Watched the President's speech tonight; I will now make predictions, being rather uppity and full of myself:
1) The situation in Iraq will not get better. I would love to be wrong about this.
2) Congress will not manage to get together the votes to kill funding for the Iraq war. Unless I'm totally confused, they'd need a veto-proof majority, and this won't happen before November.
3) November will roll around, and due to #1, the situation in Iraq will not have improved. Actually, I suspect by this time it'll be painfully obvious that adding extra troops did nothing at all, or maybe made things worse. At this point, there will be references to the parts in tonight's speech where it was stated that Iraqi forces would take over security in Iraq in November. A lot of the beginning of the speech was focused on the idea that this escalation is being used to help the Iraqis with something they themselves have initiated. At this point, failure will be attributed mostly to Iraq not being really ready for democracy, and maybe in a minor way to mistakes made at the outset.
4) Either the President will give the order to start withdrawing troops in November, or Congress will pull funding.
5) Despite mentioning Syria and Iran in his speech tonight, there will be no direct action taken towards either of them before November.
Now, watch me be wrong about almost all of them. Except the first one. I'm fairly certain about that prediction.
Posted by Ardith at January 10, 2007 10:08 PM | TrackBack