[Yardstick]

There was a good sized thread on this article here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1218593/posts

[Thebaddog]

The point of it all in my opinion, is and was to go in there and kick some ass and stay a while. The Arabs all read us to be weak when Clinton didn't act or when we pulled out after short missions. When the new point is made, then a withdrawal could be in order with the clear message that we could return again and that our foot is on their throat always. Power is all that matters to that world. Raw power.

[zkbeta51]

I think it was a mistake to not send massive firepower like in gulf war 1, but, the military was trying more of a surgical war, causing less collateral damage. The military is also trying new tactics to make the ground forces more agile. I think it worked well, but others disagree. As for going to Iraq in the first place, that is a lost cause argument from the left. We were right, they are wrong.

[A CA Guy]

We were obligated to go in on the facts that Saddam had contact with terrorists training them in camps there and was a terrorist himself. Not only to his people with mass graves, but especially because the terrorist Saddam financed terror in Israel at $25,000 to the family of each bomber.

[mammer]

what was this guys name again?

[TADSLOS]

The question needs re-phrasing. It should be "Is our mission in Iraq failing?", since it's still a work in progress.

The answer is no, it's not.

[quidnunc]

This paragraph is a dead giveaway:

• The neocon objectives for restructuring Iraq into a functioning model democracy were a bridge too far. They were never realistic.

Arnaud de Borchgrave is a paleocon whom the world has largely passed by.

[Moconservative]

I think that what you see here is John Kerry's viewpoint on Iraq being put forth as the truth. My questions would be who are these European military experts? Are they the French and the Germans? Do they have an ax to grind against the United States? Wars are not won by the editors of newspapers and magazines. Their opinions are just opinions and that is it. I think President was up front and said this would not be easy. I think when the going gets tough the liberal media wants to run. That type of philosophy does not work in the real world only in the halls of academia

[familyop]

"Off the record conversations with intelligence chiefs..."

Ah, Yom Kippur--the day the Euro-Nazi identity groups bubbled up in America.

De Borchgrave should go back to Russia, the Rump of Yugoslavia, southern Europe or wherever he's trying to come from. We were on the right track in Iraq, and we're on the right track with doing something about Iran.

And that's the way it's going to be, whether Iran's allies to its north, its east and lurking here on our soil like it or not.

[Nick Danger]

Fundamentally, this article is about whether Iraq is the right laboratory in which to create the 21st-Century Islamic country. The author basically agrees that such a thing is needed; he's just making the usual Kerryesque comments about how such a task ought to be a "global effort" and how, to defeat terrorism, we must attack the "root causes."

Well, turning Iraq into a 21st-Century Islamic country is an effort to attack the root causes. Looming in the background of all this is the horrifying truth that if that there is not some demonstration that life can be better than living under some despot who blames Israel and The West for all of life's problems, we are going to end up having to nuke these people — all billion of them — to keep ourselves safe from rogue nukes and poison gas.

I don't know if Iraq is the right laboratory for this demonstration; nobody does. But it was a reasonable choice, and we are making halfway-decent progress towards creating a place where Moslems can feel they have some ownership over what is happening and how their government behaves. Yes, this is new to them, and the average Mohammad in the street is still a bit baffled by the whole idea. In Iraq, he also sees various factions attempting to become the new despotic rulers — a system he understands pretty well and is familiar with. What he knows is that if any of them win, he had better not be on record as opposing them.

President Bush was very clear at the beginning that this was going to be a long, hard struggle. Bush's political opposition chooses to use the term "quagmire" to describe that, but what liberals are not doing is being honest about the alternative.

If we and our allies were to pull out, Iraq would sink into yet another despotically-ruled Arab "state" in which the Mullahs and their Madrassas would turn out yet another never-ending stream of hotheads looking to glorify Allah by killing infidels. Down that path lies the wholesale annihilation of a billion people, because we in the West are not going to have nukes going off in our cities... period. Our history as a people is that if we have to literally annihilate them — all of them — to keep from having to deal with WMD attacks, we will do so. The sorry truth is that compared to us, these people are bugs, and they will suffer the fate of bugs if they don't learn how to live in the world without blowing up other people's trains, cities, and schools.

Too many people are looking at this Iraq issue as if it were about Iraq per se. It's not. It's about an extremely noble and moral quest to avoid having to commit genocide. It is also a race against time. Once nukes start going off in Western cities, the game is over for Islam. We will not take the chance that we missed one when going after such terrorists. If one suicide bomber can kill 500,000 people with a nuke, then we will not leave one potential suicide bomber alive. Not one. This is the ugly truth that liberals and appeasers refuse to face. If they are, as they ought to be, horrified by the prospect of having to kill a billion people, then they should stop right now and ask themselves what they are trying to accomplish by halting the "Iraq War." Their way will not lead to "peace."

The road to peace is to convince a billion Moslems that the despotic governments that rip them off and blame The West for all their ills must go. We must convince them that they can lead halfway-decent lives, and that they have the ability to do so. No one believes that turning the Iraq of 2004 into a "shining city on a hill" will be easy. Certainly President Bush has never claimed it will be. It will be a long, hard row to hoe.

Those who wish to take the easy road now need to ask themselves what they think is going to happen if we do not persevere in Iraq. How many nukes in Washington, New York, Paris, or Rome are they prepared to see before the entire population of the Western world transforms itself into an angry mob, demanding from its governments the annihilation of these so-called "people" who do such things.

It is a testiment to our own morality and civility that we will invest troops and treasure to avoid that. It is high time that our "morally superior" liberals took their eye off this election and faced the long-term ugly truth about what's coming if we don't finish our task in Iraq. This may be our last chance to save a billion lives.

[Publius6961]

Was Our Iraq Mission a Failure?

Isn't this a presumptuous and premature question? It is not "over yet".
What mental midget decided that he was entitled to determine how much time was "enough"?

[Rockingham]

De Borchgrave is a man of experience and good judgment, so his views deserve a hearing. But I am not in agreement with him here.

• "The neocon objectives for restructuring Iraq into a functioning model democracy were a bridge too far. They were never realistic."

This is too cutely phrased. Would a less than model but functional, pro-American democracy be a failure? By de Borchgrave's formula here, that would be marked a "neocon" failure. Such a democracy is already in existence in the Kurdish region, and could probably be set up in a few years in the Shia areas in the south of Iraq. The Sunni areas are the problem and it is too early even there to declare failure.


• "The plan to train Iraqi military and security forces in time to cope with a budding insurgency before it spun out of control was stillborn."

True. Iraqis had little enthusiasm for joining up until Saddam and the Bathist regime were displaced. But new Iraqi police and security forces are being trained and many are already in the field.


• "The insurgency has mushroomed from 5,000 in the months following collapse of Saddam's regime to an estimated 20,000 today and still growing. Insurgents are targeting green Iraqi units and volunteers for training, and some have already defected to the rebels."

Accurate, but that does not mean that our efforts are failing or are bound to fail. We have the capacity to make it work if we stick it out.

• "Iraqi soldiers trained by the U.S. are complaining the equipment ordered by the U.S. from Ukraine being assigned to them gives them 'second-class status.'"

There is little justification to this complaint. If the Iraqis are to be equipped with the AK-47 and the related Soviet era weapons that they are familiar with, they are not going to be drawing on US Army stocks are they? I have no doubt that if the Iraqis want to ignore the hundreds of thousands of tons of weapons left over from the Saddam era in favor of new US weapons, our arms industry will be pleased to sell them all they want.


• "To cope with the insurgency, the U.S. requires tenfold the rebel strength — or some 200,000 as a bare minimum. Short of that, the insurgency will continue gaining momentum. The multiple is based on the British experience in Northern Ireland for a quarter-century as well as France's civil war in Algeria (1954-62), when nationalist guerrillas were defeated militarily, but won the war diplomatically. France deployed half a million men to defeat the fellaghas in Algeria."

Correct, but de Borchgrave's calculations do not include the developing Iraqi military and security forces, which amount to well over a hundred thousand with more being trained. Their numbers, quality, and experience will improve over time and should make for the necessary ratio of forces against the insurgents without additional US troops.


• "The U.S. occupation has lost control of large swathes of Iraq where the insurgency operates with virtual impunity."

True, but that is not as consequential as it sounds in a country with large patches of vacant desert. The center of gravity in a guerrilla war is not territory but the enemy forces and the support of the local population.

Moreover, one highly effective counterinsurgency tactic is to let the opposition develop a false sense of security and pour into apparent sanctuaries, but to them concentrate and destroy them. The Algerians used this method to help crush the Islamic insurgency that they recently confronted.


• "Iraq was a diversion from the war on a global movement that was never anchored in Baghdad."

Ludicrous. Every day, American troops in Iraq are killing terrorists, with many of them being drawn there from all around the Muslim world. Eventually, one side or the other will exhaust itself or lose patience and give up. Just where does de Borchgrave suggest our troops should instead go to kill terrorists? Or does he propose that we wait for them to again attack our cities? Distraction -- Iraq is integral to the terror war.


• "Iraq does not facilitate a solution to the Mideast crisis. And without such a solution, the global terrorist movement will continue spreading."

This is a variation on the argument made by the check waving sheik in New York a few days after 9/11: accommodate to Muslim demands in the Mideast if you want peace and safety. No thanks: my preferred return message to the Muslims would be that there can be no Mideast peace until the Palestinians renounce terrorism in word and deed and they and the states surrounding Israel accept its existence and open good faith peace negotiations.


• "Iraq has become a magnet for would-be Muslim jihadis the world over; it has greatly facilitated transnational terrorism."

Actually, the terrorists are more like termites drawn to an attractant that is laced with a poison: they are going to Iraq to be killed by US troops. How is this a bad thing?


• "Charting a course out of the present chaos requires an open-ended commitment to maintain U.S. forces at the present level and higher through 2010 or longer."

We are there to stay in Iraq, but are unlikely to be engaged in combat that long and not in the present numbers.


• "The once magnificent obsession about building a model Arab democracy in Iraq now has the potential of a Vietnam-type quagmire."

This purple prose misses some elementary points: the Kurds already have a thriving democracy and are not Arabs; the Shias' version of Islam is generally seen as congenial to democracy; and, learning from our mistakes and not under the constraints of the Cold War, the Bush administration is not going to let Iraq strategy and policy stagnate as they did in the Viet Nam war under Lyndon Johnson.

Nor was Viet Nam really a "quagmire" in the sense offered by de Borchgrave. Once a faltering commander (Westmoreland) and a bad strategy were replaced, Gen. Creighton Abrams' classic "seize and hold" strategy and a program of "Vietnamization" proved effective in defeating the Viet Cong insurgency in several years.

When the South Viet Namese government fell, it was to an invasion from the North after American troops withdrew and a liberal Democratic Congress blocked further assistance. We won the guerrilla war, but then let our ally fall victim to a conventional military attack.


• "Everything now undertaken in Iraq is palliative to tide the administration over the elections."

Overstated. There is a natural strategic pause because the fate of the Bush administration is yet unknown. Why concede anything to Bush and the US now when Kerry would be more accommodating later?

Bush's reelection though will clarify the choices because countries will close deals that are now held open pending the election. A second term Bush administration will pick up those gains and apply the screws where necessary.


• "What is urgently needed, whether a Bush II administration or a Kerry White House is for the world's great democracies to meet at the summit to map a common strategy to confront a global challenge. The war on terrorism — on the terrorists who have hijacked Islam — is only one part of a common approach for (1) the defense of Western democracies and (2) the gradual transformation of an Arab world that must be assisted out of poverty, despair and defeat."

This is unlikely to be productive and would be harmful because of the divisions between Western countries and the almost certain reaction of many Muslims in seeing such a summit as planning a war on their societies and faith. Why give Chirac and other cretins an opportunity to preen and pillory us? We are better served by conventional diplomatic means instead of high profile summitry.


• "A war on terrorism without a global strategy, which must include funding major educational reforms in poor countries like Pakistan, where wannabe jihadis are still being churned out by the hundreds of thousands, could only lead to the gradual erosion of Western democratic structures."

De Borchgrave has a point, but the central problem is that the madrassas training the jihadis are funded by wealthy Muslims, especially the Saudis, and the madrassas themselves reflect the pathologies of the muslim world. Even a massive, US funded educational effort in the muslim world will fail unless the madrassas and jihadist teaching is suppressed. That will be a difficult sales job and it will taken a generation or more for a reformed educational system to bear fruit.

In the meantime, what does de Borchgrave suggest that we should do? And what about the educated elite that controls and leads the Muslim jihadists? Unless we are careful and strict about funding education in the Muslim world, we may well find that we are simply turning out better educated terrorists with a more lethal mix of skills and an ability to move easily in western circles.


• "The 'war on terror' is a misnomer tantamount to rhetorical disinformation. One can no more fight terrorism than one could declare war on Adolf Hitler's Panzers in World War II or Dreadnoughts in World War I. Terrorism is a weapons system that has been used time and again for the last 5,000 years. The root causes are the problem, not the weapon."

True. But the obfuscation is necessary to obscure a more provocative truth: we are at war with radical Islam, trying to defeat it by limited measures without engaging the Muslim world as an adversary, and hoping to spur reforms in Muslim societies. We are making progress, but, as the Beslan atrocity suggests, we do not have the upper hand.


• "Ignoring the causes guarantees escalation — to weapons of mass destruction."

This cliched "root causes" observation offers no insight and suggests a lack of understanding in that the terrorists will use WMDs if they can get them, not because we have failed to understand the "root causes" of terrorism. A better approach would be making clear to Muslim governments that facilitate terrorism that the use of a WMD against the US or our allies will bring extreme consequences for those governments.

[Mike Darancette]

It has always been my opinion that victory was too swift. Instead of breaking more things and killing more people what we did was perform a coup d'etat. We walked into Baghdad and just took over causing the enemy to dissolve.

There was a plan to encircle Baghdad and slug it out maybe even fighting in urban Baghdad. Given that scenario I would Imagine that the military had planned for 2,000 to 3,000 deaths even before Baghdad was pacified.

The commanders on the ground saw an opportunely and Franks allowed the "Hail Mary" dash into Baghdad and by May 1, we had Baghdad with only 138 dead.

Had things gone by the plan I believe that we would have had 2-3 times the numbers of death that we have today.