Armchair General time

It's sort of depressing to me that, now that the election is over, nobody really gives a sh-t about the fact that Iraq just keeps getting worse, in all possible aspects, and that a shiite, pro-Iranian government looks like the only option come "election" day.

The invasion of Iraq is coming close to the point of being able to be declared a complete failure in terms of the national interest. A complete, expensive, bloody, failure. And nobody cares.

 

It's hard work...

 

Pffftt...Chicken Little...

 

Freedom is never free.

Its our away game ...

Terrorists hate our love of freedom (or was that Apple Pie?).

 

Kerry said, in that stultifying way of his, that 4 more years of Bushis "more of the same" in Iraq, and in general.

You asked for it in Iraq, america, that's what you're getting.

More of the same.

Although it might even be worse.

 

After the elections, let the new gov't unleash hell.

 

Why not just put Saddam and his cronies back in power since we know they are very capable when it comes to unleashing hell.

 

I cannot see ANY outcome in Iraq other than it becoming a religious theocracy unless the US occupies the country for the next 15 years.

Iran is doing their worst to make sure that Iraq is their new Mullah dominated ally.

The religious zealots outnumber the moderates, WHO do you think is going to gain power with "democratic" elections??

We have created a new hostile state, not that the old Iraq wasn't, but one that will allow for religious terrorists to operate freely in their borders UNLIKE the reign of Saddam's Iron fist. Even if they don't ALLOW them, they will not be able to CONTROL them--they can't even secure a ten mile stretch of road with over 150,000 US troops in Iraq!

I'm truly discouraged and saddened for both of our countries--I don't care WHO is in office. This war has no defining end or direction that I or many others can discern, other than as a dumping ground for our soldiers lives and our respect among the world. I wish I could tender a solution, I really do; that doesn't mean I'm not gonna say SH*T when I step in it! So please, don't tell me to shut-up if I'm not part of the solution...

 

Well, it'd be awkward to rehire a guy you just fired on very bad terms. A signing bonus and a no trade clause might soothe things over.

 

I don't see the alternative. Iraq has to have its elections. We have to stay long enough for the newly elected government to stand by itself (which easily could be 3-4 years down the road). The longer we do stay the more stable Iraq will be when we leave and potentially the better the Iraq-US relationship will be down the road.

How we stay the course is an open question. It will be interesting to see how a non-puppet Iraqi government will handle its relationship with the US, and vice versa. I fear this will give GWB more opportunities to use his stone hands of foreign policy for the forces of evil. and stupidity.

 

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006057

--
The Enemy in Plain View
Saddam's regime has not yet been defeated.

Tuesday, December 21

Washington must seem like a very strange place from the vantage point of Baghdad. While the world's so-called power capital debates whether Donald Rumsfeld has been solicitous enough of U.S. Senators, on the front lines of the war on terror three Iraqi election workers are dragged from their car in Baghdad and murdered in front of the world's cameras.

Do we need any clearer picture of the stakes, and the nature of our enemy, in Iraq than the photo of those assassinations that appeared on yesterday's front pages? The dead Iraqis were targeted precisely because they are trying to build a new, democratic Iraq. Their killers can't abide a free election, or a newly legitimate Iraqi government, because they know it will make it less likely that they can ever return to power. The car bombs targeting Shiite Muslims in Karbala and Najaf are sending the same brutal message.

These events ought to put to rest the canard that what we are facing in Iraq is some kind of "nationalist" uprising opposed to U.S. occupation. The genuine Iraqi patriots are those risking their lives to rebuild their country and prepare for elections. They are being threatened, and murdered, by members and allies of the old regime who want to restore Sunni Baathist political domination. Or to put it more bluntly, we haven't yet defeated Saddam Hussein's regime.

If Mr. Rumsfeld has made a single large mistake as Defense Secretary, it has been underestimating the resilience of this enemy. To be fair, this is a familiar mistake in U.S. history, the tendency to declare victory too soon and let the enemy regroup and fight on. Meade let Lee escape at Gettysburg, while overconfident generals missed the Nazi potential to counterattack at the Battle of the Bulge. In the first Gulf War, Norman Schwarzkopf let Saddam keep the helicopters that allowed him to crush the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings and survive for another decade.

Also to be fair, mistakes are inevitable in war and Mr. Rumsfeld has been far from alone. The CIA seems to have completely missed that Saddam's strategy from the beginning was to disperse his allies and conduct a decentralized insurgency. And we don't recall John McCain predicting today's events. The first person we saw who noted this likelihood was retired Marine colonel Gary Anderson, in an April 2, 2003, op-ed in the Washington Post. His warnings were dismissed at the time, especially by the CIA, which still believed that Iraq could be pacified with a "decapitation" strategy eliminating Saddam and his top aides.

But the more we learn about the insurgency, the more Mr. Anderson's analysis has proven true. The latest evidence comes from a batch of intelligence documents reported in last week's U.S. News & World Report. Reporter Edward Pound cites U.S. documents saying "former regime elements" are behind most of today's terror attacks in Iraq. He quotes one document as noting that Saddam and his allies "appear to have planned for an insurgency before the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom." Months before the Coalition invasion, members of Saddam's intelligence service and Fedayeen were planning how to build roadside bombs and to target convoys and such soft targets as water plants and oil pipelines.

All of this has strategic and political consequences. One is that the troubles in Iraq aren't a matter of starry-eyed nation-building gone awry, as some conservative second-guessers now suggest. Most Iraqis really do want to build a free country. But they are opposed by an entrenched, ruthless Baathist network that is akin to the Mafia. These elements can't be bargained with, or lured into elections. They have to be killed. Imagine if the Nazi SS still had sanctuaries in Germany in 1947; no one would be thinking it had to be given a place in a future Adenauer government.

This also suggests that the number of U.S. troops on the ground matters much less than the intelligence our forces can get from Iraqis. We could have half a million troops there and they wouldn't do much good if they didn't know where to find the "former regime elements." The Pentagon strategy of training Iraqis to fight with us is exactly correct, even if the effort began much later than it should have.

The largest lesson concerns the will of the U.S. political class to prevail. Especially now that the U.S. election is over, it'd be nice to think that we could forge a consensus directed at victory, rather than at domestic score-settling. Everyone claims to like that Saddam was deposed, but it becomes clearer every day that his forces aren't yet beaten. Along with the imported terrorists, those forces are trying to make Iraq their Stalingrad, where they can outlast America. If they succeed, it won't matter a whit that John McCain lacked "confidence" in Donald Rumsfeld.

When these columns endorsed the war in Iraq, we didn't sign up for a short or easy war. We signed up to support whatever it takes to win. No war ever goes as planned, and Iraq is no exception. But surely we can all admit that when we see those enemy assassins on our front pages, we are staring at what would be the consequences of U.S. defeat.

 

What . They're not the consequenced of a U.S. defeat, they're the predictable result of a U.S. victory. See below:



But the people who foisted these lies upon us were in fantasyland and told us more lies/delusions:

"There's a lot of money to pay for this. It doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money. We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

Paul Wolfowitz, sworn testimony before Congress, April 2003

"We will, In fact, be greeted as liberators"
Dick Cheney, March 2003

And the list goes on and on and on and on.

 

Just curious... how would they do that? The majority of the Iraqi "troops" that have been trained are unreliable. They have a tendency to haul their buns out of the line of fire if things get a bit rough. If we had preserved the Iraqi Army, and continued to pay them, while getting rid of the obviously "bad actors," perhaps a lot of this descent into chaos could have been avoided. If we had put the numbers of troops into the invasion that had been planned and war-gamed by the region's Central Command for years, in the event that an invasion of Iraq proved necessary, we may have been able to nip the majority of what's going on now in the bud.

We'll never know. Those with the ear of the President told him it could be done "on the cheap," with the kind of invasion and war planning that we've seen unfold. Bush refuses to fire those people and hold them accountable. Cheney would be hard to fire, although he could have been left off of the Bush re-election ticket. He could be told to shut the **** up. Instead, we are told over and over again how much confidence the President has in those advisors. We are told over and over again how it's tough, and it's hard work, but things are going to turn out fine in the end.

It reminds me, all too depressingly, of the way LBJ's Vietnam War played out. I was an adult then. I remember the upbeat press conferences. (LBJ actually had them. Frequently.) I recall the assurance that, with more troops, things are going to turn out fine in the end. I heard that, or what amounted to the same thing, many times. In the end, we lost the war.

Considering the air of unreality wafting through the Bush Administration, I suspect that we will have a similar outcome. When one looks at the location of Iraq, it's natural resources, it's ethnic and religious conflicts, which Saddam, as bad as he was, kept under tight control, one has to realize that the defeat of the United States and the United Kingdom will lead to a disaster for our country. Strategically, one worse than Vietnam.

I hope I am wrong.





Keep D&D Civil!!

 

Deckard;

Sadly I have to agree with most of that.

 

I see two possible strategies that could get us out of Iraq with something approaching victory.

1. We go back to the UN and the rest of the major powers and ask for help again but this time we deliver a mea culpa. We tell them that in hindsight we overestimated the threat and were too eager to invade. We were overly arrogant early but now we recognize the mess we're in and really need your help. Its too bad Powell is leaving because he would probably be the best person to deliver this mea culpa. That alone won't cut it so we sweeten the dealy by offer to turn over almost all of the Iraqi reconstruction and future oil contracts. If this is acceptable we work out a pull out of most US troops to be replaced by a multinational force with a new transitional government administered by the UN until new elections can take place.

This solution would both remove the major antagonism towards the US and free the perception of a future independent Iraq as a puppet state. This soultion is also very unlikely to happen because, this Admin. isn't big on mea culpas or turning over lucrative contracts to other countries. So a more likely solution is:

2. Rebuild the Baathists party, or something very similar, to run the country. Install a secular militarist regime that will rule the country with an iron fist but now be friendly to the US. This would essentially return Iraq's situation to prior to the invasion of Kuwait when Saddam was nominally considered an ally. The building blocks for this are already there. Allawi already shows a penchant for portraying a tough guy image and is mostly secular. He could be built up as the next strongman ruler of Iraq and as a Shiite would have a more secure power base than a Sunni or a Kurd. Of course over the longterm this might prove problematic as Sunnis and other Iraqis chafe under authoritarian rule and would do nothing to improve the US image in the world having replaced one dictator with another but there are plenty of historical precedents for this and given the alternative of continued chaos and indefinate occupation might be the most acceptable solution to the Admin..

 

Anyone think Kerry would be doing a better job? Just curious? I do. That said, I'd try and implement the plan that he had, if possible with GWB as President (may not be possible just given the personnel).

 

Way back in the first days of the invasion I posted my fear that the military intelligence corps woking for Saddam knowing they knew they couldn't face the US military power staight-on would adopt the templet for defeating a super power in Viet Nam; fighting a guerilla war of attrition until the troops lose the support of the people back home.

Unlike Viet Nam however I thought the Iraqi guerillas, without the support of a powerful, contiguous ally, would eventually run out of supplies and manpower needed to sustain the effort. But in these days of pervasive munitions and religious dupes with no reguard for their own lives I may be wrong. The capacity to induce horror trumps morality.

KURTZ:

" I've seen horrors...horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that...But you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face...And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared.
They are truly enemies.

I remember when I was with Special Forces...Seems a thousand centuries ago...We went into a camp to innoculate the children. We left the camp after we had innoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every innoculated arm. There they were in a pile...A pile of little arms. And I remember...I...I...I cried... I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I
wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized...like I was shot...Like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead...And I thought: My God...the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters...These were men...trained cadres...these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love...but they had the strength...the strength...to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral...and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordal instincts to kill without feeling...without passion...without judgement...without judgement. Because it's judgement that defeats us. "