Posted on 09/03/2006 10:03:43 AM PDT by meandog
GUADALAJARA--I'm wondering. Help me wonder. Either Georgie Bush is the minor, depressing, witless ferret I think he is, or I am. It has to be one or the other. If things don't start looking up pretty soon internationally, I'm going to be pretty sure which.
As best as I can tell, what the Maximum Cipher lacks, among an inexhaustible list of other things, is a hop toad's understanding of how people work. Here we have the explanation of just about everything he does. He's dealing with a world full of people, but has no idea what people are. He probably couldn't recognize one. So he doesn't take their predictable behavior into account.
Think about it. When he went braying into Iraq, he thought people would roll over, throw flowers, and have a democratic revolution. This would start a domino effect that would make all the other Muslim countries want to be democracies, too. They would climb over each other to be democracies. They would love us because democracies love each other. He just knew it.
This makes perfect sense if you have no flipping idea how human beings work.
(Excerpt) Read more at fredericksburg.com ...
You bet!
We are not creating them. They are rising to the challenge and were there waiting for one to come.
They knew it was coming. They caused it to come.
They know exactly what they are doing and we need to rise to that occasion. They are creating us!
We are what stand between them and civil war, so pulling out would be like pulling the police force out of LA. Hopefully the Iraqi Army can become what the Turkish army is. So far, however, no Mustafa Kemal has appeared.
My daddy would call it happyhorseshit.
Funny, with all his rantings he never mentioned 9-11 or terrorist. It was as though President Bush just decided to go into Afghanistan and Iraq because he wanted them to be a democracy.
Liberals are a dead give away when all they do is name call.
These folks have other sects like the marsh Arabs and others that have not been involved as of yet.
The Iranians are doing their damnedest to keep this going, and I can't see it ever stopping completely, until they feel a true sense of nationalism.
We are trying to create this with some success, and I still have some hope. But my real worry is the Kurds. They have been doing some things that are indicative of a separatist movement. They have the bulk of the oil fields, or close to it.
I'm not so sure that we should just let them have at it, and get out of the way for about six months.....LOL..:-)
I might just take out Sadr and THEN let them go at it. We had only to reach out our hand in 2004 to get that fat POS and we didn't.
Considering what happened when Saddam hilled his daddy, they might be correct.
It would have been better to have martyred him two years ago, during the uprising. I guess Sistani saved his sorry A....
We also have a press secretary now who is a lot smarter about countering the media than was Scott McClellan, and I imagine we are also seeing the effects of his influence as well.
One of the reasons there is that oft-maligned thread "A Day in the Life of President Bush" is to record what he is actually doing each day, since the national media pretty much ignores him unless they see an opportunity to attack. If you actually read the thread, you will see pictures of the President appearing and speaking before different groups, links to tranascripts of press conferences and speeches, and information on future appearances. Today the President is speaking in front of the Merchant Seamen's Union, for example. Did you know that? Did you know the group supports the opening of ANWR?
All of the complaining that the President doesn't use "the bully pulpit" is simply based on a false premise: that the President isn't saying anything or making any effort. What you SHOULD be mad about is that after 24/7 coverage of Bill Clinton in every media venue from MTV to the New York Times for 8 long years, President Bush, in a time of war, cannot get coverage for a speech without practically begging, which the White House is not going to do.
Are serious? What sort of an answer would you expect the president to give to this amazingly ambiguous question. Do you want him to lay out the training schedule the military uses in bringing the Iraqi military up to snuff? Do you want him to detail the exact mission parameters used by the soldiers patrolling Baghdad? As for the conflicting orders given to the military. Please cite them and include your sourcing.
A loon is a loon is a loon
As conservatives, thinking our way through problems should always supercede feeling our way through them. I'm more than a little concerned about how virulent peoples reactions have been when you try and look at the base of the problem. The war's gotten a lot more politicized than I thought.
You'd probably be disheartened to learn how looney the U.S. military and intelligence communitiy is, because we spend a lot of time trying to figure out what causes people to embrace extremist Islam. It was an amazing and unexpected development, when suicide bombers starting showing up in Iraq from around the Muslim world: Morocco, Somalia, Turkey, Pakistan. There were a number of studies and working groups put together to analyze the problem, both on stopping the flow into Iraq, and determining the source.
Why they choose to do it is fascinating, in a macabre way. I've certainly heard my share of terrorist backstory in interrogations, and in other settings. Their literature and propaganda is on the internet if you care to look for it. There's nothing random about their philosophy, and to a devout Muslim it makes perfect sense. Islamic extremism truly is a global tide that's rising from the grassroots.
At any rate, if you don't think that American foriegn policy is one of several contributing factors that empowers Islamic extremism, then you're sadly misinformed. You may find the idea of understanding how your enemies think to be un-American, since enemies are to be killed and not understood. That's your call. If you care more about winning the GWOT than being a good Republican who shies away from politically inconvenient terms, then you'll need to know your enemy as well.
The President. Department of State. Department of Defense. I'm not picky. But if you're going to send in the U.S. military, you should probably have thought these things out, because they're going to be expected to carry out the answer to that amazing ambigious question in precise terms. If there is, in fact, no answer, then you get Iraq, circa 2006.
Do you want him to lay out the training schedule the military uses in bringing the Iraqi military up to snuff? Do you want him to detail the exact mission parameters used by the soldiers patrolling Baghdad?
Not him personally, but the answer to your first, more strategic, question would have been useful information to tuck into a post-war reconstruction plan. As to your second more tactical question, we call that METT-TC, which is basically 'conditions on the ground determine our response'. That doesn't require guidance from senior policymakers.
As for the conflicting orders given to the military. Please cite them and include your sourcing.
When's the last time you've seen unclassified orders for anything bigger than an individual PCS move? Besides, your tone a second ago sounded like you didn't approve of having or publishing plans. As far as open source, there's a number of books on the subject I could recommend, like Cobra II or Bremer's Year in Iraq, that discuss things that went wrong. Or just talk to someone who's been.
Oh, but I have. That aside, talking to one, 4 or 10 people is meaningless.It's WHO you speak to and I personally have no contact with the 4 star over there. I really find it amazing that you actually do want the Admin to lay out the precise military instruction guidelines and the mission guidelines re patrols in Baghdad or elsewhere.
From day one the president has said it will be a long hard battle to set up a democracy ands win the peace. Have mistakes been made? You bet? Were mistakes made in WW2 after the armistice was signed? You bet there were and in fact the same rhetoric was spread around then as it is now.
Here, read what the gloom and doomers were saying so long ago. You'd swear it was written yesterday.
http://www.jessicaswell.com/archives/000872.html
Yes, he sure did.
The only way that I see us taking him out, would be a accident, but he is too well protected.
Perhaps we could turn him. These bone heads usually have a price. He seems to be well connected with Iran however. I assume he has food tasters.
When he was at Najaf, he could have been seized at any time without killing him , as we did his #2. When he was bloviating about become a martyr, he knew that the worst thing that would happen to him would have been that he would have become a guest of the USA in some hotel.
If we'd have skipped the PC crap and leveled any Iraqi neighborhoods that harbored terrorists we wouldn't be having this discussion....or the comparisons to Viet Nam.
I think the line of thinking is to ascertain if a positive return will follow any action taken. If their is any question, they simply don't act.
I suppose in the long run, this strategy will pan out. If they had taken him prisoner, the rioting that would ensue in Sadr City would have been huge, and they are not prepared to deal with this sort of stuff.
These Persian fanatics do not conform to normal rules of police engagement and crowd control. They are more akin to animals. IMO.....
This argument is posed in every post war or occupation period.
It was the subject of discussion in Nam, in Korea and after WWII.
Woulda-Coulda-shoulda......
I have decided to support whatever they do, and we can discuss the merits at some later date.
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