The DOGZ of WAR!
Posted on 09/12/2006 7:07:59 AM PDT by presidio9
The commander of the U.S. Marine force in Iraq on Tuesday denied his troops had lost control of the vast province they patrol, after newspapers reported his intelligence chief had written a bleak report.
A division led by U.S. Marines has faced some of the highest casualty rates in Iraq patrolling the vast western desert of Anbar, Iraq's biggest province and a center of the Sunni insurgency.
The Washington Post reported that officials who have seen a study by the Marines' top intelligence officer in Iraq say he described the situation in the province as lost. Iraq's Shi'ite-led government holds no sway there and the strongest political movement is the Iraq branch of al Qaeda, it concluded.
The Post said it was the first time a senior U.S. officer had filed such a pessimistic assessment from Iraq, and described it as having had an impact among policymakers in Washington.
But Major General Richard Zilmer, commander of the 2nd Marine Division, said the press reports "fail to accurately capture the entirety and complexity" of the situation in Anbar.
"The classified assessment, which has been referred to in these reports, was intended to focus on the causes of the insurgency. It was not intended to address the positive effects Coalition and Iraqi forces have achieved on the security environment over the past years," he said in a statement.
"In areas where the presence of Iraqi Security Forces is combined with an effective local civil government, we have seen progress made. Not just in the area of security, but in economic development and the establishment of social order and public services," he said.
The statement did not indicate which parts of the province he believed had effective local government. Anbar includes such present and former battlegrounds as Falluja, Ramadi, Haditha and Qaim in the Euphrates valley, sites of some of the heaviest fighting since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
According to the New York Times, the report described Falluja, which the Marines recaptured from insurgents after two major battles in 2004, and Qaim near the Syrian border as comparative bright spots.
The rest of the province "lacks functional governments and a respect for the rule of law," the Times said.
It said the report had concluded an additional division, some 16,000 troops, would be needed to back up the 30,000 in the province to prevent the situation from getting even worse.
Otherwise "there is nothing (the Marine command) can do to influence the motivation of the Sunni to wage an insurgency," the paper quoted the report as saying.
Great comments!
Appreciate all you do and the contributions of your unit..
Fantastic Job!
You are correct about a military solution in these backward provinces. Especially this one.
The political and cultural solutions will take a lot of time to take effect. We simply need to keep it calm enough for those solutions to eventually take root, and they will if we stay focused and protect what we have gained.
Thanks.....:-)
Sad to say, that's a big "if."
The real issue is, what is the accurate, overall picture? And, perhaps more important, why was this report, which supposedly supports the leftists' view, leaked?
Not for the next two years it isn't. During the coming days, many things will change, so we will address that particular fear, at a later date.
IIRC The Pentagon at one point pulled Ricks' credentials for his biased reporting. In any event he did not claim to have seen the memo but was reporting from second and third hand source--
I see this as much the same baloney over Afghanistan, and the NATO report asking for 2000 more troops.
The reality is that the NATO force levels are 2000 short of what was planned and they asked participating countries to bring their contingents up to full strength. The reaction to this was total BS. They (the media) claimed and is still claiming that things were going badly, which is not the case.
Not the case at all.
The commander did not write the report. It was done by a member of his staff. We do not know the context, nor the complete substance of the report. All we have is what snippets Ricks got from leakers.
Wouldn't you think the commander read it after it was written?
Don't you think the commander read it?
Thank you for all that you do and for the update. You write like a prophet, and a GD good one. God Bless.
We still don't know the entire content of the report nor it's context and until we do we have nothing but what the press chooses to report about unauthorized leaks to go on.
There was a Stephen King short story I read once about a mob-run organization that helped people quit smoking. As the "salesman" was telling the "client" about their methods he listed 9 things they would do in increasing brutality each time they caught the guy smoking. The guy asked, "And if I smoke one more time?" The salesman pulled a pistol out of his desk and said, "You WILL quit smoking. We guarantee it."
I wonder what would happen in Iraq if the President had said last night, "We will not fail to bring democracy to Iraq, even if we have to kill every last Iraqi and re-populate the country with Americans."
Of course, we would never do that. But I still wonder.
Shalom.
We have two sources. One is from the commander and the other an unatributed leak of extracts published by known Bush haters.
Which would you put more weight to?
As the commander said....'It was not intended to address the positive effects ..' Sounds like it was pessimistic, but taken out of context when leaked.
I agree.
"Close. Rooters & the WP."
Plus the NYTimes.
"According to the New York Times, the report described Falluja..."
Totally true. An 06 Marine officer has said we need to wage total war against Al-Qaida in Al-Anbar. We need to take the war to the enemy like Sherman took the war to South Carolina. They need to be totally destroyed, discouraged, and dispirited.
When the American military is hamstrung by rules of engagement that, if violated, may result in a court martial and imprisonment or execution, as is the case with the Marines imprisoned at Camp Pendleton, victory will not happen. The same mistake was made in Vietnam 35-40 years ago, and we lost that war even though we had military superiority over the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. America's most successful war against guerrillas occurred in the Philippines in the early 1900s, where our techniques against the Muslim rebels included stuffing dead enemy soldiers in pigskin.
War is ugly. Only ruthless measures will bring about victory.
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