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[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

[catman]

I guess they invaded the wrong country then. See Saudi Arabia

[Kuros]

[EFLtrainer]

[bigverne]

[laogaiguk]

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

[On the other hand]

[Gopher]

[EFLtrainer]

Resolution:

I am one that believes a nation should be able to make its own choices. If the desire to be out from under Saddam was so strong in Iraq, why didn't we do the usual, and far less incendiary, approach and arm and train the Kurds and Shiites? Ah! To avoid civil war!!! Fat lot of good that did. Ah, hindsight...

So, since we went to war to sate Bush's need to deal wth the immasculation of his poppa, what do we do now?

Exactly what we should have done before: let them settle it themselves. The questions must be asked:

1. Is civil war in iraq necessarily a bad thing in the long run? If the ultimate result is that the Kurds, Sunnis and Shias all decide to live separately ever after, might that not be a good thing? I mean, if we have civil war now, or nearly so, and all it is doing is engendering more ill will for the US, costing lives all around and bankrupting two nations, what's the point?

2. Is there any realistic chance that further US involvement will resolve things? If so, why is Dumbya already passing the torch to future administrations? How can that possibly be seen by the people of the ME as anything other than a modern-day Crusade? Seriously, is there even a slight chance ten years of occupation could be better than getting out as soon as possible and simply letting the chips fall where they may? They're going to anyway.

3. Why can't we ge out ASAP while providing a trust to assist with rebuilding regardless of who wins out in the end?

4. We then could concentrate on Afghanistan.... Oh, wait, we're accomplishing nothing there, either. Hmmm....

5. Ah, so we could pull out of both, saving massive amounts of money and lives, and reformulate the battle to what it should have been and what had worked for decades: using highly mobile and sophisticated small military units and high technology combined with focused and intense use of intelligence assets and police agencies to do search and destroy? Had we done this from the beginning we would have the support of virtually the entire planet and would have been far, far more effective in stopping, well, limiting terrorism and extremism. (But how do you successfully argue against extremists when your own president is an extremist?)

It is imperative that people understand there is no controllable outcome in Iraq. The naton was a Frankenstein from the beginning. Witness Yugoslavia. The roots of this go all the way back to WWI. (If you don't understand that, you may as well not be reading this thread because none of it will completely make sense to you.) Given that the Sunnis are deathly afraid of the retribution they expect from the Shiites, the Shiites simply wll never trust the Sunnis even if they don't seek retribution and that the Kurds are quite simply a distinct ethnicity that has suffered genocidal actions at the hands of Iraqis... well...

It is also imperative to understand we became a nation in no small part via guerilla warfare. Vietnam. Where a determined people seek freedom, or their version of it, "terrorism" is almost impossible to defeat. The Karens, a tiny tribal group in Myanmar, has been waging their battle since 1948, for example.

Thinking this can be done with massive offensive firepower ignores the history lessons taught in VietNam. Gee.. what a surprise. Once again we DON'T learn from history.

Anyway... blah, blah, blah...

Anyway, the upshot is that no matter how long we are there, the "Iraqi" people will eventually forge something of their own making. At this point it's a matter of ameliorating the damage we've already done.... much like Global Warming.

[EFLtrainer]

Critique this, because I'm sure Joo and gooph know oh so very much more than Zinni ever did about war:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5323611

Note: The Senate hearing described below occurs on February 11, 2003, a few weeks before the United States launched the Iraq war.

I had been called before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to give my views on the coming war. As I waited to be questioned, I listened to the testimony from the panel in front of me -- planners from the State and Defense Departments.

"Planners?" I thought with horror as I listened to them. "The planners have no plan. They're not thinking about what comes after we've invaded Iraq and taken Baghdad. Defeating the Republican Guard and taking the capital are what would traditionally define victory. But are the planners considering the complexities that go far beyond that?"

This was coming on top of what I'd already heard a few days earlier when the secretary of defense had announced that the original plan he had been presented was "old and stale." The plan he was referring to had been generated by CENTCOM. I had spent several years at CENTCOM, three of them as commander. I knew that plan and the ten years of planning and assessment that had gone into it by people who were actually familiar with Iraq and the region. It was a living plan. It not only took into account defeating Iraq's military forces, it took into account the aftermath.

I had also heard the secretary's deputy dispute the experienced Army chief of staff's estimate of the numbers of troops required. And I had heard interpretations of intelligence that many of us with deep experience in the region felt were far off the mark from the true threat.

Later, as the war did not progress as advertised, I heard the secretary of defense dismiss failures that had clearly resulted from poor or nonexistent planning by tossing off snappy quips ("stuff happens") or by quoting old military axioms ("No plan survives contact with the enemy"). Yet he had failed to grasp another military principle best expressed by General Dwight D. Eisenhower: "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."

Why was the Washington view so different from what we who had lived in and experienced this region for a decade saw and understood to be true?

"These so-called planners," I thought, "see the invasion of Iraq through their own narrow simplistic lens. They're thinking: ��The transformation of Iraq into a modern, democratic, capitalist society couldn't be easier: Once we've popped the cork and taken out Sad-dam, we're going to be welcomed with flowers in the streets. And then Iraq will self-order.'"

I knew they weren't seeing the aftermath.

"In my experience," I thought, "that's going to be a lot more difficult, complex, and destabilizing than they imagine. Taking Baghdad and removing the regime won't end the conflict."

After I took my seat in front of the committee, I tried to make this point.

In an earlier question, Senator Norman Coleman, the junior senator from Minnesota, had implied that Iraq would clearly be a better place without Saddam Hussein. Of course removing Saddam would be a plus; but I had a worrisome feeling that the situation in Iraq could actually become worse in many respects than it was under Saddam if we didn't plan and provide for a whole host of complex political, economic, security, humanitarian, ethnic, religious, and other factors that could complicate our efforts to reconstruct the country. I didn't sense in what I was hearing any accounting for these factors or anything like that level of planning. Removing Saddam would not put Iraq on automatic pilot headed for stability.

"I want to address the issue of 'anything is better than what we have,'" I said. "Senator Coleman, I would say that we threw the Soviets out of Afghanistan with the idea that, Soviets out -- got to be better than anything that can follow, and we left them with the Taliban eventually. So anyone who has to live in this region and has to stay there and protect our interests year in, year out, does not look at this as a start and end, as an exit strategy, as a two-year tenure. As long as you are going to have a U.S. Central Command, you are going to be out there and have to deal with whatever you put down on the ground."

I went on to explain to the committee not only the difficulty of what we were undertaking -- reconstructing a nation with complex problems -- but also how we would have to live with what we created or failed to create.

Starting a war unleashes a lot of kinetic energy. When you do that, you have to monitor that energy; you have to control it; you have to look hard at the effects you're going to generate in many different dimensions; and you have to look to the end result you want to achieve and how to get there. You also need to understand the costs and risks you face. When you pull the plug on a tyrant who controls all facets of life in a society, you have to be prepared to fill the vacuum. It doesn't neatly self-order. When you knock things out of balance, you've got to be prepared to put them back into balance; you have to know what it's going to take to put them back in balance. God knows what you're going to end up with if all you do is just launch the war and unleash the energy without thinking through these issues.

The warning from the foxhole is to take a deeper look at this world. Things are changing and we need to think through what those changes mean to us.

//

The issue is not that their intentions or the actions that follow from them are ill conceived. It's their lack of understanding of the complexity out there on the ground. They don't see what Clausewitz described as the "fog and friction" of war. They don't understand how this seemingly excellent cause can produce so many terrible effects... or how removing an evil tyrant -- whose existence is a major cause of instability in the region -- can unleash a chain of events that produces even more instability than he did.

//


Those blanket-strewn mountaintops I flew over many months after the airdrops continued to remind me of this.

The results, in this case, were more amusing than harmful. But the results of the soda-straw Washington view were not so benign following our invasion of Iraq in 2003; nor were they benign in Afghanistan after we pushed out the Soviets and left.

Note from poster: Did they learn NOTHING from Vet Nam and Afghanistan?

[Summer Wine]

[Nowhere Man]

[Summer Wine]

[EFLtrainer]