Posted on 06/28/2006 6:09:35 PM PDT by Dr.Syn
You Call This A War? June 29, 2006 Maybe those in command of the War On Terror should take a break and watch a movie. They might get a clue about what to do when you ask brave Americans to go in harm’s way, and fight a WAR. Ask Sean Connery...You wanna know how you do it? Here's how, they pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send on of his to the morgue!...Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that? Perhaps W and Rummy have been watching Rent; or maybe they attended an est session on the Yale campus with Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi; or conceivably they took Harry Reid shopping for a pair of Boyshorts at Victoria’s Secret, BUT...they sure as hell aren’t fighting a war. The last time I witnessed America embroiled in a no-win “police action” misnomered as a war, was Vietnam. Remember the pictures of Lyndon Johnson and that disgraceful Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara playing parlor board games...”Oh. Let’s bomb this bridge but don’t touch the shoreline...OK, let’s bomb this jungle 800 times but don’t touch Hanoi...!” In his book, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, H.R. McMaster makes it very clear that, “the disaster in Vietnam was uniquely due to human failure and...This failure resulted from a fundamental dishonesty, and an abdication of responsibility to the American people, on the part of Lyndon Johnson (and) top advisors like Robert McNamara....” Even more contemptuous of that wing-tipped warrior McNamara was LTC Robert B. Adolph Jr. who wrote that, “Robert McNamara...was simply opportunistic and arrogant. He felt his first loyalty was to the president and not to the American soldiers he callously threw into the ‘meat grinder’ that was Vietnam.” Well, Americans are being thrown into a new meat grinder that is called Iraq and once again...the country’s leadership is letting them down. When the campaign in Iraq commenced, rumor had it that the first round would be called "Shock and Awe". As defined by its creators, “The aim of Rapid Dominance is to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary to fit or respond to our strategic policy ends through imposing a regime of Shock and Awe...Our intent...is to field a range of capabilities to induce sufficient Shock and Awe to render the adversary impotent.” As CBS reported in January 2003, “If the Pentagon sticks to its current war plan, one day in March the Air Force and Navy will launch between 300 and 400 cruise missiles at targets in Iraq...On the second day, the plan calls for launching another 300 to 400 cruise missiles.” One Pentagon official boasted that, “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad...The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before”. One of Shock and Awes creators, Harlan Ullman, explained that, “We want them to quit. We want them not to fight...So that you have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes”. Shock and Awe was never implemented and, instead of minutes...or hours...or days...or weeks...the campaign in Iraq is taking years and may well stretch into decades. All because political leaders thought they wanted war but only had the stomachs for a protracted police action. It’s like your mouth picking a street fight when your heart is only capable of some bitch-slapping. America invaded Normandy on June 6, 1944. The war in Europe concluded on May 8, 1945. Between these dates, the Allies fire-bombed Dresden and barbequed 25,000 to 35,000 civilians without so much as blinking an eye. America was at war. In the final weeks of the Battle for Berlin, the Allies never flinched as the Soviet troops raped “around 100,000” German women in Berlin. Conservatively estimated, over 150,000 German civilians were killed in this single battle. But, America was at war. So, what’s the point? The object of a war is to eliminate more of the enemy (and his resources) than of your own until the enemy surrenders. And surrender is something that Iraq has never done. America is wasting billions of dollars and thousands of lives in a pacification project...not a war. America’s leadership wimped out at the commencement of hostilities in Iraq and they have been wimping out ever since. In Iraq today, the American GI has to keep one eye on the insurgents and the other eye on his own country. In lieu of throwing Shock and Awe at the enemy, America’s leaders have tossed America’s finest, those who serve our military, into an untenable police action. Yet, our leaders still insist on calling this a war. The only war that is currently being fought is the vile predisposition of American leaders, and this unfortunately includes W and Rummy, to ask our troops to risk their lives in a war and then...condemn those very troops for fighting a war in lieu of being street cops. The elites and the MSM are all too ready to investigate and prosecute every unsubstantiated statement of “abuse” made by the locals and none too ready to afford our troops the leeway to render “the adversary impotent”. When Enron tumbled, Washington did not pursue the word processors that typed the lies or the bookkeepers that entered the phony numbers. Political leadership went after the heads of Enron’s leadership. Yet, in every instance of alleged abuse concocted by Iraqis who have never surrendered (and politically biased non-profit organizations), the political leadership of America kisses-up and makes scapegoats out of the average fighting American. Thus making the GI’s job even harder and more dangerous. Our troops on the ground in Iraq are: (1) trying to clean-up the mistakes made in Washington for ineptly initiated hostilities in Iraq and (2) trying not to get murdered in the process. If Iraq finally surrenders and Washington starts looking as hard for the murderers of Pfc. Kristian Menchaca and Pfc. Thomas Tucker as they are presently looking at fabrications of American “abuse”...sanity might be on the horizon. Until then, let our troops do their jobs without wondering if killing an Iraqi is a greater evil than getting killed themselves. Otherwise, Iraq will become another case of arrogant politicians callously throwing America’s finest into the ‘meat grinder’. And if that becomes the case...why not withdraw immediately with a final wimper before we feel the need to shackle more brave Americans at Camp Pendleton! And, for all of you doubters, just consider this...W’s motorcade drove past the Fort Bliss National Cemetery where burial services for Marine Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas were about to be held. W’s politicking delayed the funeral for about 30 minutes. W did not have 2 seconds to pay his condolences to the Terrazas family...he just kept on driving down the road. |
Before we know it we'll have people posting about Bush's National Guard time, you know, just out of interest in getting all sides of a story.
We be got him, muh fuh.
/s.
That said, I was/still am for busting a cap on Saddam and his ilk. The only question is if we can 'pacify' an area that almost defies the verb.
He has nothing to do now and probably has no idea we know about the fake docs...
That was an EXCELLENT analysis and it jives with what I'm being told by friends, neighbors and relatives, who've been there.
The question, of course, is not only how ruthless do you have to be to convince the opposition to stop fighting, but how ruthless will you be allowed to be by an adversarial international press before they manage to cloud the reason you're there in the first place? Something of the latter is being attempted - in many areas successfully - in Iraq, and that far I agree completely with the author. This isn't WWII, where we had no interests elsewhere in the world that might have held the bombers back.
The real problem of command is listening too little to those other interests - or too much. I suspect we did listen a bit too much to those other interests in the case of Fallujah, which ended up in holding back the Marines for weeks during which the enemy only grew stronger there. Hindsight's easy, but I think that one's the truth.
Now, in Ramadi we're proceeding with maddening deliberation. Part of that is the result of battle experience and part of it is an attempt to blood the new Iraqi army properly before it has to stand alone. Those are considerations we have chosen in preference to making an example of the place (and its 400,000 inhabitants). I'm going to have to wait for hindsight to decide if that's the proper approach, but as an armchair general thousands of miles behind the lines and safe, I get to do that. The professionals don't. Having been proven a fool often enough during this war I think I'll defer to their choices.
Heh. Thanks.
Brave Americans are dying and simultaneously being accused of war crimes. A war should be fought with both fists and if you ask people to risk their lives at least let them kick some butt without a bunch of stinking lawyer looking over their shoulders 24-7.
On the other hand, war isn't an excuse for murder--and I rush to add I'm not accusing anyone of such. There is a difference, and being in a war zone doesn't mean we just shrug when it appears civilians may have been killed.
I know it's not in fashion to use this phrase here, but we really ARE better than the scum we're fighting, and considering how many engagements there have been, I see nothign wrong with inquiring into certain events. Unlike Murtha, I carry that all the way and don't call someone guilty before the facts are in.
Whatever his real combat experience may be, the writer of this piece writes like typical armchair generals who get their ideas of war from movies.
And that is the maddening lesson we should have learned...you never ask troops to die and then tie their hands behind their backs like that little twirp McNamara did.
True, but if we look at our nation-building efforts with post-war Germany, we see earie similitarities with Iraq today - including the Times' efforts to invalidate our efforts.
Well said.
Well said.
Let's hope you're correct but I have my doubts. Representative government germinated over hundreds of years in the western world. It isn't like growing a Chia Pet.
The Japanese people were NOT decimated by the war. Decimation (look at the roots) is the culling of 10% of a population or group of people as a deliberate policy. The Red Army did that to units that did not attain their objectives in the Civil War. They formed up the unit then counted them off and shot every tenth.
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