posted on November 7, 2004 01:34:01 PM newNo, wait, I get it...we fly over and announce from loudspeakers, "All you law abiding residents listen up, tomorrow at sunrise we're going to level this town, so get out now so you don't get hurt." The insurgents, being really dumb, won't leave and we'll get them all.
What's the problem? Seal off the city. Evacuate the women and children to a camp. Temporarily (or permanently) detain all males of fighting age. Bomb the city to the ground. Rebuild the city.
No more insurgents. No US casualties. Iraqis get new buildings. Win-win for everyone.
posted on November 7, 2004 03:14:01 PM new
My understanding was that the US never sent their ground combat troops into Iraq in 1991 but I may very well be wrong. I don't mind being corrected and I'm always willing to learn.
Twelvepole has said before that some of us don't understand the combat or the situation in Iraq because we were never there in Iraq like he was in 1991, that's why I asked as I thought he said he was in the Navy on a ship then and not right in Iraq.
I fully realize that we each have our own views on this war but I don't think combat experience is required to understand the way things are going in Iraq. And sometimes I get the feeling here that it’s wrong for some of us to feel sympathy for any of the innocent Iraqi citizens who got caught up in this mess.
posted on November 7, 2004 03:40:39 PM new
::Temporarily (or permanently) detain all males of fighting age.::
EAG - are you running for head of recruitment for AQ? You have some rather interesting ideas that would be quite successful if creating a new alotment of terrorists is your intention.
If someone rounded you up and jailed you based soley on your age and the city of your residence, how friendly of feeling do you think that you, or for that matter, your unjailed cousins in the next city over are going to have for your jailers?
I realize you have a real problem comprehending this but people in Iraq actually have feeling and emotions and the same level of pride as americans do. Treat them like animals and they are going rise up and bite the hell out of you.
~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~
If it's really "common" sense, why do so few people actually have it?
posted on November 7, 2004 05:23:58 PM new
Please understand that I'm not questioning your career choice, twelvepole. Also understand that I have respect for anyone who serves their country. You put it out here about being in Iraq so it just raised questions in my mind but if you don't want to talk about it that's okay and I won't question it further.
I'm trying to come to terms about this war and I said from the beginning that the US couldn't just pull out. Many of you have tried to convince me that this was planned but I just don't understand how anyone can go to war such as they did in Iraq and call it a plan and then see such a mess esculate. Somehow I think Iraqis are asking the same question, how can a super power let this happen?
I would have thought Fallujah would have been easier to take six months ago when they were saying they were doing so?
posted on November 7, 2004 07:19:18 PM newEAG - are you running for head of recruitment for AQ?
Anyone harboring insurgents/terrorist should be considered insurgents/terrorists. Arabs only respect force. If I was in charge, I would detain every one of those bastards. Lock up the suspected insurgents for 10 years and put the rest to work rebuilding their city. An example for other cities that might be harboring insurgents/terrorists.
posted on November 7, 2004 07:25:13 PM newhow can a super power let this happen?
Because the enemy is hiding behind women and children. If we didn't care about innocent Iraqi civilians, we could solve the problem in one day with carpet bombing.
[ edited by ebayauctionguy on Nov 7, 2004 07:31 PM ]
WASHINGTON — The insistence by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and many U.S. officials that foreign fighters are streaming into Iraq to battle American troops runs counter to the U.S. military's own assessment that the Iraqi insurgency remains primarily a home-grown problem.
In a U.S. visit last week, Allawi spoke of foreign insurgents "flooding" his country, and both President Bush and his Democratic challenger, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, have cited these fighters as a major security problem.
But according to top U.S. military officers in Iraq, the threat posed by foreign fighters is far less significant than American and Iraqi politicians portray. Instead, commanders said, loyalists of Saddam Hussein's regime — who have swelled their ranks in recent months as ordinary Iraqis bristle at the U.S. military presence in Iraq — represent the far greater threat to the country's fragile 3-month-old government.
Foreign militants such as Jordanian-born Abu Musab Zarqawi are believed responsible for carrying out videotaped beheadings, suicide car bombings and other high-profile attacks. But U.S. military officials said Iraqi officials tended to exaggerate the number of foreign fighters in Iraq to obscure the fact that large numbers of their countrymen have taken up arms against U.S. troops and the American-backed interim Iraqi government.
"They say these guys are flowing across [the border] and fomenting all this violence. We don't think so," said a senior military official in Baghdad. "What's the main threat? It's internal."
In interviews during his U.S. visit last week, Allawi spoke ominously of foreign jihadists "coming in the hundreds to Iraq." In one interview, he estimated that foreign fighters constituted 30% of insurgent forces.
Allawi's comments echoed a theme in Bush's recent campaign speeches: that foreign fighters streaming into the country are proof that the war in Iraq is inextricably linked to the global war on terrorism.
Kerry has made a similar case, with a different emphasis. In remarks on the stump last week, he said that the "terrorists pouring across the border" were proof that the Bush administration had turned Iraq into a magnet for foreign fighters hoping to kill Americans.
Yet top military officers challenge all these statements. In a TV interview Sunday, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, estimated that the number of foreign fighters in Iraq was below 1,000.
"While the foreign fighters in Iraq are definitely a problem that have to be dealt with, I still think that the primary problem that we're dealing with is former regime elements of the ex-Baath Party that are fighting against the government and trying to do anything possible to upend the election process," he said. Iraqi elections are scheduled for January.
U.S. officials acknowledge that Iraq's porous border — especially its boundary with Syria — allows arms and money to be smuggled in with relative ease. But they say the traffic from Syria is largely Iraqi Baathists who escaped after the U.S.-led invasion and couriers bringing in money from former members of Hussein's government.
At the behest of the interim government, U.S. forces last month cracked down on traffic along the 375-mile Syrian border. During Operation Phantom Linebacker, U.S. troops picked up small numbers of foreign fighters attempting to cross into Iraq, officials say.
Yet the bulk of the traffic they detected was the kind that has existed for hundreds of years: smugglers and Syrian tribesmen with close ties to sheiks on Iraq's side of the border.
Top military officers said there was little evidence that the dynamics in Iraq were similar to those in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when thousands of Arabs waged war alongside Afghans to drive out the Soviet Union.
Instead, U.S. military officials said the core of the insurgency in Iraq was — and always had been — Hussein's fiercest loyalists, who melted into Iraq's urban landscape when the war began in March 2003. During the succeeding months, they say, the insurgents' ranks have been bolstered by Iraqis who grew disillusioned with the U.S. failure to deliver basic services, jobs and reconstruction projects.
It is this expanding group, they say, that has given the insurgency its deadly power and which represents the biggest challenge to an Iraqi government trying to establish legitimacy countrywide.
"People try to turn this into the mujahedin, jihad war. It's not that," said one U.S. intelligence official. "How many foreign fighters have been captured and processed? Very few."
posted on November 8, 2004 06:55:06 AM new
EAG: If I was in charge, I would detain every one of those bastards. Lock up the suspected insurgents for 10 years
Did you help Bush write the Patriot Act?
There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." —George W. Bush, Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002
---------------------------------- "Give it up for George W. Bush, the best friend international jihad ever had."
posted on November 8, 2004 07:01:26 AM new
Twinkle Toes: But look up Navy Corpsman sometime... you might be surprised at their duties...
Although corpsmen go back to the very beginning of the Navy, it was over 100 years ago, in June 1898 that the Hospital Corps was officially established.
In 1814, Navy Regulations mention a "loblolly boy" who was to serve the surgeon and the surgeon's mate. The loblolly boy prepared for battle by filling containers with water to hold amputated limbs. In addition, his duties called for maintaining the braziers of charcoal to heat the tar which was used to stop the hemorrhaging from the amputations. Keeping the deck safe for the surgeon around the operating area was a duty during battle. The deck, slippery with blood, was to be treated with buckets of sand. Sounds gruesome, but cannon balls and cutlasses were not tidy weapons and amputation was the standard treatment for compound fractures.
I bet Twinkle toes favorite part of his job was swabbing the poop deck.
There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." —George W. Bush, Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002
---------------------------------- "Give it up for George W. Bush, the best friend international jihad ever had."
Official inquiries have verified what independent observers have long said: the invasion of Iraq was not justified; a small, remote and poor country, Iraq posed no threat to the United States. As in the Tonkin Gulf issue during the Vietnam war, the Congress and public were misled. Those of us who said so from the beginning are tempted now to say "I told you so" but that indulgence doesn't lead anywhere. When I was the member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Council responsible for the Middle East, I had the duty not to lament past mistakes but to identify what could be done to pick up the pieces where they then lay. With the elections behind us and the Bush administration in office for the next four years, an intelligent choice among current options in Iraq becomes even more urgent. Now as a private citizen, I ask what can be done with the current reality?
Iraq is in a terrible condition, its society has been torn apart, scores of thousands have been killed and even more wounded, its infrastructure has been shattered, dreadful hatreds have been generated. Today, there are no good options -- only better or worse -- alternatives. Three appear possible:
The first option has been called "staying the course." In practice that means continued fighting. France “stayed the course” in Algeria in the 1950s as America did in Vietnam in the 1960s and as the Israelis are now doing in occupied Palestine. It has never worked anywhere. In Algeria, the French employed over three times as many troops, nearly half a million, to fight roughly the same number of insurgents as America is now fighting in Iraq. They lost. America had half a million soldiers in Vietnam and gave up. After forty years of warfare against the Palestinians, the Israelis have achieved neither peace nor security.
Wars of national “self-determination,” to use President Woodrow Wilson’s evocative phrase, can last for generations or even centuries. Britain tried to beat down (or even exterminate) the Irish for nearly 900 years, from shortly after the Eleventh century Norman invasion until 1921; the French fought the Algerians from 1831 until 1962; both Imperial and Communist Russia have been fighting the Chechens since about 1731. Putin’s Russia is still at it. There was no light at the end of those “tunnels.”
At best, “staying the course” in Iraq can be only a temporary measure as eventually America will have to leave. But during the period it stays, say the next five years, my guess is that another 30 or 40 thousand Iraqis will die or be killed while the U.S. armed forces will lose perhaps 5,000 dead and 20,000 seriously wounded. The monetary cost will be hundreds of billions. Consider what the figures mean. Americans were horrified when about 3,300 people were killed in the attack by al-Qaida terrorists on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Iraq has already (at the time of this writing) lost about 100,000 during the American invasion and occupation.* In absolute terms that means that virtually every Iraqi has a parent, child, spouse, cousin, friend, colleague or neighbor – or perhaps all of these -- among the dead. More than half of the dead were women and children. In relative terms, this figure equates in the very much larger American society to a loss of over a million people.
It is not only the actual casualties that count. What wars of “national liberation” have taught us is that they brutalize the participants who survive. Inevitably such wars are vicious. Both sides commit atrocities. In their campaigns to drive away those they regard as their oppressors, terrorists/freedom fighters seek to make their opponents conclude that staying is unacceptably expensive and, since they do not have the means to fight conventional wars, they often pick targets that will produce dramatic and painful results. Irish, Jewish, Vietnamese, Tamil, Chechen, Basque and others blew up hotels, cinemas, bus stations and/or apartment houses. The more spectacular, the better for their campaigns. So, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946; the IRA a Brighton (England) hotel in 1984; an Iraqi group the UN headquarters in Baghdad in 2003. Chechens blew up an apartment house in Moscow in 2003 while a Palestinian group blew up an Israeli frequented hotel in Taba (in Egypt) in 2004.
Faced with such challenges, the occupying power often reacts with massive attacks aimed at terrorists but inevitably also killing many civilians. To get information from those it manages to capture, it also frequently engages in torture. Torture did not begin at the Abu Ghuraib prison; it is endemic in guerrilla warfare. Two phrases from the Franco-Algerian war of the 1950s-1960s tell it all and ring true today: “torture is to guerrilla war what the machine gun was to trench warfare in the First World War” and “torture is the cancer of democracy.” Guerrilla warfare and counter insurgency inexorably corrupt the very causes for which soldiers and insurgents fight. Almost worse, even in exhausted “defeat” for the one and heady “victory” for the other, they leave behind a chaos that spawns warlords, gangsters and thugs as is today so evident in Chechnya and Afghanistan. After half a century, Algeria has still not recovered from the trauma of its war of liberation against France. The longer the war in Iraq continues the more it will resemble the statement the Roman historian Tacitus attributed to the contemporary guerrilla leader of the Britons. The Romans, he said, “create a desolation and call it peace.”
The second option is "Vietnamization." In Vietnam, America inherited from the French both a government and a large army. What was needed, the Nixon administration proclaimed, was to train the army, equip it and then turn the war over to it. True, the army did not fight well nor did the government rule well, but they existed. In Iraq, America inherited neither a government nor an army. It is trying to create both. Not surprisingly, the results are disappointing. Most Iraqis regard the government as an American puppet. And the idea that America can fashion a local militia to accomplish what its powerful army cannot do is not policy but fantasy. It is true that in the days of their Iraqi empire, the British used such a force – composed of an ethnic minority, the Assyrians. But the British wisely used them only as auxiliaries to their army and air force. The Iraqi “Interim Government” has similarly used Kurds as auxiliaries to American forces. An Iraqi army is unlikely to fight insurgents with whom soldiers sympathize and among whom they have relatives. The best America might gain from this option is a fig leaf to hide defeat; the worst, in a rapid collapse, would be humiliating evacuation, as in Vietnam.
The third option is to choose to get out rather than being forced. Time is a wasting asset; the longer the choice is put off, the harder it will be to make. The steps required to implement this policy need not be dramatic, but the process needs to be affirmed and made unambiguous. The initial steps could be merely verbal. America would have first to declare unequivocally that it will give up its lock on the Iraqi economy, will cease to spend Iraqi revenues as it chooses and will allow Iraqi oil production to be governed by market forces rather than by an American monopoly. If President Bush could be as courageous as General Charles de Gaulle was in Algeria when he admitted that the Algerian insurgency had “won” and called for a “peace of the braves,” fighting would quickly die down in Iraq as it did in Algeria and in all other guerrilla wars. Then, and only then, could elections be meaningful. In this period, Iraq would need a police force but not an army. A UN multinational peacekeeping force would be easier, cheaper and safer than creating an Iraqi army which in the past destroyed moves toward civil society and probably would do so again, probably indeed paving the way for the “ghost” of Saddam Husain.
A variety of "service" functions would then have to be organized. Given a chance, Iraq could do them mostly by itself. It would soon again become a rich country and has a talented, well-educated population. Step by step, health care, clean water, sewage, roads, bridges, pipelines, electric grids, housing, etc. could be mainly provided by the Iraqis themselves, as they were in the past. When I visited Baghdad in February 2003 on the eve of the invasion, the Iraqis with whom I talked were proud that they had rebuilt the Tigris bridge that had been destroyed in the 1991 war. They can surely do so again.
In its own best interest, the Iraq government would empower the Iraq National Iraq Oil Company (NIOC) to award concessions by bid to a variety of international companies, each of which and NIOC would sell oil on the world market. Contracts for reconstruction paid for by Iraqi money would be awarded under bidding, as they traditionally were, but to prevent excessive corruption perhaps initially supervised by the World Bank. Where other countries supplied aid, they could be given preferential treatment in the award of contracts as is common practice elsewhere. The World Bank would follow its regular procedures on its loans. Abrogating current American policies that work against the recovery of Iraqi industry and commerce would spur development since any reasonably intelligent and self-interested government would emphasize getting Iraqi enterprises back into operation and employing Iraqi workers. That process could be speeded up through international loans, commercial agreements and protective measures so that unemployment, now at socially catastrophic levels, would be diminished. Neighborhood participation in running social affairs and providing security are old traditions in Iraqi society and allowing or favoring their reinvigoration would promote the excellent side effect of grass roots political representation. As fighting dies down, reasonable security is achieved and popular institutions revive, the one million Iraqis now living abroad will be encouraged to return home. In the aggregate they are intelligent, highly trained, and well motivated and can make major contributions in all phases of Iraqi life.
In such a program, inevitably, there will be set-backs and shortfalls, but they can be partly filled by international organizations. The steps will not be easy; Iraqis will disagree over timing, personnel and rewards while giving the process a chance will require American political courage. But, and this is the crucial matter, any other course of action would be far worse for both America and Iraq. The safety and health of American society as well as Iraqi society requires that this policy be implemented intelligently, determinedly and soon.
A former Member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Council, responsible for the Middle East, he was Professor of History at the University of Chicago and Founding-Director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His latest book, Understanding Iraq, will be published in March 2005. He is now the Senior Director of the W.P. Carey Foundation.
posted on November 8, 2004 07:42:18 AM new
Very good post Helen, however I fear that this new empire will have to learn the hard way.
When you have the blind leading the blind then you are heading for the cliff.
posted on November 8, 2004 08:29:05 AM new
Excellent reading, Helen. I keep thinking about viable solutions even though I know that I have absolutely no control over anything that will happen in Iraq. I fully realize that wars can last for many years but I'd just like this all to be over with or at the very least, not get any worse.
Everytime I see the pictures of the children there I can't help but think of how many years or generations it will take before they genuinely feel trust again and what the world can do to heal or try to repair all the damage that has been done, not only to the infrastructure but to the spirits of the Iraqi people.
If President Bush could be as courageous as General Charles de Gaulle was in Algeria when he admitted that the Algerian insurgency had “won” and called for a “peace of the braves,” fighting would quickly die down in Iraq as it did in Algeria and in all other guerrilla wars. Then, and only then, could elections be meaningful.
Somehow I can't see President Bush, who is a stubborn 'stay the course' man who can't even admit to any mistakes, doing something like that.
posted on November 8, 2004 09:07:43 AM new
Then, of course, there's always the good news about the progress that is occurring in Iraq....the news the left leaning media won't ever report....doesn't fit in with their agenda.
posted on November 8, 2004 09:16:03 AM new
Looks like OP will get their wish! Ain't life in Iraq grand!
Yup, our War-Monger-in-Chief has got his wish and carefully planned it for AFTER the election.
Fall in line everyone and remember SOMEBODY ELSE'S death is the ONLY way to liberty and freedom! War is the ONLY answer NOW!
Now we don't have to deal with those pesky things like diplomacy, thinking things through, negotiations, planning, funding........
Now it's KILL first and think later! What a wonderful country we live in!
Thousands of Troops Storm Fallujah
Updated 11:29 AM ET November 8, 2004
NEAR FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) - Thousands of U.S. Marines and Army troops punched their way on Monday into two Fallujah neighborhoods where insurgents are considered the strongest, kicking off a massive assault that seeks to put an end to half a year of insurgent control of the Sunni Muslim city.
The troops, backed by the 1st Cavalry Division's tanks and armor, swarmed into the city's northwestern Jolan district, the warren-like historic heart of Fallujah.
At the same time, some 4,000 troops, backed by the 1st Cavalry Division's tanks and armor, went into the northeastern Askari district.
The prelude to the assault was a crushing air and artillery bombardment of the city that rose to a crescendo by Monday evening, with U.S. jets dropping bombs around the clock and big guns pounding the city every few minutes with high-explosive shells.
The first punch came from just north of the city, where Marine Regimental Combat Team 1 _ more than 4,000 Marines and Army troops, along with Iraqi allies _ had been massed Sunday night.
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserv
posted on November 8, 2004 09:21:27 AM newThen, of course, there's always the good news about the progress that is occurring in Iraq....
The good news coming from Iraq must be in the same place that has all the great pictures of the Iraq reconstruction efforts.
Q. What's the difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War?
A. George W. Bush had a plan to get out of the Vietnam War.
-------------------------------
There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." —George W. Bush, Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002
---------------------------------- "Give it up for George W. Bush, the best friend international jihad ever had."
