Petraeus: The Surge is Working, Premature Pull-Out Would Be Devastating

Our objective is not to make the US safer.
The Republicans say that we are there defending democracy or establishing it or some other rhetoric.
The Democrats want us to get out with as little damage as possible as if there is some kind of polyanna way of getting out of this mess. The Dems do not have a solution nor will they provide one because there isn't a pleasant option available to us at this point.

Both parties were patriotically behind this invasion.

This country is not safe BECAUSE of those two parties. The sooner we realize this the better.

Vote for Ron Paul, he is not a politician, he is a constitutional statesman.
In my own distorted opinion.

 

What are those Objectives? Are they like BenchMarks?
How many of the 18 have they Acheived again?

Rocket River

 

I think it's in our strategist self-interest to see things turn out in Iraq - there's no debating that. So I don't see how you can claim the trust has been broken.

A positive outcome in Iraq is huge for us. Now, you can debate how feasible that out come may be, but the current situation is definitely important to the protection of the United States and our longer term prosperity.

 

Originally Posted by FranchiseBlade
The guy is in charge of military operations of all of Iraq but can't say if those operations make the U.S. safer or not?

Is that really what you think makes a good commander?

I thought that was significant. Petreus dodged the question the first time it was asked, but to maintain some cred within the armed forces he had to say he did not know whether it would make us safer, rather than "yes" it will.

It so reminds me of Vietnam, since that now that it is realized by almost all except possibly Bush that there is little to be gained, the war is being prolonged for GOP political reasons.

An incredible mess and Bush is trying to run out the clock and leave the mess for the next administration.

 

I certainly believe that seeing things turn our in Iraq depends on us getting out, not staying. So I think it was possible for the general to answer the question if he really wanted to.

 

I'm sorry, but why should we expect a general to not cow-tow to the sitting "command in chief"?

Anyone who thought Patraeus's evaluation would be extremely damaging to the President is deluding himself. His job is to implement the Bush administration's orders as effectively as he can. Of course he's not going to say that the orders (stay in Iraq, keep the troop levels up) is the wrong move. It's not his job to seriously question a higher authority, if he cares at all about his military career.

 

I disagree - he could have given a speculative answer but, if I were him before a Senate committee under oath, I too would have said - hell if I know - which, as before, operates as a pretty strong indictment of the President and his general aimlessness.

 

But the answer call for speculation to begin with. I don't see why he couldn't have given a speculative answer that couldn't really end up giving grounds for later legal actions against him.

 

this war is never going to end (ill explain my reasoning...)! morale among the troops will be crushed if tours are extended... the military is not going to be able to recruit enough people to sustain current levels. also current troops are opting not to re-up (i wouldnt blame them)... therefore, there may be a draft in the future.

this war will never end because...

1. as soon as we leave, kurds will announce independence. turkish and iranian kurds will follow suit. turkey and iran will probably begin a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

2. ****te offensive against sunnis will go large scale.

3. saudi arabia will intercede on sunni behalf (which they already said they would do if the US left).

4. iran will shift from a passive to an active role.

5. this will disrupt world oil supplies. getting china involved (probably side with saudi arabia bc of oil).

6. meanwhile russia's wealth and influence will continue to grow (oil and arms). russia has already sold a billion dollar air defense system to iran/syria. theyll have vested interest in keeping iran viable so that theyll be able to collect their money from arms sales.

7. eventually the US would have to return through the UN or NATO.

8. and on and on and on... WW3? i hope not.


as much as id like to see the US withdraw, i dont think its in the best interest to leave iraq. we may have a reduced presence but we can never fully withdraw now.

bush really jacked this one up! when we finally look back at history, i think bush will be right there with herbert hoover (great depression) and richard nixon (vietnam, watergate).

 

27. i dont want to go to iraq. im sure the troops dont want to be in iraq. but i dont think we can never fully withdraw from iraq (reasons stated in previous post in response to NewYorker)...

if the politicians who are in charge had their sons, daughters, nephews, neices, brothers, sisters, grandchildren in iraq, i think theyd start to listening to the voice of reason and theyd think longer and harder about what needs to be done.

bush, your kids are on convoy duty...
rumsfeld, your kids are pulling patrol...
cheney, your kids are being sent to check out rumors of insurgent activity...
rice, your kids (although i dont think she has kids...) lost their legs, theyll never walk again...
guliani, your kids got blown up by an ied, theyre in a coma, dont know if theyll ever wake up...
romney, your kids died, your grandkids will grow up w/o their parents...

 

It's not his job to assess whether or not remaining there will make it more likely to generate a terrorist attack. That's not the militaries domain, that should be a question to the head of the CIA and the State department.

And you can't say that getting out will make us safer. That's speculative because no one knows what on earth will happen. If Iraq degenerates into a lawless land and becomes afganistan, i'd say you'd have to be blind to history to think that would make us safer.

Haven't the Taliban taught us anything about what happens when you just abandon a people to a civil war?

 

I'm not sure I'd extrapolate all of that, but certainly there is a significant RISK that leaving will result in destablization of the region and create an even larger mess.

We have to be very intelligent how we proceed from this point on. As much as we'd all like to call it quits, bring the troops home, and forget about this miserable war - we can't afford to do that.

This is a quagmire - but one with far greater reprecrusions than vietnam. We need to leave iraq in a state that it won't fall into mass anarchy and draw other nations or extremist elements into the country.

The last thing the world needs is an all out $hite - Sunni war.

Why Can't I write ****e??? Maybe I should use Shia?

 

Because your spelling of the word Shi'ite has two 't's instead of two 'i's (I am not saying your spelling is wrong, I have seen it both ways).
Anyway because of the way you spell it the first four letters spell a synonym for feces which gets censored by the BBS software. If you use the spelling that I did, you won't run into those problems.

 

Thanks for the response. Trust me... you don't want any part of a draft. You say that if the kids of all these politicians, etc., were being drafted to fight in the war, or any war, that they would "listen to the voice of reason." Well, I'll let you in on a little secret. When we had a draft, if didn't make a god damn bit of difference. We still got into incredibly stupid, reckless wars. Vietnam, until Bush's Iraq, was the penultimate example. You are looking at it from a remove. If you were subject to the draft, or Your kids were in danger of being drafted, and it was for some cocked up, idiotic mess like Iraq or Vietnam, you would look at the draft in a far different light. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference to the average politician. They are perfectly capable of ****ing things up royally, anyway.

You want a million people in the streets, raising hell? Bring on the draft. I'll pass.


D&D. Impeach the Living Embodiment of the Peter Principal.

 

If the commander-in-chief is claiming to listen to the commanders on the ground about having more or fewer troops, then it is his job to determine that.

I agree that saying that getting out is speculative, just like it is speculative to say that staying in will help the situation in Iraq.

You are misinterpreting history. History shows that the main terrorists groups in IRaq weren't there when we weren't there. The most current documentation from within that group shows that they hope we stay in Iraq... the longer the better.

The Taliban coming to power wasn't a result of us abandoning a people to a civil war.

The situation in Afghanistan prior to the Taliban's rise, and the situation in Iraq currently aren't the same at all. You are the one who is misapplying history.

 

As some define it, looks like George Will is now a "liberal". Pretty soon, everyone will be "liberal" except the Bush-ites. The title of this article is great.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/10/AR2007091002065.html?sub=AR

A War Still Seeking a Mission

By George F. Will
Tuesday, September 11, 2007; A17

Before Gen. David Petraeus's report, and to give it a context of optimism, the president visited Iraq's Anbar province to underscore the success of the surge in making some hitherto anarchic areas less so. More significant, however, was that the president did not visit Baghdad. This underscored the fact that the surge has failed, as measured by the president's and Petraeus's standards of success.

Those who today stridently insist that the surge has succeeded also say they are especially supportive of the president, Petraeus and the military generally. But at the beginning of the surge, both Petraeus and the president defined success in a way that took the achievement of success out of America's hands.

The purpose of the surge, they said, is to buy time -- "breathing space," the president says -- for Iraqi political reconciliation. Because progress toward that has been negligible, there is no satisfactory answer to this question: What is the U.S. military mission in Iraq?

Many of those who insist that the surge is a harbinger of U.S. victory in Iraq are making the same mistake they made in 1991 when they urged an advance on Baghdad, and in 2003 when they underestimated the challenge of building democracy there. The mistake is exaggerating the relevance of U.S. military power to achieve political progress in a society riven by ethnic and sectarian hatreds. America's military leaders, who are professional realists, do not make this mistake.

The progress that Petraeus reports in improving security in portions of Iraq is real. It might, however, have two sinister aspects.

First, measuring sectarian violence is problematic: The Post reports that a body with a bullet hole in the front of the skull is considered a victim of criminality; a hole in the back of the skull is evidence of sectarian violence. But even if violence is declining, that might be partly because violent sectarian cleansing has separated Sunni and Shiite communities. This homogenization of hostile factions -- trained and armed by U.S. forces -- may bear poisonous fruit in a full-blown civil war.

Second, brutalities by al-Qaeda in Iraq have indeed provoked some Sunni leaders to collaborate with U.S. forces. But these alliances of convenience might be inconvenient when Shiites again become the Sunnis' principal enemy.

Congressional Democrats should accept Petraeus's report as a reason to declare a victory, one that might make this fact somewhat palatable: Substantial numbers of U.S. forces will be in Iraq when the next president is inaugurated. The Democrats' "victory" -- a chimera but a useful one -- is that Petraeus indicates there soon can be a small reduction of U.S. forces.

To declare this a substantial victory won by them requires Democrats to do two things. They must make a mountain out of a molehill (Petraeus suggests withdrawal of only a few thousand troops). And they must spuriously claim credit for the mountain. Actually, senior military officers have been saying that a large drawdown is inevitable, given the toll taken on the forces by the tempo of operations for more than four years.

But Democrats cannot advertise a small withdrawal as a victory without further infuriating their party's base, the source of energy and money. The base is incandescent because there are more troops in Iraq today than there were on Election Day 2006, when Democratic activists and donors thought, not without reason, that congressional Democrats acquired the power to end U.S. involvement in Iraq.

A democracy, wrote the diplomat and scholar George Kennan, "fights for the very reason that it was forced to go to war. It fights to punish the power that was rash enough and hostile enough to provoke it -- to teach that power a lesson it will not forget, to prevent the thing from happening again. Such a war must be carried to the bitter end." Which is why "unconditional surrender" was a natural U.S. goal in World War II and why Americans were so uncomfortable with three "wars of choice" since then -- in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.

What "forced" America to go to war in 2003 -- the "gathering danger" of weapons of mass destruction -- was fictitious. That is one reason this war will not be fought, at least not by Americans, to the bitter end. The end of the war will, however, be bitter for Americans, partly because the president's decision to visit Iraq without visiting its capital confirmed the flimsiness of the fallback rationale for the war -- the creation of a unified, pluralist Iraq.

After more than four years of war, two questions persist: Is there an Iraq? Are there Iraqis?

georgewill@washpost.com

 

This point I agree that it isn't Petraus' job to determine if the surge is making overall US security better. He is the commander of the forces in Iraq and while he might speculate on the overall impact his role is limited and he was there to testify on that role.

It is speculative though to say that having us stay there indefinately will make us safer. While history might show bad things happen when you leave a country lawless it also shows that bad things happen to a country that is occupying a hostile territory. Consider terrorist attacks on Russia by Chechens and IRA attacks on England.

 

To be fair it is a bit easier to attack Northern Ireland (or even England) from Ireland and Russia from Chechnya than it is to attack the United States from Iraq. Our occupation hardly exposes us to the same dangers those countries face(d).

 

But staying in Iraq has some precedence in terms of risk to the homeland in the form of terrorist attack. Afganistan was left to rot in civil war and that allowed groups like Al Qaeda to take refuge under the extremist Taliban.

Who knows who will take refuge in a lawless Iraq under guys like Al Sadr. Iran loves to insert groups like Hezbelloh in places to not only wreak havoc on the country they are in, but in neighboring nations as well.

Which poision do you pick - to stay or go? Certainly there is a price to pay either way, or it woudl be an easy choice. But there's one thing to consider. The situation is no longer deteriorating, but actually has been showing modest improvement. The drain on our country is in the blood of our soldiers and in dollars primarily - not to be taken lightly for sure.

But we need to think about leaving in a way that MINIMIZES the risk of creating a dangerous land that can cause wider instability and threats to the homeland or the homeland's interests. Now, one report says that the Iraqi army is about a year away. Does it not make sense to work to continue progress for a year and then leave?

THis way we try to minimize both risks. And that seems to me to be the wisest course of action now.

 

But the terrorists are there now. And the Taliban did gain power once the Soviets left afganistan to fight a civil war on it's own.

Look at the middle east, every country is gov't by tyrannical regime that heavily suppresses freedom. Perhaps this is the only way to rule and prevent civil war that region - and why you can't have a democracy or worse, a power vacumm.

Leave Iraq to it's own devices, and Shiites slaughter Sunnis, and Sunnis will salughter Shiites. Do you think that won't happen? Do you think Sunni nations and Shia nations will stand by and watch quietly? Do you think that environment won't foster groups like Al Qaeda or Hezbelloh to take advantage and establish a base of operation?

Lawlessness is not a good thing.