capital
Sunday, Center for American Progress Iraq analyst Brian
Katulis debated American Enterprise Institute’s military
analyst — and Iraq
escalation architect — Fred Kagan.
“Right now, Iraq is in civil war. It’s in fact in
multiple civil wars,” Katulis said. “And I don’t
think that these military tactics that these armchair generals
and the academics offer up fundamentally address the core issue
— that Iraqis are in a vicious struggle for power.”
Taking issue with Katulis’ description of him as an “armchair
general,” Kagan complained that “you only get called
an armchair general when you actually advocate doing anything.”
Speaking as an armchair general, Kagan went on to claim “sectarian
killings are way down,” despite an AP report that Iraqi
deaths have doubled so far this year.
(Article continues below)
Watch it:
Katulis rejected Kagan’s assertion that Iraqi deaths are
“way down”:
Sectarian killing is not down. If you look at the NIE, they
say the places where Baghdad has become stabilized, it’s
because of sectarian cleansing. Baghdad used to be a 65
percent Sunni majority city. Now it’s 75 percent [Shia],
and we’re standing there and watching this happen while
the militias are right underneath our nose, infiltrated in the
very security forces that we’re supporting. And this raises
big questions about what the heck we’re doing over there.
Armchair general Fred Kagan has advocated escalation so the U.S.
can militarily confront
Syria and Iran in the future. He said of escalation last month,
“Whatever you can say about the current strategy, it
has not failed.”
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