I don't believe anyone is suggesting we slink away like cowards. I know that I as well as others have said that we tore it down, and we should be there to build it up. That doesn't mean we're happy about the way it's being built up, the poor planning that went into it, or the bad intel/lies that lead up to the whole event. And you are wrong to say the only solution that opponents to the war have is to say 'Bring out Troops Home now.' Either you are ignoring or have never heard of the ideas brought up by many of them about diplomacy, working with other nations, the UN, etc. Instead of making the whole combat situation the U.S. against the Baathe party, and the terrorists, it would be the whole world against them. Troops that have been fighting over there, and on edge guarding against attack would have a chance to go back home. The middle class taxpayers which pay for the war would have some their burden lifted. You claim you aren't blindly just following the govt. line, but any time anyone points out distortions, faulty intel, and reasons for the war, as well as alternate ways to deal with the situation, you immediately accuse them of whining, being candy asses, and whatever else little putdowns you use a lame attempt to demean their position. The fact is that while you are busy using these name calling attacks other people actually are proposing solutions, and finding fault with the poor planning that went into this whole Iraq affair. I'm happy that people are finding fault with it, because that means next time it might be planned better, leadership will take the advice of those who disagree more seriously, etc. The pointing out of mistakes only makes us better, not worse.
I think the two biggest questions raised in the Rumsfeld memo are the following points: (1) <I>Today we lack the metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?</I> This is an extremely important point by Rumsfeld. Its funny to see people say that we're clearly winning when we have no idea if there are more terrorists today than a month ago. (2) <I>Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.</I> Its a little disturbing that he doesn't feel we've put much effort into a long-range plan, contrary to what we keep hearing from the President and such.
The interesting thing about the two questions is that these guys deliberately didn't give a danm about these questions. They just wanted to shoots off some of their toys, do some killing, and make some quick profits. They wanted to show, as Alabama or Treeman would say, that they weren't limp dicked or homoerotic, even though they were chickenhawks. The CIA, the State Deparment, our allies and everyone else who wasn't a ditto head knew that the Iraq war would create more terrorists than it killed. Eveyone knew that making the whole world hate us was not the way to really win the war on terrorism. Don't let Rumsfeld off for trying to wiggle out of his deliberate decision to not consider these questions, when the whole world demanded that he do so.
Glynch, They ALREADY hate us! They hated us before we even thought of trying to go into Iraq. Trying to sink the Cole, blowing up our African embassies and Khobar Towers, trying to blow up the Trade Centers and finally ramming planes into the Twin Towers was not an act of love. But one thing that is positive that terrorists are coming into Iraq to fight us, so I guess it is better that we fight them there rather than here.
They ALREADY hate us! Bama, you are right about Muslim terrorists. I'm really talking about the 99.99999% of the rest of the world, whose help or at least good will is helpful in going after those terrorists. I am really talking about how the Iraq war and our saber rattling has caused our European allies to hate us and all of Latin America and hatred by the Arab masses and leaders who were not Muslim terrorists. By all accounts, Iran, Pakistan and Syria have stopped any real cooperation with us on the matter of these terrorists. The simplistic military approach has not had hardly any success in finding Bin Laden.
Iraq is becoming a more dangerous place by the day. The US must find a way to receive some serious international assistance to finish this mission or the situation is only going to get worse.
What we're hearing from the Administration and those that follow the party line is that: 1. Things in Iraq are going well... we're opening schools, getting the electricity turned on, etc. 2. The terrorists are flocking to Iraq so we can fight them there instead of in our cities. This seems a bit incongruous, no? Now, I understand that some will say the problems are only in a few sectors and only come from a small group of bad people. But that does not seem to be the case and it looks like the more we follow the current policy (whatever that is), more bad sectors and bad groups will appear. This column in the Washington Post yesterday is one of the more interesting pieces I've read on Iraq. I don't agree with all of this, but I think the bolded sections are particularly illuminating and shows how screwed we really are... _______________ Winning Badly By Richard Hart Sinnreich Monday, October 27, 2003; Page A19 As our casualties continue to mount, America's leaders could do themselves and us a favor by calling things by their right names. What's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan today is not nation-building. It's not postwar reconstruction. It's not pacification. It's war. It's not war just because both nations are crawling with troops. So are others. Nor is it war just because people continue to die violently. That happens every day in every city in the world. Nor is it war just because some of the victims wear uniforms. That too is not uncommon even in peacetime. It's war because our undefeated enemies say it is and behave accordingly. In that stubborn resistance lies a fundamental truth that seems too often to have eluded American political leaders since World War II: It's not the winner who typically decides when victory in a war has been achieved. It's the loser. It's a truth that the late Vermont senator George Aiken inadvertently captured in October 1966 when he proposed that the United States simply declare victory in Vietnam and withdraw. "The credibility of such a unilateral declaration," he insisted with peculiar logic, "can only be successfully challenged by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. " Logical or not, he surely was prescient. In 1972, we more or less followed his advice. Three years later, the challenge he so blithely dismissed materialized and South Vietnam collapsed. It would have been truly heroic self-delusion to call that result victory. Sometimes fiction conveys reality more plainly than fact. In "Gone for Soldiers," his best-selling sketch of the Mexican War, novelist Jeff Shaara describes an imaginary but illuminating conversation between the U.S. commander in chief, Gen. Winfield Scott, and his favorite subordinate, Capt. Robert E. Lee. Scott has ordered an assault on the formidable fortress of Chapultepec guarding the approaches to Mexico City. Knowing the attack will be costly, Lee disapproves, convinced the city can be taken more quickly and less expensively by skirting the fortress. Scott takes a few moments to educate his protege: "The worst consequence of fighting a war is not if you lose," he tells Lee. "The worst thing you can do is win badly. The cause, the martyrs, will come back to life, and before you know it, there is another war. . . . Putting our flag in their city square may give President Polk a case of the giggles but it doesn't mean the war is over. We could be here for years, keeping the guerrillas away. We have to defeat Chapultepec. It is the only defeat they will accept." Substitute Bush for Polk and the Sunni Triangle, or Pakistan's northwest frontier, for Chapultepec, and the comment wouldn't be incongruous today. The key word is "accept." Very few wars have ended in the loser's annihilation. Most end instead with his acceptance of defeat, aware that no amount of courage, stamina or self-sacrifice can reverse the outcome. The challenge is to bring that condition about as quickly and inexpensively as possible. But history repeatedly has demonstrated that fighting a war quickly and cheaply doesn't guarantee winning it quickly and cheaply. Indeed, the two more often than not tend to be mutually exclusive. It was for that reason above all that Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz was right to insist that the most vital judgment before going to war is understanding the kind of war on which one is embarking. In Iraq and Afghanistan, for better or worse, that question now is moot. Having dealt ourselves the cards in our hand, we have little choice but to play them. In Iraq, that may eventually produce something resembling victory, although at a final cost we can't yet compute. In Afghanistan, it may depend more on Pakistan than on us, unless we are willing to invest a good deal more military power than we have so far. But the more pertinent question is what we will take away from these two exercises about the business of fighting wars. Putting aside the question of whether invading Iraq was necessary, both wars might have been fought quite differently from the way they were, in a way that took the loser's acceptance less for granted and therefore was considerably more ruthless about achieving it. Fighting that way certainly would have exacted a stiffer price up front, from us and from those we invaded. It is at least possible, though, that the price might still have been cheaper than the one we could end up paying in the long run. Soldiers know that, and it is in large part that knowledge that feeds their much-criticized preference for employing overwhelming force from the outset. The motivation is not simply to avoid defeat. It is also to avoid what Shaara's Scott called "winning badly." For their part, those who object to overwhelming force routinely fail to connect its price to producing the acceptance of defeat that alone can deter what may be even greater costs, or worse, still another war. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we are witnessing the latest object lesson in the consequences of that false military economy. The question is whether, next time around, we'll remember it.
New Iraq ' well on way to becoming Islamic state' By David Rennie in Washington 29 October 2003: (The Daily Telegraph) THE United States is failing in its mission to create a secular, overtly pro-Western Iraq, a leading adviser to the American administrator Paul Bremer said yesterday. Instead, the new, democratic Iraq appears bound to be an Islamic state - with an official role for Islam, and Islamic law enshrined in its constitution. That prospect is triggering alarm and opposition from the White House and the Pentagon, Noah Feldman, a leading American expert in Islamic law, told The Daily Telegraph. Dr Feldman served as senior constitutional adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, working closely with Mr Bremer. Returning from Baghdad this summer, the New York University law professor now works as an unpaid adviser to the CPA, to the White House, and to different factions in the Iraqi Governing Council. "The end constitutional product is very likely to make many people in the US government unhappy. It's not going to look the way people imagined it looking," said Dr Feldman. "Any democratically elected Iraqi government is unlikely to be secular, and unlikely to be pro-Israel. And frankly, moderately unlikely to be pro-American." While these predictions are spreading alarm inside the administration, Dr Feldman advocates dealing with Islamic democrats. He argues that Islamic parties will rise anyway, and are most dangerous when forced underground by secular autocrats. Such views led Pentagon officials to accuse Dr Feldman of being "soft on Islam". "When I tell them these things [Islam and Islamic law] are going to be in the constitution, people are very concerned about it. They want to know what can be done to avoid these things. There's still a hope that the country will be as secular as possible. "But frankly nothing in Iraq is going to look the way people imagined. Maybe if people had taken that on board, they might have felt differently about the plan for an invasion." The hawkish idealists who pushed hardest for regime change in Iraq saw the fall of Baghdad as the first step towards remaking the Middle East. In their vision, Iraq would rise up as a democratic, secular, free market capitalist beacon to its neighbours - guided, at least initially, by such exiled leaders as Ahmad Chalabi, a secularist and Pentagon favourite. In their plan, the country was to be turned into a federation of 18 or so provinces, preventing such powerful ethnic factions as the Kurds from setting up autonomous fiefdoms that might split the country apart and threaten the stability of an already volatile neighbourhood. Yet the Kurds have made it plain that they expect to emerge with an autonomous Kurdish region, and will not support any constitution that would split their territory into mini-provinces, Dr Feldman reported. Though US allies, the Kurds retain 40,000 men under arms, and have declined US invitations to disband such militias. Pentagon officials sent Dr Feldman to Baghdad for his knowledge of Islamic law. In many ways he was an unlikely candidate: he is a Democrat, Jewish and still only 32. One senior administration official declared before the war that the first foreign policy of a democratic Iraq would be to recognise Israel. "I don't know what he was smoking when he said that," said Dr Feldman. He argued that Iraqi-Israeli relations were off the radar, as Washington struggled simply to keep Iraq from slipping into disaster.
The problem is the entire Muslim world has never, ever liked us. Just read the comments of that assclown Malaysian PM who says that we are ruled by a Zionist/Trilateral conspiracy that will attempt to wipe out Islam and enslave everyone to the Jews. Unfortunately, this type of lunacy is ramapant amongst Muslims. It is is a clash between civilizations and if we don't win this clash, we will all be avoiding pork, wiping our asses with our left hands, praying to the demonic, hateful deity known as Allah three times a day and going on fun pilgrimages to Mecca where tramplings, stonings and hand cuttings are all part of the Branson of Islam.
Well, folks in the State Department have been saying this since before the war. The most amazing thing in the article is that some of the Pentagon types accuse Feldman of being "soft on Islam." Is that really the mentality directing our occupation of an Islamic country?
So my question is... If the US doesn't like the constitution Iraq comes up with, will the US accept it? Or are we going to say "uh...no...You need to rewrite that"?
Yes, because all the loss of blood and treasure would be for nought. In no way should we allow them to establish yet another backward, ignorant, anti-U.S., back to the 14th century Islamic state.
But if it's a democratically consented constitution by the Iraqi people shouldn't we accept it even if the US doesn’t agree with it?
Not if it leads to an Islamic state. In that case, we can not allow it. So freedom for the people of Iraq <I>isn't</I> the primary focus after all... Interesting.
Freedom for the people of Iraq was never the primary focus. Only those who aren't wearing blinders can see this.
