Posted on 03/12/2006 11:00:01 PM PST by jmc1969
I think Iraq is just a battle in a much bigger war.
Must close down for the night!
Nite all!
The best treatment for IEDs is exactly what we did on Route Irish also called the Airport Road. Flood the damn area with troops and set up road blocks, checks, and block unnecessary access to the road with pits and barbed wire.
In doing so we were able to turn what was once known as the Highway of Death into one of the safest roads in Iraq.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/03/AR2005110302600.html
I think you are delusional.
The plan was always to dash to Baghdad, and collapse the morale of the resistance. Those scenes of entire Iraqi Armies walking home proved the effectiveness of this.
The arm chair generals here, and at the NYT who assume no plan was made for the few dihard bathists and terrorists seem to have very little ability at strategic thinking.
Are you so blind that you can't see we have not been attacked in 4 years? The plan was ALWAYS to attract all the jihadists to Iraq, and drain the swamps of rest of the world.
Just a couple weeks ago a bunch of terrorist wanna-bes were arrested in Toledo. They had plans to go to Iraq and attack US forces! The entire Midwest laying open and defenseless to their attack and they were still drawn to Iraq.
Go ahead, tell me the plan hasn't worked!!
Yeah we are taking casualties in Iraq. The best trained, best armored, and best armed of our people are putting it on the line far away so that we don't have to have secretaries and chcool children fight this war in Toledo, or Buffalo or Miami.
More troops would not mean fewer deaths. Just more targets. More deaths. You start down that road and you will be there for 20 years.
They are fighting each other now. They've largely ignored our troops for the last week and its time for Al Sadr to get his.
Not every nation surrenders like the Japanese. The Germans didn't start stringing piano wire across roads till AFTER the war. We took way more casualties AFTER the surrender in Germany than we have in all of Iraq.
For the record, I do not support more troops in Iraq now because that would be pointless and counterproductive. The time for that is past.
That is total nonsense. You been reading the NY times or what?
The vast majority just ran away, and have never come back. If they had, there would be vastly more large attacks and ambushes wiping our entire US convoys with surprise attacks.
Instead we are seeing small 1-5 man teams of suicide squads which are totally unable to make and significant hits unless they attack soft targets like civilians and Mosques.
The few attackers are jihadists (increasingly foreign) and die-hard bathists. There are probably more involved in attacking each other now than are focused on our troops. (And if anyone deserves attacking, its the Sunnis.)
No the entire army did not melt away to reform. You sir are delusional.
"We took way more casualties AFTER the surrender in Germany than we have in all of Iraq."
I call BS. What are your sources?
Ben Shepherd and Perry Biddiscombe, probably the leading expert in post War Nazi resistance, has never put a number that high.
For the record, my comments were aimed to the period of 12 months after the fall of Baghdad. The liberals are fond of saying we should have had twice as many troops on the ground at that time. If we had done that, we would have had three times the casualties as we have now.
Who is delusional?
"Those scenes of entire Iraqi Armies walking home proved the effectiveness of this."
Not effective, foolish. The Iraqis just took off the uniforms to fight another day. That's the fact. Saddam predicted it and so did our NIC.
A whole wall full of history books. Those who will not learn from history are bound to repeat it. At least three American and British troop transport trains were derailed, with large numbers of dead. Go browse the archives of the Saturday Evening Post at your local library. Everybody was whineing for the boys to come home and leave the germans to clean up their own mess. Do your own home work.
Were still in Germany, and it's only been three years in Iraq and they have "democracy" (voting) there.
That is total BS. What we needed was enough troops to police Iraq, as I was saying since before the war, and it was of no consequence whose troops they were, so long as they did the job. One obvious alternative would've been to draft the Iraqi military and law enforcement into the task, but instead Bremer dissolved them both.
In the aftermath of the war, we had fewer 'law enforcement' officials (i.e., U.S. troops) per capita in Iraq than the typical U.S. city has police officers per capita. In the aftermath of WWII we had a ratio of 1:24 in Germany in Japan, four times the number of police officers per capita in a typical U.S. city.
With the ratio we had in Iraq an insurgency was all but inevitable. The reason I did not support the war back then was not because of the war objectives, but rather because I saw little evidence in the build-up that we were preparing to police Iraq in the aftermath.
The people who are talking nonsense in hindsight are those who say that the mess that's followed was inevitable. It wasn't. Everything the neocons who planned the war could've turned out just as they wanted IMHO if not for their ridiculous notions of human nature.
And might I further add that I have no idea where this myth of the German or Japanese insurgency has come from. American troops were not fired upon by Germans or Japanese after the surrender. There was no organized resistance to speak of whatsoever in Germany after May 9, 1945. In Japan, General MacArthur famously travelled about unarmed to underscore the defeat of the Japanese. Moreover, the civilian law enforcement infrastructure was transitioned largely intact (or at least as intact as possible) and then gradually purged of undesirable elements.
Iraq is not Germany. It was not bombed into submission with virtually all of its 16-40 year old males gone.
Putting these people on street corners with guns would have enforced and enabled the very things you think it would prevent.
When the only cop on the beet is Akmed, just how closely do you think he is going to look at every back alley? He would be protecting the terrorists, not turning them in.
Your oh-so-clever ploy of using locals as police only works when the local country is totally devastated by a long war - long enough to take the fight out of everybody. That didn't happen, and your plan (or should I say Kerry's plan) would have allowed entire armies to exist in the streets of Baghdad. Its crazy! You don't walk into the midst of an unbeaten population and appoint the local gun thugs as your hench men an get away with it.
Lier!
You don't know your history. Come back after a little reading.
Heck, the biggest problem we had was keeping the Wehrmacht from starving to death..
That is a lie. In the aftermath of the war Germany had over 30 million men in that age range, well beyond the population of Iraq in its entirety.
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