U.S. Army Says It Intends to 'Kill or Capture' Sadr BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military intends to kill or capture rebel Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr who launched an uprising this month with his militiamen clashing with coalition soldiers in several towns and cities. "The mission of U.S. forces is to kill or capture Moqtada al-Sadr," Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq (news - web sites), said in a video conference from Baghdad with correspondents in the United States. ------------- There are about a thousand more radical clerics that are ready to take his place... do you think we can kill/capture them all?
We love to do things which will get more of our troops killed just to show our resolve. I'm sure this will go over well when it occurs. Make no bones about it...the Army doesn't do jack without the politicians calling the shots. Just another mistake in a long list of mistakes. If we lose 100 troops in subsequent called-for jihad from Sadr followers, then is it worth it? Or, is it worth it to those soldiers' families?
Yes, the guy who causes uprising's that kill American soldiers should not be killed, but just be given a slap on the wrist. That will show him.
Of course none of this would be necessary at all if we had addressed his concerns before now. Instead, we waited for him to become disgruntled and have now decided to take him out using any means necessary. Sounds like our domestic policy.
Capturing or killing Sadr will create a reaction which will create a corresponding reaction and so on. Face it folks, we're screwed in Iraq. Does anyone really think the whole idea of giving sovreignty to Iraq (who in Iraq?) on June 30 is going to turn out well?
Come on, General, Bremmer, Bush, Karl Rove etc., Saying "get it on"; "wit us or agin us" etc. makes you look tall in the saddle; plays to the dittoheads and all, but use your heads. Sadr is the head of a movement of approximately 10% of the Shiite population of 60% of 26 million Iraqis that is about 1.5 million followers. Sadr is not one man. Grandstanding just won't cut it. IMHO, at best this action will succeed in driving a few thousand or more of his followers into guerilla cells if you crush him now. Of course, I guess if the Bush Admin feels all is possibly lost and they don't mind the killing perhaps of 10's of thousands, Sadam or Stalin style, they can suppress the public expression of the movement for a while. Perhaps until after November 2004. Perhaps the Bush Admin feels that is good enough. Can you imagine holding Sadr in a prison in Iraq? That would really cool things down. lol This looks like a temper tantrum by the Bush guys. Maybe if Bush would just read a newspaper occasionally he could be a little more nuanced. Robert Fiske has an interesting article about how our tactics and even names given them are directly from the current Israeli playbook. ************** ....In besieging cities - when they were taking casualties or the number of civilians killed was becoming too shameful to sustain - the Israeli army would call a "unilateral suspension of offensive operations". They did this 11 times after they surrounded Beirut in 1982. And yesterday, the American army declared a "unilateral suspension of offensive operations" around Fallujah. link
The killing or capturing of Sadr will stop any opposition by Shiites the same way the capturing of Saddam stopped opposition by Sunnis.
It doesn't seem very smart to telegraph to your enemy exactly what your intentions are in this type of situation. It would have been far better, in my opinion, to have kept this guy and his followers guessing as to just what our intentions are.
I wish the Bushies could read and comprehend. This guy is telling them exactly what they could do... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4711931/ Our Last Real Chance The way forward: The administration has to admit its mistakes and try to repair the damage. Here's how By Fareed Zakaria NewsweekApril 19 issue - In early June 1920, Gertrude Bell, the extraordinary woman who helped run Iraq for Britain, wrote a letter to her father on some "violent agitation" against British rule: "[The extremists] have adopted a line difficult in itself to combat, the union of the Shi'ah and Sunni, the unity of Islam. And they are running it for all it's worth ... There's a lot of semi-religious semi-political preaching ... and the underlying thought is out with the infidel. My belief is that the weightier people are against it—I know some of them are bitterly disgusted—but it's very difficult to stand out against the Islamic cry and the longer it goes on the more difficult it gets." In fact, the "agitation" quickly turned into a mass (mostly Shia) revolt. British forces were able to crush it over three long months, but only after killing almost 10,000 Iraqis, suffering about 500 deaths themselves and spending the then exorbitant sum of 50 million pounds. After the 1920 revolt, the British fundamentally reoriented their strategy in Iraq. They abandoned plans for ambitious nation-building and instead sought a way to transfer power quickly to trustworthy elites. There are many differences between Britain's experience in Iraq and America's current course. But there is a distinct danger that what we are witnessing in Iraq could turn the national mood against the United States. Recent polls suggest that Iraqis remain tolerant of, though not happy with, American forces in their country. But that support is clearly waning. Images of America's massive operations in Fallujah have generated anti-American sentiment across Iraq. The United States could be entering a ruinous cycle. As attacks on its troops grow, it uses full-blown military might, which produces anti-Americanism, which helps insurgents. When pro-American members of the Governing Council resign in protest, it must be that they sense a shift in the public mood. . . .
The troubling thing here is that the Bush response to this is to focus on an individual... as if killing Sadr will turn the tide, as if capturing Saddam will stop the violence, as if killing OBL will prevent Al-Q from launching another attack. This administration is incapable of thinking strategically... tactics without a strong strategy create a huge mess.
It's a Catch-22. You can't not go after him after what he's been inciting, but you risk pissing off even more people if you capture and/or kill him. I think you have to do that latter, honestly. I don't think there are that many Iraqis on the fence of being anti or pro-American for this to turn the tide.
Agreed, but there are some things to try. One could endorse the lead Shiite Cleric that had called for early direct elections. Make him more powerful and high profile. Then Sadr fades. After he's faded arrest him, and people would hardly even notice. Go after everyone else but him. Pretend he barely exists give him less publicity, and again his following will not increase. Go after every other target first. That would take a long time, and Sadr's fame might fade enough to go after him later and not have it make that much of a splash.
These are our choices... read 'em and weep... (From the Newshour last Friday... Mearsheimer runs a program on international security policy at the University of Chicago.) _____________ JIM LEHRER: Mr. Mearsheimer, in general terms, is this going to work? JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No, the United States is basically in a situation where it's damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. If we get tough on the Iraqis as we're doing now, tough on the insurgents, it's likely to backfire on us. What it's going to do, is it's going to enrage more of the population and make them more sympathetic to the [insurgents]. And even if we shut this down in the short-term, we still have the long-term problem that we have no political institution inside Iraq that we can turn power over to on July 1. We also suffer greatly from the fact that the Iraqi security forces that we have been building up over the past year are effectively melting away and many of those forces are joining insurgents. It's very hard to see how getting tough with the Iraqis is going to solve the problem. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to me that it is going to work if we back off either because then we'll show weakness and the Iraqi people will tend to bandwagon with the insurgents. The insurgents will grow stronger. So we're in a hopeless situation. Either way we turn we lose. JIM LEHRER: But a hopeless situation still has... somebody's got to do something. So somewhere in there, do you see a combination of toughness and a soft approach working at all? JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I don't think you can combine the two. I think you have to either be tough, you have to increase the number of forces there and get tough, or you have to keep force levels regards low and back off. Those are the two broad choices. And the problem that you face is no matter which one you do, you lose. It's just a matter of choosing your poisons here.
They are determined to fight us from the beginning no matter what we would have done then or what we will do in the future. It's like the "peace" process in Israel. The Palestinians claim they want peace, but all they want to do is claim the land that is not theirs. When the Israeli government calls for a ceasefire, the militant Palestinians go bombing folks again. It'll never be peaceful over there. The same is going on in Iraq. All the Iraqis wanted Saddam gone, but when he is, they want to kill someone else, especially westerners. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I'd rather see Sadr killed by his own people than to see him go free and cause turmoil. He'll never stop. Once those blood thirsty heathenistic militants get started, it takes a strong party within to quell them. If the US pulled out now, the finger would get pointed at the current administration and leftist idiots would say, "But look what you did to Iraq! You left those poor people in civil war!" If we stay there, the same morons say "Look what you are doing in Iraq! You are letting Americans die over there!" You cannot please people who just don't want to be pleased. The bottom line is that the blood of platoons and companies will be on the hands of Sadr if he is left to incite radical Shiites. If Americans cannot kill Americans without being punished, then why in the hell should some worthless war monger kill them in the name of their god?
Addressed his concerns? This guy has said from the get-go he wants to kill American troops, hithero, he is the enemy. He should be found, tortured unmercifully and put on public display unless you have a problem with us killing the enemy in a WAR.
I don't think the Administration has a coherent war strategy for Iraq and I think we are seeing further interference from the Administration's Wolfowitz/Cheney/Rumsfeld/etc. clique on how we are prosecuting this war, with a dose of Rove's influence on how things will look domestically in the runup to the election. And that's the very group that Bush should boot out the door and won't. I heard Bush refer to the insurgents as "thugs and criminals" today, like they were a small group of bandits causing problems and as if we aren't fighting a full-blown insurgency. If we are in a war, bama, which we certainly are, doesn't it make more sense to not tell the enemy what you're going to do with a top religious figure? And that's what this guy is, whether we think he's a worthless, radical piece-of-**** or not. All that does is inflame popular feeling among the Iraqi masses for a guy who had been on the margins of the Iraqi power structure. Now we have created either a hero or a martyr out of this fellow, depending on how this plays out. And thousands of Iraqi's, those "thugs and criminals", will see this as yet another reason to fight an occupation perceived as imposed upon them by the United States. Bush was an idiot to get us into a war in Iraq which was unnecessary and a distraction from what should have been our goal... the complete and utter destruction of AQ and it's leaders. Iraq could and should have waited. The vast majority of liberals, large numbers of independents and many Republicans don't think that Saddam remaining in power was a desirable thing, but that there was no reason to go after him at the time Bush chose to and with the inept diplomacy that preceded it and has characterized the entire foreign policy of the Administration. I can't help but wonder, why the fixation on attempting to pummel anyone who disagrees with the Administration on this subject? It seems to me that some of you should be Bush's most ardent critics. He has been reckless with the use of the finest military in the world. Those men and women in the Service, their families, and the American people deserved and deserve better.
