Change of strategy needed
 

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The spiraling violence coincides with increasingly strident demands from the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for American forces to pull back into bases and leave Iraq's cities and towns under the control of his military and police forces. But the highly partisan troops and police are believed to be involved in sectarian killings themselves or to look the other way, allowing Shiite death squads and militias to operate unmolested.

I agree with the Prime Minister, let the Iraqi Military and police take up the fight. Our efforts to quell the violence has failed. I don't believe any strategy change on the part of the US is going to be effective, with the exception of carpet bombing cities and towns controlled by the insurgency. Start in Sadr city and Takrit and take it from there. Time to take the gloves off to win this war or get the hell out.

When I worked in Dubai in the oilfield supply boat business we had a saying that as long as the boat was tied up to the dock it will require repair. This meaning that the longer you take care of something the longer it will require you to take care of it.

As long as we are in Iraq the less likely the Iraqis are to take the lead. People like the Iraqis, who are basically working with a 16th century mentality in spite of the 21st. century trappings around them, are never going to 'come up to speed'. They are mired in centuries old traditions, family feuds, religious and class differences, political animosities, land disputes, etc. The US, by getting involved in Iraq for self serving reasons, has created a nest of vipers from which we will never extricate ourselves. We have now created a terrorist training ground like none other ever seen and we nor the next 5 generations of Americans will ever put it right, exactly the way we did not and could not ever put right Viet Nam.

Whatever its there country, if they want to kill eachother let them. I am beginning to think that country needs a brutal government in order to function.

Exactly correct, except it's more like an 8th century mentality. Nothing the US can do will end this insurgency. There are no solutions or change of strategies that will beat the insurgency. Just like Vietnam, we can win all the battles but the war will never end.

I don't think we really want to make the Vietnam analogy concerning withdrawal, do we? We told the world the date by which we would leave RVN. The VC and NVA regulars massed troops in advance of our departure and attacked as we were leaving. By then no American could stomach the idea of going back in, though we did sign a treaty to that effect with the North Vietnamese in Paris. They recognized that we were war-weary and do nothing. I reckon the same back-stabbing will take place if we set a time-table for withdrawal. Only a complete boneheaded f**king idiot, like Richard Nixon, would do something that stupid.

We lost Vietnam, not because the US military was unwilling or unable to fight. We lost because (as Bin Laden accurately opined) Americans have no stomach for war. That is the only major point in common between Iraq and Vietnam.

This is a transitional period for Iraq and I'm willing to guess that the chances of success in Iraq are worse than 50%. This is essentially what I have said since 2002. The iraqi factions were brought together under a common government through murder and intimidation. This is very much like Yugoslavia and completely different from Vietnam.

In S Vietnam we treated the ARVN and the civilian Vietnamese rather poorly because we were contemptuous of their lack of resolve and the completely corrupt system that the Vietnamese inherited from their colonial masters the French!

I have seen no indication that our civilian leadership treats Iraqi leadership other than with the deference afforded a sovereign nation. I know it's just for public show. But in Vietnam we didn't even bother to do that.

In Vietnam we never told our client state that we wanted them to take-over until a year or so before the collapse of the gov. In Iraq we have told Iraqis since GHWB and into the 1990's that we wanted Saddam out but don't want our people to stay.

In Vietnam we were unwilling to chase-down supply lines through adjacent countries. In Iraq we have had SF and CIA folks lurking and skulking and killing bad guys who smuggle stuff. It is a largely unreported war because part of what keeps CIA & SF safe is secrecy. Those men (I believe they are all men at this juncture) go waaaay out on a limb and removed from logistical support for many days or weeks at a time.

Perhaps the worst thing we could do from a PR perspective would be to seize their oil and sell it to our benefit. We certainly could do it. But doing so would simply confirm in people's minds that we deposed Saddam to get his oil. IMO we deposed Saddam to prevent him (Saddam) from fulfilling his oft-stated policy of bringing middleastern oil under pan-arab control. He conveniently self-proclaimed as leader of the pan arabists.

And that is basically the point the Iraqi Prime Minister is making, without admitting it. Brutality works when no other options are possible. Saddom understood what was needed to keep order and I believe that realization by the current Iraqi goverment is taking hold. The US needs to fall back and let the new Iraqi regime assert itself without the constraints of US intervention.

Long as they can assert themselves I'm all for it. I have a feeling they are a paper tiger, I hope they prove me wrong.

They had one.

The assumption that there is a magic timetable of some sort to democracy is a superstition. It i predicated on the supposition that people cannot learn and change their minds.

B

We lost Viet Nam because we were trying to fight an army of dedicated men who were fighting for their country and had the fire of patriotism in their bellies. While our allies were as corrupt and as spineless as they come. I was in the US embassy on May 1, 1975 when Saigon fell. To see the 'brave' government solders deserting their posts, stealing helicopters to fly their families out to the ships while leaving others to fend for themselves is a little disheartening to say the least.

In 1954 after the fall of Dien Pien Pho the French warned the US against getting involved in Viet Nam, but the US felt that they could show those 'frogs' how to fight a war. Boy, we really showed the world how the US could fight a war. The same way we showed those Somalians who was boss.

We lost nearly 69k men and women, wounded nearly a million, killed over a million Viet Namese, wounded about 3 million, absolutely destroyed Viet Nam, divided the US, sent back to the States hundreds of thousands of vets that never recovered and never became productive members of society, and for what?? We made Brown and Root, Halliburton, Bechtal, Kellogg, Trammel Crow, Boing, Lockeed, Bell, etc., etc. billions of dollers richer and for what?? What in God's good name did this country get out of Viet Nam?? The only thing we have ever gotten out of Viet Nam is cheap tennis shoes.

All the above is pretty much what we are going to get out of Iraq. Perhaps not to the scale of Viet Nam but certainly the defeat will be just as humiliating and just as costly. Bush has created a national debt that will take generations to pay off. Say what you want to about Clinton's morals but at least he had the balls and brains to pay off the 4 billion dollar debt that Reagan and Bush I ran up and then had the courtesy to leave this country with a half a billion dollar surplus.


Bush went into Iraq for political and economic reasons only. How many Iraqis were involved in 911? The answer comes back, "None". How many WMD's did we find-None. So if there were no Iraqis in 911, no WMD's and Iraq was not a terrorist training ground (remember, Saddam ran Bin Laden out of Iraq in 1993 when he tried to set up training camps there) why did Bush declare war on Iraq? Mostly because no wartime president has ever failed to be reelected. And maybe, just maybe it could be for the oil.

If we were so anxious to bring democracy to Iraq why didn't we help out in Dafar where 2.4 million have been killed in the last 10 years, or in Ruwanda where a million were killed, or in the Congo there they lost over 800k? The answer is OIL. We need it and they don't have it.

This administration and the right wing can use terms like, "freedom, democracy, liberty, anti-terrorism, blah, blah, and wave the flag all they want but it is not going to change the fact that the US is in Iraq for no other reason than the whims of a deluded egotist. He tries to make 'staying the course' sound like some sort of high idealism, but, when in fact, is it is just the failed policy of a cabal of men who never had a very good plan to start out with. And now they want you, me and all out children to pay the price. Thanks, but no thanks.

Cheney took us there in an attempt to secure the ME for the continued flow of the lifeblood of the developed world's economy... the Devil's Tea.

Without it the lights go out, we get real hungry, and people die from the weather extremes. Our systems are totally dependent on it's uninterrupted flow at a reasonable cost. Without it the system collapses. Period.

Cheney may be an arrogant ass, but he ain't no dummy.

It is my humble belief that is the eventuality, except not for profit but for survival. It will prove to be a very difficult exercise getting it here safely though. Given the options, of which there are none, we've got little choice.

werent we doing pretty well with sadaam in power...oil wise?

tom w

Seems like it to me. But Dick was afraid that was only a temporary affair, of which it was I guess.

No one said that the members of the 'cabal of crap' were stupid. They are all, save their illiterate leader, very smart; misguided, egocentric, greedy, scheming, morally corrupt, but smart.

The same, "What is best for America is best for the world", attitude that got us into Iraq is what caused the US if not to install at least to keep in power about 90% of all the dictators in the world in the last 100 years. The list of US puppet nations around the world reads like the index of the National Geographic atlas. Iran, Iraq, Viet Nam, Korea, Nicaragua, Panama, Chile, Guatemala, Honduras, the Philippines, Afghanistan, stop me when we get to the zees.

The problem is that when the puppets turn on their master, as they did in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Panama, and Viet Nam, we feel obligated to remove them. Then cometh the war. The US government has yet to figure out that about 95% of the people of this world do not think like Americans do. Then when we go into their country and try to spread the word of democracy they bow up and now we are in the middle of a cdivil war. When will we ever learn.

All the above might be an interesting study in international relations if it were not for the fact that in the end the American people are going to have to pay for all these blunders.

Seems too broad a generalization. Americans have no stomach for unjustifiable wars if Vietnam and Iraq are the examples. Or as Rumsfeld puts it; the voters can't understand his complex war. Rumsfeld has the moral subtlety to appreciate the value of an imperial war which has killed 100-600,000 people whereas the average American with their simplistic morality finds killing people in those numbers in a non-defensive war unacceptable.

You've conflating my view with Rumsfeld's. I cannot read his mind so I take on face-value taht he follows the president's lead. The President laid-out a number of reasons for deposing Saddam. NOT ONE of those reasons was enough reason for me to buy into deposing Saddam. Let's keep them separated, shall we?

Bin Laden & Saddam, and that ol' Ho from N Vietnam all came to the same conclusion -- the USA has no stomach for war. All three of them believed that if enough of the visual impact of war could be put before the American people that the Americans would quail from the objective.

Those are the beliefs stated independently by each of these men. They did not qualify their assertions as to just vs unjust. They just wanted to make sure the public saw lots of bloody images. They were absolutely right.

B

PS I will agree this much with Rumsfeld: Most people do not have a mind for geopolitical strategy. They have no concept of what will happen if the oil supply for 3/4 of the world's population were to be embargoed. People will demand their governments do "something" and they wont give a damn what "something" is.

If, due to interruption of 3/4 of the planetary production of petroleum the choice becomes between my kids starving or some kids in China starving, then my choice will always be for some other kids to starve, not my own. Multiply that by 3/4 * 6,000,000,000 people and the magnitude of the worldwide threat to stability should become more apparent.

What I was thinking about was WWII. While it was not easy to get the US into the war, Americans seemed to have the stomach for that war once it was entered. Bin Laden, Saddam and Ho may have been right that Americans had no stomach for a war against them.
I'm not sure about the geopolitical strategy question. Americans may not have the stomach for the Bush/Rumsfeld geopolitical strategy, just like they didn't have the stomach for the domino theory geopolitical strategy. But again, I think it's a big leap to think that Americans have no liking for geopolitical strategy on the whole.

The geopolitics will melt into the background once we get hungry enough and shiver/sweat from the temperature extremes without the energy we've grown used to keeping us comfortable.

We'll come to understand when things get third worldish around here.

Agreed! Kinda makes me believe that Saddam was better and was doing a much better job. Lot less violence under Saddam even though most of the violence was done by Saddam's SS

Yep, things sure seemed to be alot better all around under Saddam, even if you where an Iraqi.

Makes ya wonder what the hell bush/rove was thinking.

I am in agreement with this passage 100%.
The question is HOW do we get out of there, save face and dignity, and also make things right?

I believe that the answer is ALL of the following:

1. Give the Iraqis exactly one year and tell them to get their act together and take control and bring stability before Christmas day, 2007 because that will be the day our last troop will be off the ground and they will have absolutely no support from us at all. They will learn to swim pretty fast if you push them into the deep end of the water.
2. Pay restitutions to every Iraqi who has lost a loved one because of this ILLEGAL war based on deliberate lies that was brought on to them; a war which was baseless, senseless, unethical, and nothing short of mass murder at the hands of our president and our country.
3. Turn over Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld to be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity and cross our fingers that the millions of terrorists that WE (USA) has given birth to would be humbled or softened by this action which is highly unlikely.
4. A class action law suit should be filed against Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld on behalf of the innocent Iraqi civilians who lost loved ones (650,000) and who have suffered by this war and those who have lost their homes and jobs in addition to restitutions and for the wrongfull deaths of 650,000 civilians and Bush's, Cheney's, and Rumsfeld personal assetts should be fair game. It should not matter if these innocent people were killed accidently by our forces, or by the terrorist insurgents, or by suicide bombings as America's action and America's illegal war is the cause of the deaths because America's war has set the stage and has provided this environment for the insurgency.
5. Rebuild Iraq's infrastructure to pre-war level without any charge to them. That should also come out of our pockets.

Something familiar here.

Let's not forget wolfowitz, pearle, fieth (sp.?), libby, the whole bunch of slime behind it. How about haliburton, McDonnel/Douglas et. al. And throw in the cheerleaders too, the ones who supported and made $ on the war; limblow, hanity... let's confiscate their wealth to help pay for it all.

I'm dreamin, I know. Justice ain't that real.

Just saw a show on the war hospitals. Damn bush/rove. I wish there was a hell.

there is ....

and the average iraqi citizen is living through it.

tom w

Well then perhaps the bush/rove team could be transferred there and attempt to run that show rather than ours.

Ah hell no, they've already put the poor Iraqis through enough. We're the ones who elected them, we should have to be the ones to live with our democratic choices.

Till Gulf War, I would agree.

Learning from History
 

If you read up on the history of Iraq, you could pretty well come to the conclusion that only a dictatorship or other form of strictly authoritarian government could ever hold that country together. At the best, a more liberal form of government would work only if the majority of Iraqis felt it was completely free of foreign (read Western) influence.

Iraq in it's present form has only been around for about 90 years, less than a century old. It was created after WW1 when the French and the British carved up the remains of the Ottoman Empire. The borders were drawn by the colonial powers to divide up territory, not to produce a workable nation-state. That's why it's ended up with 3 disparate religious/ethnic/tribal groups that have a hard time getting along with each other.

Back in the 70's a scholar wrote an essay titled "The Kingdom of Iraq", which examined the period of British administration up thru WWII. Deja vu, it strongly parallels what we're going thru now. Ethnic/tribal violence, hatred of foreigners, distrust of the central government that was aided/advised by the British, at times the British had to resort to military force to maintain order and even recorded instances of sending out the RAF to bomb entire villages to bring everyone back into line.

In one part of the essay, it tells where a British official asked a tribal leader what his beef was - they had their own government, police, etc. The tribal leader's reply was "Yes, but they all speak with a foreign accent".

By the late 20's/early 30's, the British had pretty much reached the same conclusion we have today - that if they ever left, the country would fall into chaos and disintegrate along ethnic/religious/tribal lines, unless there was some form of strictly authoritarian central government that would do whatever was necessary to hold the country together.

Don't forget the puppetmasters!

http://www.illuminati-news.com/graphics/pyramid-of-satan(5).gif

Thanks Bot, but I'll stick with reality and the perps that actually committed
the crime.

If you think Bush/Rove were thinking about the iraqi people, you got another think coming. It was whether we feel safe with hussien the way he is.

Not even a thought in their minds. Nor the consequences of their failed debacle.

Nor mine. It is what we do best as human beings. We take care of our own first. If they benefit, so be it. However to sell ourselves a nice song so we can sleep better, we say it is for their benefit.

Don't know about that. I don't think they would want a plan to fail

Chalk that up to total incompetency.

I believe it is still too soon to call the Iraq adventure a failure. That would be like calling WWII before the Battle of Midway incompetently run. Wars do not follow a predictable path and the outcome is never certain. There is one thing that is certain. Abandoning the field will lead to defeat.

One thing that bothers me is the disparity between what mid-level bureaucrats and soldiers say upon return from Iraq as compared to the hallucinatory assessments from the White House on one extreme and the defeatist attitude of of the press and Democrats.

The mid-level people that I know and talk to say that things are mostly going pretty well in most of Baghdad and most of the provinces. There are some bloody-awful areas in Baghdad and in some provinces. What I get from them is that they don't think it is possible for the coalition forces to subdue the insurgents.

But they do believe that the Iraqi Army is improving dramatically. When the Iraqi gov controls its own army and we step aside, then it will be the Iraqi Army bearing the brunt of the battle and they have a FAR different attitude than we have.

Most Iraqi Shiites DO NOT want to be ruled by Tehran. None of the Kurds nor Sunnis will accept Iranian rule. As the Iraqi Army gains strength and confidence they will be able to meet Iran as equals and gain respect taht they currently do not have.

I'm not saying that the strategy we are following right now is the only one or the best one. I don't know. The proof will come as more an more of the country is controlled by the Iraqi Army. If their army is capable of defeating the insurgency then we will know the current strategy is correct. If their army remains incompetent then we will know it is the wrong strategy.

B

Any strategy requires a stratiegic goal.

The current goal is to aid in the creation of a state that is a democratic example for the Mid East and to create a state that will fight with The United States against terrorism. While not necessarily exclusive they are not necessarily synonymous and both might well be pure fantasy.

We need to lay out our vision for the future in such a way that we play one side and back it. A secondary goal is acceptable but a primary goal is essential. Once you understand your primary goal you can figure out who is with you and who is not.

Oil allows the Mid east to sit back and do nothing to get ahead, but there's no future in it.

Fundamentally, giving a sith about what happens in the Mid East is our biggest weakness. Every increased measure of self sufficiency, energywise, increases the strength of our hand in fact and in the eyes of those who assess us. Energy independence may be the only sure thing we can do to contribute to winning this war. We need to buy from our friends and not our enemies even if that means we have to do without or reinvent the current system. The term cheap energy gains relativity over time.

Things worked out pretty well for us during the cold war when there was a wall and everything that passed it recieved the utmost scrutiny. When you let the 'enemy' work your side of the wall by the barrelful, your over one.

Time to re-deploy the home front. So lets get out over the long term and let the situation resolve itself... oil prices through the roof... we do something about it through re-tooling our fueling and consumption accross the board... and the situation resolves itself as it competes with our model.

the mantra that there is no goal ignores about 4 years of speechifying to the Congress and us lesser mortals. It has been laid-out numerous times. Kudos to the Democrats for successfully convincing the voters that there is no plan and shame on the Administration for failing propaganda 101.

Has anybody ever seen any contest, from toddley-winks to global war, in which a purely defensive strategy triumphed?

B

The current situation is not comparable to the Battle of Midway. (remember "Mission Accomplished'} The current situation is more like 1947 or 48 in Japan or Germany.

Good point.

[. If their army is capable of defeating the insurgency then we will know the current strategy is correct. If their army remains incompetent then we will know it is the wrong strategy.

B[/QUOTE]

door #2

tom w

not at all comparable. both of those countries were pacified by having been beaten thoroughly.

that is certainly not the case in iraq.

this is more like viet nam in the aftermath of the tet offensive.

tom w

Iraq was beaten thoroughly, in the sense that the central government and its army was destroyed. The population in Iraq had a more ambiguous relationship to the central government than either Japan or Germany. There is no cultural unity underlying Iraq as there was in Japan and Germany.
I'm not sure that Vietnam is a good comparison. I don't think there was much doubt that once the US left Vietnam, there would be a unified country. It would be a nationalist and communist government, but it would eventually control the country which had a long cultural history (I think)

Iraq is a unique situation for this country it, but for the British this is not so new. What do the British think?

We have never fought a war quite like this, Vietnam it most certainly is not. Its also a far cry from Korea, WW1/2, Spanish American, Civil, War of 1812, ect. I am sure I missed a couple...

Is the situation closer to the British pullout of India when Pakistan and India were created?

IF the USA were the center of the world, you might have an idea that works. It is NOT. So, even if you are independent and other countries are not, it will not work. In this global economy, I go down and so do you. Will you retool everyone else too?

Any comparison with any part of WWII is faulty. The powerful nations of Germany and Japan held a direct threat to the US, leaving us no choice but to engage them and fight until death. This is war of choice against a small country that had no real immediate threat to our survival... completely different situation. Don't confuse the two.

Those other countries want to be almost as independent of the ME as we do and they want to kick the Devil's Tea habit for environmental reasons which we seem to care little about. If we restructured our own energy systems and came up with the new techs that lead to efficiency/renewables we'd be the new ME in the energy field, which would lead to an economic boom that would make the Dot.Com thing look like a kiddy party.

We've just got to take the bull by the horns and take the country away from the corporate interests seeking to mire us in the 20th century for their own good and not ours.

i read a huge book about that. there are definite parallels. on a vastly different scale though. when the british pulled out there was a secterian blood bath. there were basically different areas carved out for folks of certain religeons, muslim packastan, for one then another area for hindus (lets say). i am not sure i have that last group correcty identified. when the brits left there were still huge numbers of muslims in the hindu region and vice versa. as these folks tried to go to the area where they would be safe they were systematically murdered by groups of extremists. whole trainloads at a time.

i think when we pull out, whenever that is, it will be similar. the ones left in the regions that dont fit will have a hard time getting to their safe area.

it is happening even now. when we pull out it will just get worse.

imho.

i hope i am wrong.

tom w

You are of course, pretty much exactly right.

My analogy was suitable only for the time-to-victory. In the WOT we are barely started and it will be as Don Rumsfeld said on several under-reported occaissions, "A long, hard slog."

"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." Speech by Winston Churchill given at the Lord Mayor's Luncheon, Mansion House, London, November 10, 1942.