NY Times (via Drudge): Iraq Insurgency Self-Sustaining

[rfp1234]

--Yet (leftists) undermine the war against terrorism at every turn, they oppose the Patriot Act, they oppose international telephone surveillance, they oppose vigorous interrogation, they oppose incarceration, to list just a few. Why?--

a) They are blinded by perverted goals (e.g. destruction of Israel, dismantling Christianity) which they share with the Jihadists.

b) They believe that intellectual socialism is the pinnacle of human achievement, and that the Jihadists will see the light and lay down their arms, once they've been exposed to its glory.

c) They are DEEPLY disturbed and delusional.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Al-Qaeda Attacks Sadr City, Tal Afar

*************************AN EXCERPT *************************

Attacks not only aimed at escalating the violence, but are directed at the will of the American public

The carnage in Sadr City. Click image to view.

On Thanksgiving Day, al-Qaeda in Iraq pulled off a well planned, coordinated attack against Muqtada al-Sadr's base of power. Five car bombs and two mortars stuck markets in Sadr city, while a platoon-sized element raided the Ministry of Health, which is run by Sadr's political block. Over 200 have been killed and hundreds more wounded in Sadr City. The Mahdi Army hit back with a mortar barrage on the Sunni dominated neighborhood of Adhamiyah. Up to 20 Iraqis were killed in the attack.

The Maliki government responded by imposing a curfew on Baghdad, shutting down traffic in the city on the day of prayer, to prevent further retaliatory attacks. The airports in Baghdad and Basra have been closed. Sadr and other Iraqi political and religious leaders have called for calm, but the Shia have responded. The Mahdi Army attacked four Sunni mosques in the Hurriya district of Baghdad. The Iraqi Army is said to have intervened to stop the attacks, and Reuters reports “least 18 people had been killed and 24 wounded.” Sadr's political block has threatened to withdraw from the government if Prime Minister Maliki meets with “the terrorist,” President Bush.

The timing of the Sadr City attacks must immediately be called into question. Al-Qaeda had duel objectives with this attack: 1) push the Iraqi people closer towards civil war by forcing Sadr to escalate the violence

******************************************************

2) give the American public topics of discussion at the Thanksgiving Day table. The 'failure' of the U.S. effort in Iraq and the hopelessness of containing the violence was al-Qaeda's messages to the American public.

********************************************************

Today, al-Qaeda sent another message. The city of Tal Afar was hit by two suicide bombers. Over 22 were killed and 26 wounded. Tal Afar has been called a model Iraqi city by President Bush, and the mayor has praised American troops and the president for ridding the city of al-Qaeda. Press reports often note this fact, without pointing out al-Qaeda's motivations for hitting Tal Afar.

[rfp1234]

--I am coming to the conclusion that the elites in the left are not purblind, not the misguided victims of their own worldview, but cynical high-stakes gamblers who risk plunging themselves and us into a new dark age if it will enhance their own chances to rule.--

Very well stated. I agree, and would just add that the Clintons and the Sorocrats are at an even deeper level of cynicism. They see the leftist elites as THEIR own useful idiots.

[Brad from Tennessee]

What's the source of this map? I notice the initials at the bottom have been defaced.

[nathanbedford]

Dr: Here is something I posted before the election, before the people repudiated the war as it is being waged, before 250 people were blown up, before Drudge tells us that the "Insurgents" are running their war in the black,:

Before the invasion I wrote that "God help me" I wanted the invasion to begin as soon as possible before the inspection regime or the French could so undermine the administration that the war could not be started.

Unlike these treacherous neocons, I will admit that I was wrong. In my own defense I can say, for what it's worth, that I was never seduced by the idea of imposing Wilsonian democracy on Iraq, although I of course would not have spurned it, but I saw the war in what I arrogantly believed were grown up and real world considerations of geopolitics. I wanted forward bases in the Mideast from which to strike at Syria and Iran if intimidation alone did not work. I wanted us to get all our hands on the oil fields to deprive Muslim terrorists of petrodollars with which to buy weapons of mass destruction. I wanted us to demonstrate to the Muslim world that no leader could sleep safe if he played a double game with America. I wanted to so intimidate the Muslim world with our military prowess that they themselves would turn against the terrorists in their midst because I believed, and still believe, that the only way we ultimately can win this war is to turn the sane Muslims against the crazies. And, of course, I wanted a regime change as the only effective defense against WMD's in Iraq. My mistake, and I believe Bush's, was to underestimate the tenacity of the Muslim belief system and to see the war in a two dimensional geographical box, like a game of checkers, where squares were to be taken and held.

Not only was I wrong but the result has been calamitous and every one of the "strategic" reasons for waging war in Iraq have been stood on its head. I suspect that the main reason there has been no terrorist attack on the heartland is because Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, as well as Iran, are quite content to see America founder in Iraq. Iran, likewise, is the big winner from all of this as it moves closer to upsetting the entire balance of power in the Middle East when it acquires the bomb and perhaps fashions a Shi'ite Crescent running the Mediterranean Sea. I believe my error came out of the false understanding of the nature of the global intergenerational war against terrorism: that somehow it was a war which could be conceived of in geographical terms. It is not-- although if it is lost the ultimate impact will be geographical. This is a war for the soul of Islam and we must not lose our own souls before we can save theirs.

Perhaps the very worst legacy of this whole Irak tragedy is that we are a daily demonstrating to the world that we are presently incapable of winning asymmetrical wars of terrorism. The Israelis just proved that in Lebanon. The people in Afghanistan are beginning to understand it. The tide in the Muslim world is rising against us as their fear drains away. So the goal of saving the soul of Islam has been made more elusive.

To compound the catastrophe, the "socialist" world of Cuba and Venezuela, Russia and China can read the daily events in Iraq and are emboldened as they have not been since the first Iraq war and seem eager to make mischief 1960s style.

Meanwhile, we've increased the danger of losing our own soul as defined as the will to win. Western Europe already lacks it and half of America possesses an anemic red blood count. Another tragedy of the Iraq war might will be to cause the installation of a Democrat regime in America which will align itself with the appeasers in Europe and so fatally succumb to jihad. The danger is as near as next Tuesday when, if the Republicans suffer a stinging repudiation of the polls, Bush might be left in as feckless a state as Gerald Ford was during the final pathetic agony of Vietnam.

Our dilemma is that we cannot win in Iraq and we cannot abandon it. We cannot win until we learn how to fight asymmetrical insurgencies against our occupation. We show no evidence that we have any idea how to do this at a price America is willing to pay. The training up of Iraqi forces, especially the police, is clearly a failure. So we are mired in a situation that spills our blood and empties our treasury and turns our friends against us. Meanwhile, the existential threat against America, represented by Iran's possession of a nuclear weapon which it passes off to terrorists to explode in the heartland, grows daily closer to reality. Our efforts in Iraq have so attenuated our military force that we probably cannot mount an invasion and air power alone probably cannot interdict Iran's nuclear program. This is well known to the whole world and especially to Iran so our ability to intimidate the Iranians into good behavior has bled into the sands of Iraq along with the Bush Doctrine.

Soon it will be fashionable even in conservative circles to blame Bush just as the neocons now are doing so ignominiously. My belief is that the miscalculation was to presume that the Iraqis, read Muslims, would behave rationally when presented with the opportunity for self-determination and democracy. It is not really that we made fatal tactical military mistakes in Iraq which we can lay at the feet of Bush or Rumsfeld, rather it is the nature of the traditional Muslim society that caused all of this bloodshed to be inevitable. Iraq has revealed that America has no stomach for the pain which must be endured to see such a traditional Muslim society through to Western democratic values.

Asymmetrical warfare works against armies of occupation but these tactics do not work against 21st-century Blitzkrieg, American-style. I fear that the American military will engage in another Vietnam style soul-searching and draw the wrong conclusion, that military force does not work at all in the war against terrorism. I am tempted, therefore, to argue that it was the occupation and not the war itself which was the bridge too far. After Iraq, I am humble enough to admit and perhaps it is I who misses the lesson.

I am well aware that new military adventures will be virtually impossible to sell until the inevitable happens: a strike is made against the homeland. If Al Qaeda strikes with anything less than a mortal blow, ie. a series of nuclear explosions, America might yet be able to find its finest hour. But strike it must if Al Qaeda intends fulfill its ambitions. God grant that they settle for half a loaf with an intensity level not exceeding 911.

We must fashion a new policy, a new strategy for winning this intergenerational worldwide war against a portion of 1.4 billion Muslims who inhabit the earth. We must turn rational Islam against this jihad or we will perish because we will rot from the inside out or we will simply surrender after our cities are turned into glass. We cannot hope to prevail if we eschew all military operations as ultimately counterproductive. We must find what works. Above all, we must not lose our soul.

[Brad from Tennessee]

Well said. I know Vietnam was a different conflict but the best program we had there involved recruiting local police detectives off the streets of America and sending them to Vietnam. Working with the U.S. and South Vietnamese military these guys helped to identify and eradicate the Viet Cong and their infrastructure by 1968. This was Operation Phoenix. Of course the North Vietnamese filled this vacuum but that was not the fault of William Colby and his program.

[nathanbedford]

There is a wonderful scene from Batman in which the Cat Lady is about to fall to her death from the roof and must let go of her bag of loot and take Batman's hand to be saved but she cannot do it, her greed forbids it and so she falls to her death.

[The Old Hoosier]

It's from the Wikipedia link posted above by MN Johnnie.

[Sword_Svalbardt]

Where are they getting their arms, food, and money for operations? If they are not providing said same - they are not self sustaining.

SS

[Sword_Svalbardt]

They should, and Bush should have done what Roosevelt did during WWII - remove the credentials of each member of the press, and have them wait in D.C. for the press releases, or have them on the front - embedded, and dying - see Earnie Pyle for example.

SS

[Brad from Tennessee]

This is the original source. It offers an objective assessment of what's going on in Iraq:

http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/pdfs/Security-Stabilty-ReportAug29r1.pdf

[Garvin]

We didn't give them freedom, we are giving them the means to attain it.

[Almondjoy]

While we can argue that some of the mission objectives were wrong in the war. It's clear that the only reason we didn't wage war like we suppose to was because the American hating left would yell and scream until the middle came to their side.

It is Vietnam all over again. The objective didn't fail. The policy might be flawed in some aspects. But what did us in is that our citizens have failed us.

[nathanbedford]

I posted this days ago

It seems to be validated by the course of events: 250 people blown away yesterday; calls on these threads for more troops when Gen. Abazaid has just testified we cannot even sustain 20,000! The reality is the voters have spoken, the debate about Iraq now is now only about cosmetics. Here is my post, sorry for the length:

Now we conservatives are left with nothing but to proceed through the seven stages of mourning in an attempt to accept, integrate, and rationalize the loss of the war in Iraq.

Some posters are still in the denial stage, they advocate continuing the fight. These are the candidates for matriculation into the "stab in the back" rationalization for the loss which many other posters or already exhibiting. These blame either "Democrats"-a remarkable conclusion in view of the fact that we Republicans have been a control of the federal government throughout-or the press. Even more remarkably, many posters blame The People themselves.

Symptomatic of the state of mind, in which those of us (yes I include myself) who originally were so ardent for the war, now seek to place responsibility elsewhere. For example, everyone delights in giving Pat Buchanan the back of his hand when Buchanan is one of the few conservatives who has earned the absolute right to stand up on his hind legs and look the movement in the eye and say, "I told you so." I at least will say it, "Pat Buchanan, you were right and I was wrong."

We compare the mess in Iraq to the defeat in Vietnam. We conclude that you cannot fight and win a politically correct war that we must unleash the military from the structures laid upon them by the politicians. We forget that it was the policy of this Republican administration to give the military what it asked for and the serving officers have stated publicly that they always got what they asked for. Putting aside the contentiousness over general Shinschecki's view that more troops would be required, it does appear that the military got everything it asked for.

Many of us on this thread seem to instinctively recognize (although they have yet not articulated it exactly) the real root of the matter: when attempting to suppress asymmetrical resistance ("insurgency") to an occupation, the inferior indigenous enemy has one great advantage, he can always ratchet up the violence one more step. This means that the occupying force must always be a half step behind unless it is willing to leapfrog the progression and employ indiscriminate, brutal suppression of innocent and guilty alike.

There is no question that the United States was quite prepared to leapfrog into such brutality in the occupation of Germany and Japan and the occupied peoples damn well knew it. The bombings which destroyed city after city in both countries proved that beyond any doubt. There was not a man or woman, boy or girl, in America in 1945 who did not believe that the Germans and Japanese, every single one of them, deserved everything they got. But this reservoir of anger is not available to an occupying power who has just invaded in a war of choice which was the case in both Vietnam and Iraq. In such an occupation in a war of choice, the public simply will not stand for brutality even on a limited scale and the reactions to Abu Ghraib prove that. If the occupying power is condemned by its own people for conducting what amounts to little more than fraternity hijinks at Abu Ghraib, how, as one poster has advocated, can you "B-52 Falluja" ?

All of these problems were infinitely compounded when it was shown that the original reason for the war in the first place, the alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, was misplaced. It matters not that Saddam, having effectively evaded the sanctions, and on the verge of breaking free of them entirely, would have used his petrodollars to buy them as soon as he had wholly evaded scrutiny. It matters only that the air went out of the balloon. The alternative justification for the war, the granting of democracy to the Iraqis, will carry the American people only so far, just as it did in Vietnam. It will not carry them through even very limited casualties if, as was the case in the last election, they do not see a light at the end of the tunnel.

So we have two kinds of wars: wars of national survival such as those waged against the axis and recognized to be such, and wars of choice. The last election demonstrates that the public no longer believes, if it ever did, that the war in Iraq is a war for national survival as part of a general war against terrorism or more precisely, Islamist terrorism. As the public began to regard the war in Iraq is a war of choice, the options of the administration and especially the grace period accorded to it by the public became very limited. In fact, George Bush is very very lucky that the clock did not run out on him for the last election. But a war of choice such as occurred in Iraq has two separate identifiable phases: the invasion and the occupation. No one can argue that the invasion was not a stunning triumph of American arms and gained us geopolitical advantage throughout the world in places like Libya and Pakistan and even Syria. The American public was unwavering in its support throughout this phase. It is only in the occupation phase that the American support ebbed away.

Up until now there was not much point in attacking America while we were squandering our resources in Iraq, permitting Iran to become closer and closer to the bomb, alienating our allies, emptying our treasury, attenuated our force of men and matériel to the point where we could not, according to General Abazaid's testimony, sustain an increase of 20,000 Marines in Iraq, dividing our nation domestically, and demonstrating emphatically to the entire Muslim world that we cannot cope with phase 2 of a war of choice, the occupation phase, at a price which Americans are willing to pay. Better both for Iran and for Al Qaeda to let America continue down that path while they peel away our allies in Western Europe.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1743696/posts

[processing please hold]

We didn't give them freedom, we are giving them the means to attain it.

So, you're saying they were free under saddam. He wasn't a dictator. We bled for their freedom they do not appreciate. Three hundred thousand Iraqi troops and they can't pull their country together. If they can't do it now-they never will.

[sgtyork]

You posted a six month old map, old hoosier. Don't you have anything more current? Or do you want to emphasize the negative?

[PghBaldy]

Thank you for the laugh. In a bad mood for several reasons and your post lightened my mood.

[processing please hold]

I've been going over in my mind when I have ever agreed with him about anything, and, I keep coming up dry. But, I will say this, his cuttin' and pastin' has vastly improved. :-)

[woofie]

glad to be of service

[PghBaldy]

3 3/4 years is not an instant.