posted
Hmmm...the real place where we blew it in GW1 was in letting/forcing Shwartzkopf(sp?) to negotiate terms of cease fire with a whole team or Iraqi negotiators... They asked for (and recieved!) permission to keep their helicopter gunships (bought from the Russians in their "going out of world domination" sale) to "defend themselves against their neighbors" (who quite rightly hated saddam for their own reasons).
Thus the Kurds were wiped out by said helicopters- some US listening posts along the border and satelite photos caught the whole sorry affair play-by-play and (because we signed that cease fire in good faith and everyone here was happy the war was over and relativly bloodless) did nothing.
Blame Bush version 1.0 for that one- he was busy planning his triumphant re-election campaign by then.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Ride untill we find them: Kill them all. shiney penny for whoever gets that ,movie quote)
I think the option would be to do everythig possible to get Iraq's new government up and with something like a stable meeting schedule- passing their own laws, voted on by their own citizens without US interference or any US agenda for "country-building" being evident.
Then, set attainable goals to get the vast majority of US troops out of Iraq (there is going to be at least some US military presence there for a looong time). While it's a fantasy, it would be nice to have the Iraqi people vote to have the US forces leave, then have their elected officials make the call fot US military presence scaled back to a bare minimum. That would give the adverage Iraqi citizen a much needed say in his own future (along with some re-establishment of national pride at "kicking us out") and would both encourage Iraq to stand on it's own while letting the US out of any potential "they abandoned us" blame game of future generations if things go back to dictatorship and religous oppression.
But I dream: private intrests wanting the US to stay have far more say than the majority of people wanting us out.
Besides, how can we possibly tell Iraq how to govern when so many in our government are obviously retarded .
Elsewhere, Israel is tired of playing nice- and after I was certain that peace was just around the corner, too.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Pizza? Only if we make it kosher, so both sides can eat it...extra cheese is probably okay.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
There's no movie quote though...I've never seen "Tombstone" (the Kevin Coster or Kurt Russel movie?). What shouts quote-ish?
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Jason Abbadon: Ride untill we find them: Kill them all. shiney penny for whoever gets that ,movie quote)
What do you mean there's no movie quote.
Anyway, there was something similar in Tombstone.
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Oh, that! That's from The 13th Warrior Bandaras' character asks "Do we have anything resembling a plan?". It's one of my favorite movies.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
By Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, September 11, 2006; Page A01
The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents.
The officials described Col. Pete Devlin's classified assessment of the dire state of Anbar as the first time that a senior U.S. military officer has filed so negative a report from Iraq.
One Army officer summarized it as arguing that in Anbar province, "We haven't been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically -- and that's where wars are won and lost."
The "very pessimistic" statement, as one Marine officer called it, was dated Aug. 16 and sent to Washington shortly after that, and has been discussed across the Pentagon and elsewhere in national security circles. "I don't know if it is a shock wave, but it's made people uncomfortable," said a Defense Department official who has read the report. Like others interviewed about the report, he spoke on the condition that he not be identified by name because of the document's sensitivity.
Devlin reports that there are no functioning Iraqi government institutions in Anbar, leaving a vacuum that has been filled by the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has become the province's most significant political force, said the Army officer, who has read the report. Another person familiar with the report said it describes Anbar as beyond repair; a third said it concludes that the United States has lost in Anbar.
Devlin offers a series of reasons for the situation, including a lack of U.S. and Iraqi troops, a problem that has dogged commanders since the fall of Baghdad more than three years ago, said people who have read it. These people said he reported that not only are military operations facing a stalemate, unable to extend and sustain security beyond the perimeters of their bases, but also local governments in the province have collapsed and the weak central government has almost no presence.
Those conclusions are striking because, even after four years of fighting an unexpectedly difficult war in Iraq, the U.S. military has tended to maintain an optimistic view: that its mission is difficult, but that progress is being made. Although CIA station chiefs in Baghdad have filed negative classified reports over the past several years, military intelligence officials have consistently been more positive, both in public statements and in internal reports.
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Just so you can see the size of Anbar Province, here is the graphic the Post included with the story.
You might be asking yourself how, the American military with all the might it possess is not doing so well in the post-initial conflict stage of the invasion of Iraq. We might find the answer in this story I found posted a Crooks and Liars:
Long before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld forbade military strategists to develop plans for securing a postwar Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said.
Brig. Gen. Mark E. Scheid told the Newport News Daily Press in an interview published yesterday that Rumsfeld had said "he would fire the next person" who talked about the need for a postwar plan.
Scheid was a colonel with the U.S. Central Command, the unit that oversees military operations in the Middle East, in late 2001 when Rumsfeld "told us to get ready for Iraq."
"The secretary of defense continued to push on us . . . that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," Scheid said. "We won't stay."
Planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4" -- plans that covered post-invasion operations such as security, stability and reconstruction, said Scheid, who is retiring in about three weeks, but "I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that."
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Recently, the United States reached another one of those milestones in the current military conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq that people seem to measure.
Now the death toll is 9/11 times two. U.S. military deaths from Iraq and Afghanistan now match those of the most devastating terrorist attack in America's history, the trigger for what came next. Add casualties from chasing terrorists elsewhere in the world, and the total has passed the Sept. 11 figure.
The latest milestone for a country at war comes without commemoration. It also may well come without the precision of knowing who is the 2,973rd man or woman of arms to die in conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, or just when it happens. The terrorist attacks killed 2,973 victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
Not for the first time, war that was started to answer death has resulted in at least as much death for the country that was first attacked, quite apart from the higher numbers of enemy and civilians killed.
Historians note that this grim accounting is not how the success or failure of warfare is measured, and that the reasons for conflict are broader than what served as the spark.
The body count from World War II was far higher for Allied troops than for the crushed Axis. Americans lost more men in each of a succession of Pacific battles than the 2,390 people who died at Pearl Harbor in the attack that made the U.S. declare war on Japan. The U.S. lost 405,399 in the theaters of World War II.
Despite a death toll that pales next to that of the great wars, one casualty milestone after another has been observed and reflected upon this time, especially in Iraq.
There was the benchmark of seeing more U.S. troops die in the occupation than in the swift and successful invasion. And the benchmarks of 1,000 dead, 2,000, 2,500.
Now this.
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As of Friday, the U.S. death toll stood at 2,693 in the Iraq war and 278 in and around Afghanistan, for a total of 2,971, two short of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The Pentagon reports 56 military deaths and one civilian Defense Department death in other parts of the world from Operation Enduring Freedom, the anti-terrorism war distinct from Iraq.
Altogether, 3,028 have died abroad since Sept. 11, 2001.
The civilian toll in Iraq hit record highs in the summer, with 6,599 violent deaths reported in July and August alone, the United Nations said this week.
*Emphasis added.
The violence might have had something the Washington Post reported:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers do not want to leave other parts of their country to serve in Baghdad, leaving security efforts in the violent capital short by 3,000 Iraqi troops, a senior U.S. commander said on Friday.
"I would tell you I need more Iraqi security forces," U.S. Army Maj. Gen. James Thurman, the U.S. military commander for Baghdad, told reporters at the Pentagon from Camp Liberty in the Iraqi capital.
Thurman said that six Iraqi army battalions -- roughly 500 soldiers each -- that he has requested to reinforce Baghdad have not been provided by the Iraqi government. U.S. commanders have said sectarian violence in Baghdad between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims could lead to civil war if left unchecked.
"Some of these battalions, when they were formed, were formed regionally. And some of the soldiers due to the distance did not want to travel into Baghdad," Thurman said. "And the minister of defense (Abdel Qader Jassim) is working with that."
U.S. commanders have stated that curbing sectarian violence in Baghdad has become the main effort of the 3-1/2-year-old war, more important than the long-running fight against Sunni Arab insurgents in vast Anbar province west of Baghdad.
But only a relatively small portion of the 145,000-strong U.S. force and the 302,000-strong Iraqi government security forces are being devoted to the effort. Thurman said 15,000 U.S. troops, 9,000 Iraqi army soldiers, 12,000 Iraqi national police and 22,000 local police are operating in Baghdad.
Thurman said he was not disappointed by the failure of the Iraqi government to get the requested soldiers to Baghdad, but added the U.S. military was working to make Iraq's army "more mobile."
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-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Much of this is Rumsfeld's Let them succeed with what they already have" attitude- only after the situation is untenable does he relent and bring in additional forces. This goes against everything his military commanders have advised and caused our forces to wage battles they are not equiped for in a foreign land with minimal intel/cooperation from the locals we put into positions of power.
Case in point- Iraq's President (our pal, right?) has publicly condemned US soldiers after they arrested several insurgent leaders loyal to Al Saudr- he's afraid of losing support from Iraq's true power and being shafted after the U.S. pulls out. After all, Al Sadur's forces are only running death squads...why shou;d we interfere with that.
There is talk of re-enforcing our Iraq forces by two additional battalions and swiftly crushing any resistance in Bagdhad with overwhelming numbers, but this would stretch US forces hair thin and leave things vulnerable to a coordinated attack elsewhere.
As to Al Sadur's power, Al Sadur's #2 man regularly dined and slept at Bagdahad's police headquarters while police forces kept US troops from "bothering" him. He was, after all, a guest of Bagdahad's Chief Of Police.
What we need is what we dont have- an international peacekeeping force in Bagdhad to train and police their police forces so the US troops can go on the offensive elsewhere. Of course, we dont have too many pals willing to help out just now...maybe we can ask Venezuella to assist us? We're their biggest oil customer, afer all.
I cant say this enough- we cant win anything in Iraq if Afghanistan is lost: and it's circling the bowl pretty badly just now. A unified, strong and peaceful afghanistan would serve as the staging area for winning Iraq. We had it and we lost it because we focused only on Iraq. Fuck, even the media says nothing about Afghanistan anymore. If we can secure a free and peaceful Afghanistan, people in Iraq will demand the same for themselves...then maybe the clerics will cooperate with the new government.
Or we can bug the fuck out, secure our own country and just drop the occasional MOAB on them (as we should have that Taliban funeral).
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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