Posted on 10/30/2006 1:11:43 PM PST by Barney Gumble
Nov. 6, 2006 issue - Robert Secher had a passion for history. Until his death in Iraq on Oct. 8, the 33-year-old Marine ... was making raw Iraqi recruits ready and able to take over the fight against the militants.
Secher found the task exasperating and often discouraging; in e-mails and letters home, he expressed doubt that the Iraqi military would ever be ready for a handover, and criticized the way the Bush administration had directed the war. "Without the U.S., this army will fail and get eaten alive by the insurgents,"...he spoke of suspicions that some of his trainees were loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr and would have no compunction about betraying their American instructors if the radical Shiite cleric told them to.
At other times Captain Secher's messages expressed fondness for his Iraqi trainees and respect for their courage... His parents describe him as an unswerving Republican, and his own dispatches consistently defend the invasion of Iraq even as he anguishes over its dwindling prospects of success. "Don't mistake us for Cindy Sheehan," Pierre Secher told NEWSWEEK at his Memphis home ...
[From his emails:]
"Anytime an American fires a weapon there has to be an investigation into why there was an escalation of force..."
"Iraqi soldiers tell us that when America leaves, they'll quit..."
"If you really want to win a war you have to be brutal. You have to be Sherman and raze Georgia as you march to the sea."
"the Iraqi culture is incapable of maintaining a western style military. The Arabic-style military [...] is distasteful to western soldiers"
"The war in Iraq itself, yeah, it was the right thing to do, but the way it was carried out, man, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney have nothing to be proud of."
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
I think people can tend to fall into two camps whether they like Bush and decry anything critical of the war or they hate Bush and will smother any good news.
What people should be doing is focusing on victory and actively trying figure out how best to do that with the least amount of American casualties. The left wants to retreat but the Bush administration doesn't seem to want to change tactics. If he has, he isn't telling the public.
While it is easy to play Monday morning quarterback, many people including myself, were saying that Muqtada Al-Sadr should have been dealt with well over two years ago.. Bush said he wouldn't appease terrorists, but as soon as Saddam fell, we began appeasing terrorists (Al-Sadr)
Some people don't think the Iraqis can govern themselves and need an iron fist. Many of those people are liberals, but to say that they imply that the Iraqis are inferior people.
http://purveyors-of-truth.blogspot.com
Have you ever read about the situation in Germany 3 years after WWII?
I wonder if any soldiers/marines wrote such letters, and if they would have made it into Newsweek?
The Iraqis identified where it was coming from and immediately returned fire, but by the time they successfully translated where the fire was from it had stopped [...]
Anytime an American fires a weapon there has to be an investigation into why there was an escalation of force. That wouldn't have stopped us from firing, but it prevents us from just firing indiscriminately. We have to have positively identified targets. That is why I am now a big fan of having the Iraqis with us. They can fire at whatever the hell they want, we call it the "Iraqi Death Blossom." These guys receive one shot and the whole unit fires at everything in sight until the attached American unit gets them to control their fire. That's fine with me
This has been one of the biggest complaints that I have heard from our troops. You can thank the left for this.
FYI.
Not too difficult to understand. Let's see...when are the US mid-term elections?
This is Newsweek...I might consider paying attention months after the elections are over, if at all. Until then (and probably until further notice) what I think of Newsweek's content and opinion:
Sounds like a solution.
Until the U.S. and Great Britain spend four years pummeling the sh!t out of Iraq and bombing every major Iraqi city to rubble, that point is, well -- pointless.
World War II may have been the last war the U.S. fought that wasn't a stupid nation-building exercise at its root.
Love it.
Germany isn't remotely like what we're doing in Iraq and that's precisely the problem.
Yes, the left is the big cultprit, but Bush bears blame too. Real leadership is standing up to the left.
Besides, it's not like the need of a "escalation investigation" has been the chief rallying cry of the left either. If Bush could ignore the left when invading Iraq, don't you think he could ignore them when instituting minor policies in Iraq?
Bush has yet to realize that the left is going to hate him no matter what he does, so he might as well do it right.
Can you describe an analog for modern day terrorism from the 1930's-1940's?
That is, stateless entities attacking nation states directly?
Your theory could very well hold water. People should be openly discussing these things instead of being held back by fears of being called bigots. (Is it our own Darwinism at work?)
In February, 1946, my Dad's troop train, going from Tokyo to Osaka, was fired on by multiple unknown persons in the hills. A couple of GIs died, and more were wounded (my Dad was a medic, and help treat them).
None of this got any press, and wouldn't even be known if he hadn't told me about it. Dad told me the press was instructed not to go into any of these activities, yet they did happen. Some Japanese continued to fight for years--not only those who didn't hear the Emperor's command to surrender.
No, I disagree. If you can show me a case where 3000 people were killed in a single day by a stateless terrorist group from across an ocean, or even some proportionally similar event (to 1940's demographics) then I will concede the point.
The salient ingredient in my post was that there are always those who want to fight the last war, even though the situation may have changed. In an all out war, those who try to fight the war the way the last successful one was waged, usually lose. It is an unpopular sentiment, even with myself sometimes, but the glass parking lot theory or even the Dresden theory will not apply here. With our military strength, it would be EASY to load up B-52's and carpet bomb cities in Iraq and the Middle East. I could plan those missions myself. But it will not work. It serves as a nice mental salve for frustrated emotions, many of which I share. But in reality, it will not produce the desired effect. We could be like the Nazis, the Japanese and the Soviets, be completely ruthless and make them all fear us. But it will not solve anything, and we will be just like them. The Left would love that, America just like the Nazis. Many of them already think it is anyway. But I digress.
Perhaps it will come to that someday, the glass parking lot, maybe after a nuclear device is detonated in New York or some other American city. But as an American, if it does come to that, I want the moral underpinning of being able to say that we did try another way. And I think history will judge us better than our contemporaries, no matter how it turns out.
Yes, I cannot see the USA totally destroying a country run by a threatening regime, if the only thing it has done is be "threatening". I can see us destroying in total warfare a country we are in open warfare with. The model of WWII would fit, and would be appropriate.
In my opinion, what was done against the axis powers in WWII was terrible, but appropriate. Their civilian populations were supplying the war machines that were killing our citizens, and if they could have done to us what we did to them, they would have done it, and with prejudice. It was a war of survival.
I do not think, even for second, that the majority of Iraqis are against the USA and are actively supporting the terrorists. I do think there are a large number, perhaps a majority who are afraid to actively take a side, especially if doing so can mean having your head sawed off slowly with a rusty knife with your body dumped on your doorstop for your kids to find. It is remarkable that are are a number of them who HAVE tried to step up. We shall see. Perhaps we will fail. But we saw how well that whole hands-off thing worked before 9/11.
Maybe it was a nation building war. The USSR was under attack from the east by Japan and from the west by Germany. We basically supplied the Russian military before and during the war and fought battles to relieve pressure on Uncle Joe. We assured his and the USSR's survival. Was that nation building?
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