Posted on 03/20/2008 7:24:49 AM PDT by Delacon
For the record, I still believe that deposing Saddam was justified and useful. He was a Hitler, and he was our enemy. But I'm still reeling from the snotty incompetence with which the Bush administration acted. Above all, I'm ashamed that I trusted President Bush and his circle to have a plan for the day after Baghdad fell.
All of our other failures in Iraq stemmed from this fundamental neglect of a basic requirement: Our soldiers and Marines reached Baghdad without orders or strategic guidance. We became the dog that caught the fire truck. The tragedy is that it didn't have to be that way: One thing our military knows how to do is plan.
But the relevant staffs were prevented from doing so. Ideologues and avaricious friends of the administration wanted the war for their own reasons, and they didn't intend to alarm Congress with high cost estimates. So they trusted the perfumed tales of a convicted criminal, Ahmad Chalabi, rather than the professional views of the last honorable generals then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had not yet removed.
Even on the purely military side, the White House put its faith in hopeless gimmicks, such as "Shock and Awe," convincing itself that ground troops were an afterthought. Of course, it was the old-fashioned grunts, tankers, gunners and supply sergeants who had to get us to Baghdad.
Iraq just didn't have to be this hard.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Precisely. Opposition to the war wouldn’t have grown nearly as much if the immediate aftermath of the invasion hadn’t been to totally botched.
Ditto.
As an aside, the Bush administration came up with the clumsiest-sounding, most inarticulate names for military operations I have ever heard.
The problem for the left wasn't really what was done, but who did it. And hatred of Bush actually empowered him — the administration had no incentive to reach out to those who wouldn't reach back, so it just did as it pleased. Today's "antiwar" left also contains plenty of politicians who backed interventions in the Balkans and Somalia, who would be glad to send American troops to Darfur today and who voted for war in Iraq.
Both parties are quick to employ our military. It's the only foreign-policy tool we have that works. Neither party is a peace party — each just wants to pick its own wars. The hypocrisy in Washington is as astonishing as the dishonesty about security needs.
ping
Whining about the greatest success in the history of the armed forces of The United States of America.
Sheesh.
Stopped reading at “snotty incompetence”.
Suddenly everyone's an "expert" on geurilla warfare in a gigantic Middle Eastern country full of terrorists willing to kill themselves, their children, and families.
Oh, yes, and no CIC ever made mistakes in a War. Bush is the first. EEEEvvvil Bush.
That cost us many lives and billions of dollars.
Some people state that we couldn't deploy more troops immediately as it would have upset those in the ME who were somewhat on board with our actions. Appeasing neighboring muslim/arab nations who provided minimal help and such.
Others say that Donald Rumsfeld simply wouldn't follow the suggestions of those who said more troops were necessary.
I could come up with several other explanations, all equally speculative.
However the fact remains that we only turned the situation around after Rumsfeld was forced out of office and the right commanders were put in charge.
I have to ask: What was the delay in doing this from day one?
Certainly they may not have anticipated the level of difficulty they would have experienced from terrorist sponsored resistance. However once that discussion became verified fact, there should have been immediate action taken.
I'm not ready to condemn the administration for the war, however the execution of it bears scrutiny. Who got in the way? I mean other than the traitorous democrats.
Apparently they are gone now, and President Bush will have a triumphant victory in Iraq.
However his legacy will be questioned over the above concerns I have noted.
Had these problems been resolved sooner, who knows what might have been achieved in neighboring rogue nations. Perhaps the democrats might have never gained a foothold in congress, thusly crippling any future pursuit of this war on terror.
JMHO...
Oh, one more thing. This nation needs to begin executing people for high treason. The democrats have nurtured and comforted our enemies throughout this conflict and intentionally divided this nation for the sake of power.
They need to pay the price for their actions.
Rumsfeld was and is a bean counter. It was all about “doing it on the cheap” to prove that we wouldn’t have to spend billions and billions.
Outstanding article. Right on the money about Shinseki: he gave the administration the right answer about Iraq, and he was degraded for speaking the truth clearly.
We ALL now know that the 250,000 men Shinseki wanted on the ground to fight the war and maintain the peace would have been exactly the right answer.
I still find it hard to believe that we fell back into the “capture and depart” policy of Vietnam regarding enemy hotspots. It didn’t make sense then. I can’t think of a decent reason why it would ever make sense, assuming one were trying gradually to subdue an entire nation.
it is still my opinion that rumsfield and bush executed the war in just the right way to enable the killing of more jihadists than ever...
if we overwhelmed them, al-qada would have scattered like the roaches they are and infested a lot more areas. this plan, as limited and brainless as the mainstream media made it out to be, attracted the very best of the worse kind of people and allowed our brave men and women the opportunity to kill them, all of them.
jmho, of course.
teeman
“Both parties are quick to employ our military. It’s the only foreign-policy tool we have that works. Neither party is a peace party — each just wants to pick its own wars. The hypocrisy in Washington is as astonishing as the dishonesty about security needs.”
Hell, Obama would invade Pakistan.
Iraq must be assessed within the history of warfare, not within the fairyland mind-set of how liberals think wars should go! How many marines died at Iwo Jima? What was the one day casualty count at Antietam? There were many, many screw-ups that cost many lives and there were many great heroes and heroic acts. That's war.
I will disagree.
With Afghan and Iraq under our control, and with Libya rolling over as soon as they saw the American military’s power, there would have been no nation willing to harbor the Al Qaeda. The congressional authorization allowed Pres Bush to go after them wherever they went AND against any country that harbored them.
They frittered away every single bit of that momentum by allowing an insurgency to get legs in Iraq.
Remember: It took only 4 years to win WWII. We’ve been at the low intensity conflict side of this for 5 years now.
With nations on notice that they would be toppled if necessary, Al Qaeda would have been able to run, but they wouldn’t have been able to hide.
Peters is right. Shinseki was right. Our ground troops were right.
“But I’m still reeling from the snotty incompetence with which the Bush administration acted. Above all, I’m ashamed that I trusted President Bush and his circle to have a plan for the day after Baghdad fell.”
Oh, they had a plan, just not the right one. However, anyone who knows ANYTHING of military history knows that almost NO PLAN survives contact with reality in a military conflict. THERE IS NO PERFECT PLAN. Only armchair generals think that there might be.
No war and occupation of this scale has EVER been run for as long with as much success and as few losses compared to former conflicts. The problem is that nothing less than perfection would have been acceptable to the armchair generals and the anti-American left.
Has the left used these failings for their benefit, to the detriment of America, Iraq, the troops, and the civilians caught in the middle? You bet. But that’s what the treasonous left does. See, e.g., Vietnam.
Were there mistakes? Yes, BUT THAT IS THE NATURE OF WAR.
I’m not minimizing the price our brave servicemembers have paid. Each loss is awful. But unfortunately, as I said, this is the nature of war. Could it have been done better? ABSOLUTELY. Could it have been done worse? Well, just about every military conflict before this one (except Gulf War I) WAS DONE WORSE. Draw your own conclusions. But this whining about Bush and his failings serves NO REAL PURPOSE.
Yes wars are always fought with massive mistakes. US torpedoes during WW2, the flying fortress, etc. But no, one should always be critical of how or if wars are fought. We owe the future soldiers that much.
I’ll agree with most of Peters’ points. I’m still amazed that Bush and Rumsfeld didn’t have all the contingency plans in the world for what happened after Baghdad was taken.
But for Peters to say that Bush is the most inept war-time president since Madison is a bit over the top.
Peters was around for LBJ’s Vietnam experience: deciding his tactics based on opinion surveys and popularity polls. He must have been aware of JFK’s acquiescence to the toppling of the old Vietnam regime — and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, leaving Cuba and brave Cuban freedom fighters to be slaughtered and consigned to living in slavery for 50 years. JMHO.
“But no, one should always be critical of how or if wars are fought. We owe the future soldiers that much.”
VERY good point. However, I took the article as more of a BDS rant than an honest analysis of how the war was fought and what lessons could be learned from the mistakes (other than “Bush Sucks”).
And it only took 3 weeks to win Iraq.
We might have gone in with more troops. It may well have been different, but I don't think it necessarily would have been better. More boots on the ground in a counterinsurgency also means more targets.
It's not unfair at all to suggest that the surge worked when it happened, but had it happened early and in more force that the Iraqi people would not have been as ready to turn the corner and take sides *with* us rather than not. It was the change that happened in the hearts and minds that changed things on the ground. It wasn't merely the extra troops, it was the commitment that the surge demonstrated, that showed they could trust us not to leave them to the wolves.
IMHO.
You can look at all past major wars and find major foul ups in every single one of them. I guess this one was supposed to be different because.....?
“Were there mistakes? Yes, BUT THAT IS THE NATURE OF WAR.”
Agreed.
It is not an excuse, simply fact.
“I took the article as more of a BDS rant than an honest analysis of how the war was fought and what lessons could be learned from the mistakes (other than “Bush Sucks”).”
Well any critique of a war is practically by definition a critique of the president who presides over it. I don’t think any war has ever been initiated over the objections of the president in office. Bush is the leader. He has to take his lumps even if Iraq turns out the be the most successful campaign in US history. Aside from that, I think the one area that this article doesn’t cover and should is by not pointing the finger at us, the citizenry. No president can conduct a war as effectively as he should because the American people have set standards that make quick in and out campaigns the only politically exceptable option. We aren’t the same people of WW2 fame. No sacrifice is to little these days.
bttt
“It is not an excuse, simply fact.”
Sounds to me like an excuse. Just because wars are by their very nature chaotic and filled with mistakes, doesnt mean we should overlook the mistakes. A fair assessment is in order. I will agree that saying Bush is the worst wartime president in history is as one poster said “over the top”.
To all of you Bush haters out there: Terrorists including alQaeda, from all over the world have been flocking to Iraq to fight the U.S. Military. Is that a bad thing?
take your time...
Never said overlook the mistakes. Simply accept that will happen and learn from them. But each war is unique. Thus.. mistakes will be made everytime to varying degrees.
IMHO
Hindsight is great isn’t it. Makes you look sooo much smarter than the people that actually have to do the job in the first place.
It’s kinda funny how Ralph Peters was considered a highly competent authority on the Iraq military campaign among many folks here on FreeRepublic when he was a consistent supporter of the administration for the first 3-4 years after the invasion of Iraq, but he’s suddenly become something of a pariah among some of us now that he doesn’t toe the party line so much anymore.
I admit that my only frustration with the Iraq war was that no one was tasked with winning the peace.
See the war only lasted 28 days. The MSM keeps refering to our “ongoing war in Iraq” and that’s a false statement. We are not at war with Iraq. We already won that war...in 28 days.
What we didn’t do is finish the war with a cohesive plan to win the peace, which is the harder task in the grand scheme of things.
We would have been well served to take some of the lessons from the end of the axis powers and applied them. Even that would have been an improvement to what we did do.
At the end of the day though the people of Iraq now have the ability to decide their own fate which is something that they havent had for over 50 years. So I dont regret us going in there.
What I see is a problem is the American public expecting war/military action to wrap up neatly like a 30-minute sitcom with absolutely no mistakes and no casualties, and costing very little money. They want it gone and done away with so they can just “go back to normal.” We’re used to getting what we want fast and quickly, with minimal fuss.
When this whole thing started five years ago, I remember telling a co-worker that I had no doubt we would overthrow Saddam Hussein fairly quickly. Arabs are terrible at modern conventional warfare. The tricky part, I said, was going to be stabilizing the country.
The Bush administration DID make mistakes. But it certainly wasn’t helped by the Democratic party or the MSM, which was determined to see us fail in Iraq for partisan reasons. The constant carnage reports and “we can’t win” mantras demoralized the public and emboldened the terrorists for two years. The Bush administration should’ve done more to communicate with the public about our objectives and remind people of why we’re there in the first place, and why it’s important to win. But it would’ve had to shout over the heads of the news media, pop stars, Hollywood, etc..
“It’s kinda funny how Ralph Peters was considered a highly competent authority on the Iraq military campaign among many folks here on FreeRepublic when he was a consistent supporter of the administration for the first 3-4 years after the invasion of Iraq, but he’s suddenly become something of a pariah among some of us now that he doesn’t toe the party line so much anymore.”
Well said.
To me, that was a clear indication that the military campaign and post-invasion occupation of Iraq was, in fact, costing this country far more than anyone in Washington was willing to admit, and was an ominous warning about what was certain to become a massive increase in monetary inflation in this country. Some astute Freeper(s) have pointed out that the real rate of monetary inflation in this country is now somewhere on the order of 18% -- which makes the "official" inflation data published by the Federal government downright comical.
In defense of the Pentagon, I should point out that they really didn't have much of a choice in the matter. They were given a completely unrealistic task to accomplish (in terms of both manpower needs and financial costs), and they basically had to make do with what they had.
“Well any critique of a war is practically by definition a critique of the president who presides over it.”
Granted, and that would be acceptable. But the words “snotty incompetence” don’t comport with an objective analysis — it’s just bashing.
Anyone who thinks our expectations for a stable post-invasion Iraq are completely unrealistic should remember that it was people in the Bush administration who made these predictions, not us.
My hesitation about supporting the invasion of Iraq turned into outright opposition back in late 2002 or early 2003 when I watched a television interview in which U.S. Department of Defense official Richard Perle responded to a suggestion that the troop levels under consideration at the time were extremley insufficient -- by suggesting that the U.S. didn't even need ground troops at all. From that point forward it was clear to me that this adminstration was filled with @ssholes who had no idea what the hell they were doing.
“Granted, and that would be acceptable. But the words “snotty incompetence” don’t comport with an objective analysis — it’s just bashing.”
Well Ralph Peters is a editorial journalist(who are not known for their quiet reserve). He isn’t a historian and even historians often stray from “objective analyis”. But when future historians put pen to paper and want to find a good gage of American frustration with Bush and the Iraq war, they might find this article a good reference.
. . . because countless people in the Bush administration made it very clear that it would be different?
Notice that I said we’ve been at the LOW INTENSITY side of this for 5 years. We were at WWII for only the 4 years. There was no lingering low-intensity conflict going on being the Germans or the Japanese. They each unconditionally surrendered.
There is every reason to think that 100,000 more boots on the ground would have prevented the insurgency from getting off the ground. For one, the experienced military commanders BEFORE THE WAR, who had no political ax to grind at that time, said so.
I’ve taken a lot of grief over the years for standing up for Shinseki, but he was a good general, and his ideas prevailed. The surge proves it.
There’s no good reason for spilling blood the THIRD time to take the same hill. If it’s such an important hill, then KEEP the frick-frackin’ hill. (Ramadi, Samarra...)
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the fact that there was a detailed plan for the post-victory administration of Iraq, and that Jerry Bremer threw it out entirely. Now why he wasn’t immediately sacked and someone put in who would enact the plan, I have no idea.
I've been saying that for a long time, too. The Dem and MSM support for the war, such as it was, became opposition the day Bush flew onto that carrier, with a great backdrop, and gave a good speech announcing the end of "major combat operations". They saw a Republican triumphant, and riding a wave that would create dominance for a long time, and they fought back with everything they had, to deflate the glory. Well, "Mission Accomplished", they did it. It took several years of ceaseless, negative, pissy stories, day after day after day, but eventually, they people wore down, and they said "enough of this war." They just weren't smart enough to realize that they said "enough" because the MSM conditioned them to get tired of it, not because it was all that horrible or unsustainable.
There were many problems with the Bush Administration's handling of Iraq after the successful defeat of Iraq's Army, but truth be told, they had fewer mistakes and less costly ones than Dems did in places like Normandy and Vietnam. Those Dems just didn't have an antogonistic press sniping at every decision, small and large.
Of course, this goes hand in hand with his failure to clean out the State Dept. in the first place. Had it been a decent set of foreign policy experts, headed by a Jeanne Kirkpatrick or a John Bolton with a group of young, conservative intellectuals doing the policy work, we could potentially have trusted the Dept. But we instead had Powell, that bald sucker Armitage and a bunch of people who claimed expertise, but were just Dem and leftist hacks.
You're just reaffirming the point that mistakes are made. Yes, mistakes were made by the Bush administration. More important, more right actions are making the war/peace winnable.
Right. That’s why they shouldn’t have even been there the FIRST time if the United States wasn’t going to make the necessary commitments to “keep that hill.”
You forgot Anzio, the Hedgerows and even Gallipoli in WWI. Our side failed to plan all of those properly, and won both of those wars because we did not quit.
Ain't that the truth.
Rumsfeld isn't some short-sighted bozo and this war hasn't been a surprise to those who are waging it.
The Administration rightly realized a draft would be not only counter-productive in this modern age of warfare, but the country would not stand for it.
Five years is a long time, and people are understandably tired of spending one-half trillion dollars on something that has seemed to bring them less prosperity and $4/gallon gas prices.
Four hundred thousand Americans died in four years in WWII. Four thousand Americans died in five years fighting in Iraq.
There is still only one superpower on this planet and it continues to be our home address. I don't believe this remains true because this government makes strategic mistakes.
Creating expectations at home doesn’t change the unique problems each war creates.
Bush should listen to the Generals, I feel he did.
But even Lincoln had to struggle there too.
Personally, I myself thought that we would have had far more troops killed, and that things would be farther along by now.
So it is taking longer then I expected, but far less have died then I expected.
But again, nobody has ever done anything like this before on this kind of scale. It is the first time.
sure there are parallels with other wars, but this one is incredibly unique because of the nature of the enemies.
I also think the Iraqis had to become war weary.
It took suffering under the islamo facists for a while for that to sink in. I dontthink the surge would have worked until that happened.
stressing that is just my opinions, I am no military expert. But I think I am not too far off.
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