Posted on 03/14/2006 9:42:59 PM PST by SUSSA
Gen. Tommy R. Franks climbed out of a C-130 plane at the Baghdad airport on April 16, 2003, and pumped his fist into the air. American troops had pushed into the capital of liberated Iraq little more than a week before, and it was the war commander’s first visit to the city.
(snip)
Huddling in a drawing room with his top commanders, General Franks told them it was time to make plans to leave. Combat forces should be prepared to start pulling out within 60 days if all went as expected, he said. By September, the more than 140,000 troops in Iraq could be down to little more than a division, about 30,000 troops.
(snip)
In the debate over the war and its aftermath, the Bush administration has portrayed the insurgency that is still roiling Iraq today as an unfortunate, and unavoidable, accident of history, an enemy that emerged only after melting away during the rapid American advance toward Baghdad. The sole mistake Mr. Bush has acknowledged in the war is in not foreseeing what he termed that “catastrophic success.”
But many military officers and civilian officials who served in Iraq in the spring and summer of 2003 say the administration’s miscalculations cost the United States valuable momentum – and enabled an insurgency that was in its early phases to intensify and spread.
(Excerpt) Read more at gnn.tv ...
PS. That peacekeeping help never did show up from the UAE
Liberals in 2006 remind me of a sewer rat scraping the ground at a piece of cheese ignoring the flood waters rise all around it.
They are too self absorbed to realize that now is the time to unite against the muslim vermin and save their radical agenda for later. IF they don't, we'll all sink.
I didn't write it, but it looks like there were top people, including military people, saying they should plan for a strong resistance.
Do you have an article or document that contradicts this one? It would be good to compare them.
From the article:
(snip)
"Achieving the administration’s ambitions meant dealing with any turmoil that followed the collapse of Mr. Hussein’s government and his iron-fisted security services. Administration officials assumed that American and multinational troops would help stabilize Iraq, but they also believed that the newly liberated Iraqis would share the burden.
“The concept was that we would defeat the army, but the institutions would hold, everything from ministries to police forces,” Condoleezza Rice, the president’s national security adviser, said in an interview. “You would be able to bring new leadership but that we were going to keep the body in place.”
Early Warnings
Some military men, though, were worried that the administration would be caught short. Gen. Hugh Shelton, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first nine months of the Bush administration, was one of them.
General Shelton had contacts in the Middle East who had warned that Iraq could devolve into chaos after Mr. Hussein was deposed.
At a Pentagon meeting early in 2003 with former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former vice chairmen and their successors, he voiced concerns that the United States would not have sufficient troops immediately after the dictator was ousted. He cautioned that it was important to have enough troops to deal with the unexpected. "
(snip)
What's wrong with giving all the muslim nutburgers in the world a place to run to? What's more efficient... trying to find them where they are in the world... or getting them to one nice tidy place where they face the U.S. Marines?
From the article it looks like Rummy was the one overriding the advice from the military.
(snip)
"Military aides on the National Security Council prepared a confidential briefing for Ms. Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, that examined what previous nation-building efforts had required.
The review, called “Force Security in Seven Recent Stability Operations,” noted that no single rule of thumb applied in every case. But it underscored a basic principle well known to military planners: However many forces might be required to defeat the foe, maintaining security afterward was determined by an entirely different set of calculations, including the population, the scope of the terrain and the necessary tasks.
If the United States and its allies wanted to maintain the same ratio of peacekeepers to population as it had in Kosovo, the briefing said, they would have to station 480,000 troops in Iraq. If Bosnia was used as benchmark, 364,000 troops would be needed. If Afghanistan served as the model, only 13,900 would be needed in Iraq. The higher numbers were consistent with projections later provided to Congress by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in Iraq. But Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed that estimate as off the mark."
Some high up military critters and many of the "Pentagon passed overs" are the biggest second guessers. Nobody really knew what was going to happen BEFORE we went in except that the Iraqi Army would be toast in short order, and that proved to be right.
Only problem is, there isn't a finite number of nuts.
If there were 10 options for a field commander, the geniuses in the 5 sided puzzle palace would find 10 more after the war, especially if they were out of service.
I agree the war went very well. However, the occupation is a cluster****. And it seems from what's being reported here, contrary to what the administration has repeated over and over again, it wasn't the military making the decisions, it was the politicians.
That's a testable theory.
Why do you have so little regard for the military?
EXCUSE ME! Where do you get that from? Did you ever serve?
So, in addition to insulting folks that have been there, you swallow the MSM`s reporting of what is really going on in Iraq. Well, the same tactic was used against us before, in Vietnam, and it worked there, so why not now.
If you want to learn about what really happened then, and see how the same thing is going on now, read the biography of Gen. Abrams.
Obviously there is.
From your posts:
Posted by bybybill to SUSSA
On News/Activism ^ 03/15/2006 12:30:39 AM CST • 12 of 16 ^
If there were 10 options for a field commander, the geniuses in the 5 sided puzzle palace would find 10 more after the war, especially if they were out of service.
Posted by bybybill to SUSSA
On News/Activism ^ 03/15/2006 12:27:10 AM CST • 10 of 16 ^
Some high up military critters and many of the "Pentagon passed overs" are the biggest second guessers.
##
Those comments sound harsh. Perhaps I’m misreading them, but they sound like you don’t think much of the military leadership. They kind of surprised me when I read them.
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