Ignor Sun Tzu at your own peril.

Jeff Huber at Pen and Sword

The ancient Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu said "Every battle is won before it is ever fought."

Sun Tzu also said "There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare."

And: "When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength."

And: "If the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain."

And: "Contributing to maintain an army at a distance causes the people to be impoverished."

And: "In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them."

And: "It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on."

And: "In war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory."

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Some of the 'Surge' troops in Iraq wil come from... Afghanastan!

Scarecrow at Firedoglake:

David Wood of the Baltimore Sun (by way of Boston Globe) summarizes what we're not supposed to be watching: Commanders seek more forces in Afghanistan. Not only are the US and NATO forces already stretched for enough troops to deal with a resurgent Taliban, but some of the US troops already there are scheduled to be part of the "surge" into Iraq.

[...] To sum up, we're about to have three surges simultaneously (nice parallel with King Abdullah's three civil wars scenario, which is also on track, but that's another story). We will surge US troops into Iraq; to allow that, we will surge US troops out of Afghanistan; to take advantage of that, the Taliban will surge all over Afghanistan. Symmetry.

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