quote:All the world's intelligence agencies believed that Saddam did have an active NBC program.
If you're going to make THIS argument, that renders the presence or absence of WMDs completely irrelevant. In other words, saying "it doesn't matter if we found WMDs or not because we really thought there were WMDs" means that calling a press conference to discuss the "discovery" of WMDs is pretty pointless.
Unless of course the question is not whether we thought WMDs were there, but rather whether we thought correctly. Santorum's press conference is designed to address the latter question, and I'm attacking it on that basis.
If we want to discuss whether the administration really thought there were WMDs there to find, we can -- but that's unrelated to this issue.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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In the wake of the gulf war Iraq simply stopped trying to make chemical weapons as it could not afford it. The weapons that had already been constructed were buried and people all forgot about them. When weapon inspectors showed up to see to check on WMD, Saddam turned them away without letting them poke around, because he enjoyed pissing off the international community. He had no intention of using any of his degrading chemical weapons and he had no intention of perhaps selling a handful of his working WMD to terrorist as a sort of, "Stick it to the US," because he was afraid of repurcussions.
Or
Saddam after trying to flex his muscles by grabbing Kuwait was beaten down and decided to be more discreat about developing his armed forces. He couldnt win in a battle of strength so he decided to take the WMD/Nuclear Weapons route as everyone knows if you have nuclear weapons, nobody can touch you. He was using WMD as a means of control to remain in power until he could develop nuclear weapons. AQ Kahn afterall was selling the technology to the North Koreans and to Iran, why should Iraq be any different, they were just another muslim country. The possibility of him giving WMD to terrorists remains unknown.
Maybe neither explanation is close to the truth, it just seems so strange that Saddam after being beaten in 1991 harbored no resentment towards the US and simply did nothing for the next decade.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote: If you're going to make THIS argument, that renders the presence or absence of WMDs completely irrelevant
Once again, my point is that Saddam agreed to Terms of Surrender which he did not comply with. 16 UN resolutions were passed against him in attempts to make him comply. Saddam still did not comply. He was then removed from power. Saddam was to allow UN weapons inspectors search where they wanted back in 1991. Had he done so, none of this would have happened. He did not. He stalled, refused access, and then threw out the UN inspectors. For more than a decade, Saddam did not allow UN inspections to occur as stated in the Terms of Surrender. Does this clarify anything for you?
Posts: 1918 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
If they can no longer cause "mass destruction" (assuming of course that sarin and mustard gas ever could) are they really WMDs? Wouldn't WSDPs or Weapons of Somewhat Dangerous Poofs be a more accurate term?
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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Sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's not a perfect analogy to be sure. Actually, it was probably a crappy analogy since I have to explain it. To me the actual issue is about implied definitions and whether or not we have a right to be upset about being mislead about those implied definitions.
My cousin had never had sexual intercourse before the wedding, even though she had done...other things. But according to strict definition, she was a virgin. When she told her husband she was a virgin, she was telling the truth, but in his mind virginity also precluded those "other things".
Bush implied that WMD = nuclear weapons to get us to support the war. My cousin implied to her now husband that she was a virgin in the way that he thought she was. She never corrected his mistaken assumption, as far as I know.
If my cousin's husband found out about those other things, he might accuse her of lying about being a virgin when they got married. But she never lied. She may have obfuscated definitions, but she never lied. Just like some people are saying now that Bush never lied about WMD in Iraq. Sure, he may have implied that WMD = nuclear weapons, but he never lied according to the strict definition of WMD (which includes mustard gas and other chemical weapons, expired or not).
Ok so I can say that strictly speaking, Bush didn't lie to us. But that doesn't mean I don't have a right to be upset with the way he presented the WMD issue before the Iraq war. If my cousin's husband found out about the other stuff she did that didn't include intercourse would he have a right to be upset with her even though she never lied?
Posts: 82 | Registered: Jan 2006
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quote:Once again, my point is that Saddam agreed to Terms of Surrender which he did not comply with. 16 UN resolutions were passed against him in attempts to make him comply. Saddam still did not comply. He was then removed from power.
Yes, yes, everyone agrees that Iraq didn't live up to the terms. The question is whether that was a sufficiently bad deed to justify invading the country. And the answer to that might have something to do with whether there was really a working WMD program going on.
Stasia, I'm really enjoying this analogy about your cousin. Posts: 4600 | Registered: Mar 2000
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posted
Heh. I'm sure she would appreciate my discussing it if only she knew. I've got to start drinking more coffee in the morning before I start posting in non-fluff threads....
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You know, DK, I see people project those two "likelihoods" about what/why Saddam did what he did, concerning his weapons programs... But there are other reasons why he may have dragged his feet. One I can think of, off the top of my head, is that there was/is a neighboring country that he had not long ago fought a nasty war against (to a standstill, essentially), and who was also building up a weapons program. Had he been completely upfront with his weapons program (or lack threof), it could certainly entice that country to try and invade, or send agents to destabilize his control. So long as the spectre of a weapons program existed, it would give that country's leaders pause.
He complied, but publicly dragged his feet as much as he could, so that he would lose his stranglehold on the country.
quote:The question is whether that was a sufficiently bad deed to justify invading the country.
I don't think that is the real question. Rather, it's considering that invading Iraq was one of the many things we could have done at that point, was it a good choice or at least one we were compelled to do?
Ultimately, I think it comes down to whether the invasion was going to be of net benefit to us, not one of simple justification. I think we were obviously justified by Iraq's breaking of the cease-fire agreement. If you sign something that says "We'll do this so you stop shooting at us." and then don't do the things you said you would do, the other side has the right (assuming that the original attacks were justified) to resume hostilities.
However, having the right to do something and it being a good idea to do so, especially in such a complicated situation as we found ourselves in, are two very different things. If the situation were as it was presented as "Iraq is actively trying to obtain nuclear weapons and is cleverly hiding their ongoing programs for the weapons inspectors.", this presents a very compelling reason for invasion. However, "They're not living up to the full agreement they signed, but don't really poise any threat to us." makes a very bad argument for invasion being necessary.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
Stasia, I agree it's probably not the best analogy either. The biggest issue I have with the analogy is that your cousin knew that she was not a virgin according to her husband's definition of the word. She knows what actions she performed that were 'wrong' (I'm saying that they were wrong or making that judgement, just according to her husband's definition they were wrong). That is much different than the entire world believing that Saddam has WMDs and then finding out that his WMD program was not as active as everyone believed.
quote: Ok so I can say that strictly speaking, Bush didn't lie to us. But that doesn't mean I don't have a right to be upset with the way he presented the WMD issue before the Iraq war. If my cousin's husband found out about the other stuff she did that didn't include intercourse would he have a right to be upset with her even though she never lied?
Her husband should be upset (I don't think being upset is a 'right', anyone can be upset about anything so that is not really an issue) because his wife knew that she was not a virgin according to his definition of it and she told him that she was. I see where you are going with this, it's just a bad analogy
Posts: 1918 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
The real issue is and always has been: was this war necessary at that time? We still had one going on in Afghanistan, remember. We had economical issues at home. Hussein violated his agreement, no question, and we had every right to go after him. I doubt you'd be able to find many Americans in any political party that are unhappy he's out of power. But did we need to invade right then, and no later?
The WMD threat was one of several different justifications used to launch the war, and the evidence even beforehand wasn't as cut and dried as you make it out to be. There were protests from the military and intelligence communities as to the veracity of the evidence and to the effectiveness of the invasion plans. Inspectors had been let back into Iraq and had unparalled access. We were bullied into this war, frightened with exaggerated claims, and told afterwards that it was all under control when it plainly wasn't. That's what the outrage is about. Not the war. The way it was fed to us.
I support staying and finishing what was started -- you clean up your messes -- but I want to see plans based on reality and not on what will sound good to the voting base.
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quote:Originally posted by akhockey: Basically 500 or so chemical weapons have been found in the past 3 years. The weapons are thought to have been made prior to 1991, some of which have degraded since their creation. What do you guys think? Unimportant? Reason for apology? Just wondering.
IIRC, the US has many more than 500 chemical weapons dating from the Cold War. For the most part, they are degraded, unstable and unusable--we just for various reasons haven't gotten around to destroying them. Is that sufficient causus belli for a foreign power to invade and occupy the US? What do you guys think? Unimportant? Reason for apology? Or just irrelevant to the question of invasion? Just wondering.
(I skipped the rest of the thread due to time pressure, just thought I'd toss this in.) Reseach Post-script: While the details are fuzzy, this graph from a US Army website verifies that the US still has chemical and/or nerve agent weapons.
Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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posted
A Department of Defense official has recently confirmed that the weapons were fully degraded, and the chemical concoctions were dead and decayed. They were mostly unable even to be fired as designed.
Information is still mostly classified as to where these shells were found, but it's considered likely that these were just mothballed remnants left unaccounted for.
quote:But I gotta know.. what's the deal with the emphasis on the fact the nerve gas had "expired"?
It becomes about eight gazillion times (ballpark estimate) less dangerous as a substance, and useless as a chemical munition. Sarin and tabun, in particular, have a very short shelf life and degrade into useless sludge.
It's important to emphasize because -- for the purposes of determining the importance of this find -- it means that there was literally no benefit towards keeping / mothballing the ordinance. What you have here is a few pallets in total of enough ammunition to count as an infinitesimal quantity of material that Saddam could not benefit from keeping.
Likely, that means, it was misplaced ordinance out of an original supply that was discarded and/or dismantled.
quote:Had the completely corrupt Oil for Food program continued, Saddam would have restarted his NBC programs with the millions and millions of dollars that he was earning.
The administration's own Iraq Survey Group concluded that Saddam had no intent, and assumed no capacity, to restart the weapons program while under sanction.
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posted
But he was only being sanctioned by refusing to allow inspectors in. If all he had was near useless warheads why take the economical punch in the gut for nothing?
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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No . . . he had giant sanctions on him even when the inspectors were allowed in. We wouldn't even allow Iraqi airplanes to fly over large portions of Iraq (notably Kurdish territory)!
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:Originally posted by fugu13: No . . . he had giant sanctions on him even when the inspectors were allowed in. We wouldn't even allow Iraqi airplanes to fly over large portions of Iraq (notably Kurdish territory)!
if this is completely true, then I stand corrected.
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posted
But he never allowed the inspectors full access or to finish the job or even show them anything useful. All of which was his responsibility. This is such a broken record…….
Posts: 2845 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
Well, no, the last big barrier to the inspectors finishing up in terms of time was us and our invasion. He certainly impeded their progress, but he wasn't too successful in that. Try reading the report of the head inspector.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Well, hey, Bush DID give those inspectors what, five or six weeks before he declared them ineffective and said we HAD to invade.
Of course, six weeks into the invasion, he claimed we just needed a bit more time to find the weapons...nice to know that a few years later, with literally hundreds of thousands of men and women scouring the sand, we actually found something.
I can't imagine Bush ever seriously expected the inspectors to find something. The burden if proof was ridiculous. Saddam turned over thousands of documents about his chemical weapons programs and how they were destroyed. Does anyone honestly think we actually went through every page in the six weeks or whatever we had to look at them before we invaded?
Between that, and the inspectors' 'failure,' I don't see any real commitment to a peaceable solution. It was always going to be war. Saddam could never have supplied the proof that Bush wanted.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
Have you ever scoured that sand you smart mouth punk? If you haven't then keep your cake hole busy trying for marital rights for your life partner.
How much poison is enough? How much support for terror is enough, the answer seems to depend on your political agenda, three thousand dead American Civilians are not enough for some people, two thousand dead soldiers are too many for some.
All I can say is that I am glad our grandfathers are mostly dead and unable to see what we have come too, making excuses for evildoers and throwing it all away because we never had to live without it.
It is safer to be a solder in this country then a fetus, chew on that...
If I thought for an instant that the Iraq war makes us safer, and that it punishes those responsible for the attacks on 9/11, I could perhaps agree with a portion of that post.
But without a definitive connection between Saddam's regime and the Al Qaeda group, you are basically saying that it's okay for America to get generally ticked off at people who are SIMILAR to the people who attack us, and go kill them.
That particular justification for the invasion of Iraq just doesn't hold water.
Heck, why didn't we attack France while we were at it? They got us angry too.
The entire invasion of Iraq was predicated on a clear and present danger from that regime.
And every person who supports a war should recognize one very ugly fact about war. No matter how hard one tries to end the war quickly, and with as few casualties as possible, there will be people killed on both sides. And there will be civilians killed. Now, some say that is the price of war.
I see a certain moral equivalence here. If you want to tally civilian deaths, it's 3000 Americans killed by representatives of a group based mostly in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia; against how many (no one will tell us) civilians killed in Iraq?
Are their lives less valuable than the lives of our civilians' lives? Why? Because we chose to go to war against their brutal dictator?
I know you don't like looking at it from this perspective. And I assure you that I understand that we (the American people) have asked our soldiers to go into harm's way and make often split-second decisions on whether to pull a trigger or not. I don't want more of our soldiers to die because we change the rules of engagement and make our soldiers more vulnerable.
But I want to impress upon you that I think there's a reason why war is a last resort. And by last resort I mean you exhaust every possible avenue, then hesitate, then wait some more, then work again, and try other things, and try to work the problems out. And then hesitate again.
And you go to war when you are SURE, with certainty born of real facts and your back is against the wall, that war is the only option that will keep your own people from being killed.
Why? Because in war there are deaths of people who should not have died. Who would not have died if the war hadn't come to their country. And when innocent people die, it isn't enough to say that they should've cleaned up their own messes, or that our rules of engagement protect our troops, or that we weren't sure that they weren't insurgents. Those deaths are a moral burden placed upon us by our decision to go to war.
I won't put that burden on the soldiers who we sent over there (except in cases where the soldiers acted illegally). No. Those deaths are on me and every other American.
And it's a burden I do not want, and I am not happy to accept it. And I don't want more of it if there is a way to avoid it or stop it.
You can't ease that burden from my shoulders. You can't take away the shared guilt that we all have for those deaths. You can just do your job and come home as soon as possible.
And remember that my "cake hole," and those of others like me put bullets in your guns, gas in your tank, armor plating on your Humvee, plasma in the medical tent, money in your wallet, money in your pension fund, and medical care in the VA.
I do not support this war. But I support you and other soldiers in every possible way short of coming over there and pulling the trigger for you. And I will not do that because I know in my heart of hearts that the war in Iraq was never right, that it was started not as a last resort but out of some other motivations that I am too angry to allow myself to guess at, and I have guilt and shame enough over the death we have wrought in our rush to remove Saddam without a solid understanding of the country, the people, or how we would deal with the vaccuum left by his removal.
And before someone tells me about how a year more of Saddam in power would've (or might've) meant a greater menace, I will ask what our military planners might have accomplished with another year to gain a better understanding of who and what we would be dealing with once we got over there.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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quote:Originally posted by Bean Counter: Have you ever scoured that sand you smart mouth punk? If you haven't then keep your cake hole busy trying for marital rights for your life partner.
How much poison is enough? How much support for terror is enough, the answer seems to depend on your political agenda, three thousand dead American Civilians are not enough for some people, two thousand dead soldiers are too many for some.
All I can say is that I am glad our grandfathers are mostly dead and unable to see what we have come too, making excuses for evildoers and throwing it all away because we never had to live without it.
It is safer to be a solder in this country then a fetus, chew on that...
quote:Originally posted by Bean Counter: Have you ever scoured that sand you smart mouth punk? If you haven't then keep your cake hole busy trying for marital rights for your life partner.
How much poison is enough? How much support for terror is enough, the answer seems to depend on your political agenda, three thousand dead American Civilians are not enough for some people, two thousand dead soldiers are too many for some.
All I can say is that I am glad our grandfathers are mostly dead and unable to see what we have come too, making excuses for evildoers and throwing it all away because we never had to live without it.
It is safer to be a solder in this country then a fetus, chew on that...
BC
Hey jackass, I served MY time in the Army, punk, so that people could express themselves whenever they want to, and I don't agree with you on anything.
Particularly if they have the brains to disagree with anything you say.
You are the reason pillow parties never went out of style.
Be glad I wasn't your medic.
Actually, scratch that. I know I would have done my best for you, despite you being an idiotic, bigoted, uneducated piece of @#$$. Even the lowest common denominator deserves to live.
You deserve every single piece of sand you get in your toilet paper and food. Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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I'm guessing from the marital rights thing, you're either trying to call me gay, or liberal. Quite frankly I don't really see how either applies as a justifiable insult given the topic at hand, but I won't pretend to understand the odd complexities of your mind.
As for the "keep your cake hole shut" comment: No. I won't. Why? Because some of those dead grandfathers you referenced made sure to write it into law that I have the right to keep my cake hole eternally open. Furthermore, both my grandfathers, two of my uncles, and my brother fought for the same thing as well.
You think that just because I haven't spent my time in the sand I've been untouched by war? My brother came back from basic training in Parris Island with a flesh eating bacteria, and fibromyalgia. The former of which, after he was discharged from the Marine Corps, ate a nice little hole in his body, and when the VA refused to treat him, I, and my family, watched him screaming in pain in the ER of the local hospital while we waited for them to treat him.
I won't pretend for a minute that I felt anything like the pain he went through, and while I haven't heard the screams of war directly, I have his cries of pain and agony to keep me company whenever I think about the war over there.
Do you even know what you're fighting for? Fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them at home eh? Fighting to avenge a wrong done to us by visiting death and horror on a nation that had nothing to do with the original crime? You know what forum you're in, haven't you read the rest of the Ender series? Osama bin Laden was Warmaker, and Bush was a malicious version of Grego. He got the rabble moving, and instead of going after the real bad guy, we just went after something that looked exactly like it who happens to have done us wrong in the past, so why not take care of them now.
I honestly don't think that the war in Iraq has anything at all to do with protecting my liberty, or my freedom. It's not about fighting terrorists who wanted to kill me. Or at least, if it is NOW, it's only that way because of what we started, because of the floodgates that WE opened. We're fighting a war, and an enemy of our own creation. It started that way when we fought Saddam, a warlord more or less that WE armed and WE trained who ran amok, supporting him in a war against a nation whose former leader that WE supported and WE propped up and befriended. And now that he is gone, we fight insurgents that want us gone, we fight foreign terrorists that want to kill Americans anytime anywhere.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I wonder how much it's worth when you measure it in blood.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
All it cost YOU is money, If we are not the hammer we will be the nail, what does it make us if we created Saddam's regime and then turned around and created this one? The Master of both. Live with it.
When you have power you either use it or fail in your moral obligation, FAIL IN DUTY, for a lesson in that I suggest you watch "Guest's of the Ayatollah" tonight and see what happens in an action vaccuum, however 'moral' intentions.
It also will teach you why the Left cannot be trusted even when they put forward a good man of honest faith. (Good luck finding one today) Bush acted on the best intel he had, we are learning that he acted very correctly, we are also being reminded that action itself is more right then waiting for all the facts to come in.
posted
You know BC, if I thought you actually represented "the Right," I'd probably become a Democrat. Fortunately I know that your attitude represents neither that of the majority of our soldiers or our conservatives in this country.
You are a piss-poor representative of both.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
Oh bull BC, dear God, do you REALLY believe the things you are saying?
This isn't about sitting at home on our hands and waiting while the world passes us by, I never suggested that, and by the way, the Republican poster child for anti-Liberalism, Hillary Clinton, is more gung-ho than the rest of her party. She fully supported Afghanistan, as I did, and do, and she fully supported, and continues to support Iraq. She might think it was a bad idea, but she's thrown herself into the mix to ensure that the soldiers get what they need, and to increase funding for veterans, which Republicans cut. Thank your vaunted hero for that.
As I was saying, people aren't mad that we got involved at all, they are mad that we went after the wrong friggin target. Why are we bogged down in Iraq, accomplishing nothing and pissing off EVERYONE in that region, when we could have actually gone after the real supporters of this ideology. We could have thrown the full power and effort of the US military and government into solving the Palestine/Israel problem, rather than just giving them a road map and saying "deal with it," or we could have put the screws to Saudi Arabia, which funnels millions of dollars to state supported wahhabist schools if Islam that teach hatred and jihad. We could have gone after Islamic warlords in northeast Africa where open air markets sell thousands of guns and explosives, and RPGs that are sold to insurgents and terrorists that later use them against us.
But no. We went after secular Iraq, which no proven ties to Al Qaeda, no proven ties to 9/11, only ties to Palestinian terrorists, who until recently have almost always avoided US targets, military or civilian. We went in with little understanding, or at apparently little care of the situation there, political or religious, and are paying the price for it now.
But hey, if that is what you want in a military and MORAL leader, then I guess Bush is the guy for you.
quote:we are also being reminded that action itself is more right then waiting for all the facts to come in.
And here is where I've officially come to conclusion that you're totally off your rocker. As Stephen Colbert would say, "that's the craziest f*$(#)$ thing I've ever heard."
You REALLY think THAT is the lesson we've learned from this war? I'd HOPED that we'd learned the exact OPPOSITE of that lesson. It's a lack of facts that has led to the mess we are currently in over there.
And by the way, for all Americans who care, or who have family in the military, or previously in the military, it costs a hell of a lot more than money, and I think it's incredibly smug, uncaring, and douchebaggish of you to say that.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
Was I talking to them? No I was talking to those who are still not behind the mission, but who 'support the troops' what a crock. I am a soldier and I am what I do, my mission defines my role in the world, support me and support the mission. You cannot do one without the other. It is way past time to get behind the mission.
We have broken the terrorist and are slowly teaching the everyday Iraqi basic morality, a much more tedious and ubiquitous process which neither side likes very much, they love their corruption and we despise it. Get behind the damn mission and help us get it over with or shut up.
quote:I am a soldier and I am what I do, my mission defines my role in the world
Out of curiosity, BC, do you believe it's possible for soldiers to be misused? In other words, are all your missions good ones, even the ones that aren't?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
It is certainly possible for leadership to make tactical blunders that costs lives, that happens way below the level of Strategy for the most part. A soldier also has a responsibility to not follow orders that violate the rules of war and code of conduct.
But if you are asking if soldiers can make sweeping political decisions like 'this is an unjust war' then no, a soldier needs to focus on 'is my weapon clean, did I PMCS this vehicle, do I have a full tank, an MRE, how are my coms, are all my guys in full armor, etc...' then at higher levels they must think about the best way to carry out the mission, and in Iraq we often needed to find our our own Intel to guide mission selection.
Military force is a violent solution, so it is hard to throw words in common usage out to describe it because in military terminology they have different meaning, for instance it can be good to kill three hundred people in a military engagement, sometimes because it is a large number, sometimes because it is small. For non military the concept of violence itself is negative, whereas like Eskimo's with snow, the military breaks violent action into many flavors.
So there is no such thing as a "good" military mission by civilian standards, they are effective, the meet objectives, they conserve assets, they alter the battle space in ways we intend. The military is a tool, so it can only be used competently or incompetently, with skill or with disdain. The current administration has certainly used it better then one before. I do know of a case of gross military misuse, Hillary Clinton once made her Marine security detail serve drinks in Dress Uniform...
quote:Originally posted by Bean Counter: I do know of a case of gross military misuse, Hillary Clinton once made her Marine security detail serve drinks in Dress Uniform...BC
Off with her head!
Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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posted
That's a case of gross military misuse? What would it be called if, say, the President orchestrated a publicity stunt where he appropriated military hardware and landed on the deck of a carrier before a press conference?
And I think there are certainly good military missions from a civilian standpoint.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:It is certainly possible for leadership to make tactical blunders that costs lives...
On a non-tactical level -- on a strategic level, in other words -- is it possible to misuse the military?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Its his aircraft carrier, his plane and we are his men. We were sure as hell glad to see him there, to hear him speak, Since we were doing the fighting I am glad he did not check with you before he boosted my morale.
I think there were strategy errors in every war we ever fought, then even higher a kind of 'policy' error. I think we should have pounded the Chinese in Viet Nam, I think we should enforce freedom of religion in all the new governments we build. But I will say this about our fight in Iraq, it has been strategically brilliant, we have flexed with reality in record time on a hundred issues, we have implemented new strategy quickly and used new technology to build whole new strategies from scratch. Where is the book on how to fight this kind of fight? We are still writing it!
Redesigning the military, fighting two wars and redesigning combat operations all on the fly, I think anybody who does not consider Rumsefield and Bush to be the best leadership the military has had since the cold war ended and changed our priorities forever is existing in a vacuum of information.
quote:Its his aircraft carrier, his plane and we are his men.
So, to clarify, if Bill Clinton had required his security detail to serve drinks, that would have been an appropriate use of the military? The inappropriate nature of Hillary Clinton's request was due to the fact that they weren't hers to order around?
quote: I think there were strategy errors in every war we ever fought, then even higher a kind of 'policy' error.
Okay. Given that you concede this, how do you reconcile that concession with this statement: "I am a soldier and I am what I do, my mission defines my role in the world, support me and support the mission."
That's another quote of yours.
In your opinion, if there have been both strategy and policy errors in almost every war ever fought, should it be the role of civilian leadership to identify those errors and seek to correct them -- or is a soldier's purpose more fulfilled when he dies due to policy or strategy mistakes than when his "mission" is altered by civilians?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:How much poison is enough? How much support for terror is enough, the answer seems to depend on your political agenda, three thousand dead American Civilians are not enough for some people, two thousand dead soldiers are too many for some.
Yes, how interesting that some people would dare consider Iraq to be something different and unrelated to 9/11.
quote:But I will say this about our fight in Iraq, it has been strategically brilliant
This is absolutley untrue: it is acknowledged by military strategists that Donald Rumsfeld's operation of the war with minimal initial troop numbers, in defiance of military reccomendation, created a significant operational and peacetime power vaccum that allowed the insurgency (and sectarian warfare) to take root.
quote:I think anybody who does not consider Rumsefield and Bush to be the best leadership the military has had since the cold war ended and changed our priorities forever is existing in a vacuum of information.
I find that position to be hopelessly misguided, and I feel that it is because I've been paying attention to debacles such as the Shinseki fallout. A "Vaccum of information," from your perspective, is probably anything short of administrative kowtow.
quote:We have broken the terrorist and are slowly teaching the everyday Iraqi basic morality, a much more tedious and ubiquitous process which neither side likes very much, they love their corruption and we despise it. Get behind the damn mission and help us get it over with or shut up.
Yours is the sort of purposefully ignorant, willingly obsequent genuflection that I refuse to allow the present administration to have a free ride off of.
I would have trouble finding a sentiment less 'patriotic' than the idea that critics should remain silent, so don't bother telling me to shut up.
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quote:it is acknowledged by military strategists that Donald Rumsfeld's operation of the war with minimal initial troop numbers, in defiance of military reccomendation, created a significant operational and peacetime power vaccum that allowed the insurgency (and sectarian warfare) to take root.
This is a significant recasting of what that original criticism was. Most of the original "quagmire" predictions were about the main offensive. The contention that more troops were needed was that we would not be able to defeat Iraq's military quickly enough.
It was only after the "quagmire" of the original invasion turned out to be a 1 week pause that the insurgency quagmire (which had been predicted by some strategist before) was suddenly adopted by the strategists who had been wrong about the major combat operations. "See, we told you there'd be a quagmire." Yeah, but they were wrong about what type.
There are plenty of strategists who think more troops would have encouraged the existence of more insurgents and/or more adventurism elsewhere by other states.
I'm not saying they didn't make mistakes. I am saying that presenting the opinion of some military strategists as if it were fact is pretty much the flip side of what Counter is doing.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
Yeah, the troop numbers thing is mostly a non-issue. The problem was with a complete lack of good post-invasion planning for the troops we did use.
There were widely known planning problems long before the invasion of Iraq that the State Department tried to get the DoD (which had taken over post-invasion planning from the State Department at the administration's direction) to address. Needless to say, the concerns were not addressed, and problems even a simple plan would have prevented mushroomed into crises.
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quote:it is acknowledged by military strategists that Donald Rumsfeld's operation of the war with minimal initial troop numbers, in defiance of military reccomendation, created a significant operational and peacetime power vaccum that allowed the insurgency (and sectarian warfare) to take root.
This is a significant recasting of what that original criticism was. Most of the original "quagmire" predictions were about the main offensive. The contention that more troops were needed was that we would not be able to defeat Iraq's military quickly enough.
This turns out not to be the case, Dag. The professional uniformed military had many strategists, including head of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Shinseki, commander of the invasion Gen. Tommy Franks, and the Army War College, as well as the civilian Secretary of the Army White who insisted that high troop levels would be needed in post-war Iraq to maintain order. It was Rumsfeld and others in the Pentagon , particulary his deputy Wolfowitz who argued for low troop levels. The final troop levels were apparently a compromise between the 2 camps.
Now, if you're talking about armchair generals (like me, and basically anyone on the internet) and MSM analysts, that's different. My concern pre-war, and the main reason I was always against it, was the general one that the occupation would be much more difficult than the conquest (without the specifics available to professional analysts, of course.) Plenty of MSM analysts had various views about quagmire in the conquest and/or the occupation phases of the war. But Samprimary's point was about Rumsfeld ignoring the advice from the military, not other analysts.
From an interview with Army Secretary White:
quote: Frontline interviewer:How much of the concern was there around troop levels that would be in place in Iraq immediately after the war?
White:Shinseki's concern and my concern was, if you were to look at the postwar tasks that had to be accomplished, the special weapons sites that had to be inspected, which numbered in the hundreds -- The size and scope of the concentration of people in Baghdad, for example. The fact that this was a country as large as the state of California with a population of 25 million people. We were very concerned that there wouldn't be sufficient boots on the ground after the operation to provide for security and get on with the stabilization activities. That was our principle concern, from an Army perspective.
Frontline interviewer:There are those who argue that no one could have forecast that the Iraqi state would have collapsed as it did. Is that a fair enough defense?
White:I don't think that's an adequate rationale to not have done a better job of planning. We have more experience in the United States Army in peacekeeping operations, because of the Balkans, than probably any army on the face of the earth. All of us in the Army were very, very concerned that if it wasn't a war of liberation, if lawlessness broke out, that we would have a very difficult time stopping that.
There are two ways you could have sized the force to go into Iraq. One was the way it with done, which is necessary to win the war, and then assume that you would need fewer and fewer troops to ensure the peace after the war.
The other was to say the real force driver here is the stability operation following combat. So even if we launched the combat operation early to achieve, to guard against these other problems, the torching of the oil fields and so forth, we still need to keep the force flow going and get additional forces in there so that we can secure the peace.
Unfortunately, the latter course was not the one that was adopted. I think to a certain degree, it was foreseeable. … We were absolutely convinced that it would take an enormous number of people to stabilize the [postwar] situation. Short of those people, a great deal of mischief would occur. I guess you take a bit of satisfaction that your view has been vindicated by the way the results played out. But at the same time, this is something that could have been anticipated, I believe.
Paul Wolfowitz, also Donald Rumsfeld, were very strong, outspoken in criticizing the army's views on troop levels needed.
Well, yes. There's a certain amount of arrogance to both of them in this regard. Neither man is a man that I would say was burdened by a great deal of self-doubt. Having been right in Afghanistan with conducting an operation with basically special operating forces and indigenous forces, their view was that they would be absolutely right here.
Our view was that they were going to be terribly wrong. Their response, publicly and privately, was basically that Shinseki and I didn't know what we were talking about. I suppose, looking back on it, it is hard to believe that rational people looking at that situation before the combat operation could have thought it was going to come out in any other way than in fact it did.
I mean, here you have a population which is fractured, with the Kurds, the Sunnis, and the Shias. It's a huge country. It's been ruled with an iron fist by a tyrant. As soon as you take that iron fist off the population and don't replace it with an obvious presence of law and order, I don't think it was that hard to divine what was going to occur.
quote:Frontline interviewer: Specific to prewar, what was the main reason the Army wanted so many troops -- why they thought the numbers that they were talking about were necessary?
Fallows:The Army had both a specific and a larger metaphysical reason for wanting to have a lot of troops going in. The specific reason was their very precise argument that it would be harder to occupy Iraq than to conquer it. You would need a relatively small number of troops actually to beat Saddam Hussein's military, but then occupying this quite large and quite fractured country would be quite hard, and would take a lot of troops.
The metaphysical reason was the Army's sense that, once the sort of glory of the short war was over, the people that would actually be there would be the U.S. Army, not some international force, not the Air Force. The U.S. Army would be taking the heat for whatever went wrong. We wouldn't have enough of them there.
Frontline interviewer:Explain the reasoning of the head of the U.S. Army, Gen. Shinseki, on how important the first days after the fall of Baghdad would be.
Fallows:Shinseki of the Army drew not only on his experience in the Balkans, trying to administer a fractious region postwar. [He also drew from] all the corpus of evidence that had been produced by the Army War College, by every other group that looked into this, to say that there was a crucial moment just after the fall of a regime when the potential for disorder was enormous. So there would be ripple effects for years to come, depending on what happened in those first days or weeks when the regime went [down] ….
The Army War College study had worked out a very detailed checklist for how the military, and the Army in particular, should start thinking about the postwar, well before it actually went to war. One of their conclusions was that it was best to go in heavier than you actually needed to be, so that at the beginning of the postwar period your presence would be so intimidating that nobody would dare challenge you. You'd set a tone that would allow you then to draw down the forces very rapidly. So it was better to go in heavy and then draw down, than the reverse.
posted
I wouldn't say troop levels are "mostly a non-issue", fugu.
I guess I would say, better pre-war planning for the occupation phase is the most important lack, was needed, and would have suggested higher troop levels.
Oooh, I can add Bremer to my list. From fugu's link:
quote:As the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Ambassador Paul Bremer, later argued, “The single most important change . . . would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout.” Bremer claimed to have “raised this issue a number of times with our government” but to have been overruled.
quote:This is a significant recasting of what that original criticism was. Most of the original "quagmire" predictions were about the main offensive. The contention that more troops were needed was that we would not be able to defeat Iraq's military quickly enough.
That doesn't match up with what I know/remember at all. There were voices from the military, most blatantly Shineski, saying exactly that the troops levels would be insufficient for post-combat challenges. A great deal of the criticism I remember both hearing and saying at the time was that the initial combat was going to be by far the easier task. This was also the understanding of planners ever since the first GUlf War. Heck, George H. W. Bush dedicated a significant portion of a book about why they didn't topple Saddam Hussein when they had a chance, with the inevitable long, protracted, and bloody occupation - or "quagmire" - this would necessitate being the main concern.
At the beginning of the first Gulf War, the Iraqi army was the 5th largest in the world with formidable supplies and equipment. At the beginning of the second, they were significantly weaker in terms of manpower and supplies. I'm having problems picturing people focusing on beating the Iraqi military as being something we wouldn't be able to accomplish as being taken seriously.
edit: Also, considering that the point up for debate was fully realized by the planners of the first Gulf War, I can't buy that it wasn't realized by the planners of the second. Actually, I could buy it - I mean George W. Bush seemed almost proud he didn't ask his father for advice - but I couldn't then see it as anything but an amazing display of incompetence.
posted
Wow I stand corrected, the mission is wrong, the war is wrong, soldiers are bad, I am going to go kill myself now by climbing a water tower and shooting people until the cops get me...
posted
If it makes you feel any better BC, you're not actually a soldier. You just lie about being one on messge boards.
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quote:There were voices from the military, most blatantly Shineski, saying exactly that the troops levels would be insufficient for post-combat challenges.
True. Doesn't contradict a single thing I said, of course.
quote:I'm having problems picturing people focusing on beating the Iraqi military as being something we wouldn't be able to accomplish as being taken seriously.
And, yet, it happened.
Go back and review the commentary during the time we were "stalled" outside Bahgdad.
quote:If it makes you feel any better BC, you're not actually a soldier. You just lie about being one on messge boards.
Wow, you are in an arrogant pissy little mood today, aren't you.
You might not want to make absolute personal charges you can't back up.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:Wow I stand corrected, the mission is wrong, the war is wrong, soldiers are bad....
This doesn't logically follow, either.
The mission MIGHT be bad; it might not. Soldiers MIGHT be bad; they might not.
What I'm trying to point out to you is that it's perfectly possible for good soldiers to be used on a bad mission, and perfectly reasonable and loyal for people to observe that a mission is bad without concluding that the soldiers themselves are bad.
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