Would there be consequences?
Well, it would be nice if Iraq turned around because of this, but that is not the primary goal. The primary goal is to protect the long term health of Americans, in which the military has been highly successful.
And this American (kidd) is highly grateful.
I'm impressed by how stoically the volunteer troops take this extension. In the conscript early '70's type of Army I was in it would have been a morale disaster (but we weren't too far from a morale disaster even on our good days).
This is the key sentence in the whole email. I lean to the "symptom" thinking. Of course, we're asking a bunch of nomadic tribesmen to advance about 500 years in thinking in a year.
As for the bitching about staying longer than expected, that's normal. If I had been told I was getting out of that sewer of a country then got stopped at the last minute, I'd be pretty p*ssed.
Iraqi society is sick in many ways. Sometimes it's hard to tell if Saddam was the problem or the symptom. I just don't know how a society so divided along ethnic and tribal lines, with no democratic or liberal traditions and almost zero respect for the rule of law can build any kind of society accept and autocratic one.
Sounds an awful lot like Yugoslavia, doesn't it? It's astonishing to me that we're still reaping the "benefits" of the political rearrangements that followed the First World War.
I've heard this a lot in the last couple of weeks, and I'm reminded of the situation just before the I Drang battle in Vietnam. There were men in Col. Moore's group who were close to being finished with their tour of duty. Rather than extend their tour, the Army brought in new men who didn't have time to get trained and up to speed before being shipped off. It is believed that the lack of experience of some of those men made the battle more difficult than it need have been. Am I remember this right, AR? I seem to remember having read this in Col. Moore's book.
Experience is a wonderful, though sometimes tough, teacher, and the fact that these men on the ground now HAVE lots of it helps when dealing with a flare up like Fallujah. Imagine the dog's breakfast it could have been with all new troops. They could rotate new folks in a few at a time to get them up to speed and rotate the other guys out slowly. In fact, I believe the military is doing something like that now. There are new folks in who are learning the ropes, so to speak, and the ones who've been there a long time will be coming home.
But we have to remember, this is war, and things don't always go as planned, so our folks have to be flexible. It seems the media is under the impression that the war is over, so that's why they're so incensed about American soldiers continuing to die. It ain't over folks. The President announce that MAJOR operations were over last year, and he was right. We're no longer having to fight all over the entire country. We can now concentrate on the hot spots and deal with the terrorists who are coming in from all over the Middle East; something else the partisan media is mentioning. These are not just Iraqis we're fighting.
Thanks for posting this soldier's email. I would humbly submit this as an exhibit in the case for those of us who opposed the war with Iraq from the get go. Contrary to the claims against us that we were anti Americans, terrorists, appeasers, isolationists, etc. what we were was consistent to conservative and libertarian understanding of failures of central planning and the dangers of ideologues. Ideologues start with grandiose ideas and build upon them. When reality conflicts with the basic tenets of their faith they dismiss reality, those unrepentant communists around the world for example. This is why some of us have disagreed with neoconservatives. They are central planners and ideologues. They had an idea for transforming the middle east and indeed the world. From the start their critics predicted this mess in Iraq. They predicted the need for large amounts of troops to pacify the country after the military was defeated. In fact the generals in the pentagon took issue with the neocon civilian authorities and were harshly slapped down by Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, et. al. In summary everything the neocons predicted has failed to materialize and everything their critics said has come true. The cost has been heavy in blood, treasure and American prestige. Unfortunately the ideologues have learned nothing from failure and wish only to invade more Arab countries - preventative war you know - making the world safe for democracy, etc.
P.S. I'd like to add that those of us on the right who criticized the invasion of Iraq always thought the reasons for the war were fraudulent.