Posted on 12/12/2006 9:32:13 AM PST by LAMBERT LATHAM
What went wrong in Iraq? We are about to start withdrawing our troops from the country and turn the fighting over to Nuri al-Maliki's government even though nobody but Bush, and a few of his die-hard worshipers, believe that the Iraqi military can control the country.
Although, Bush isn't calling it "Iraqization", it is, none the less, the equivalent of "Vietnamization" and will produce the same result.
But, how did we get to this point? How did, what should have been a relatively easy victory go so very wrong?
To answer that question one must look at the planning for the war and at the execution of the military conquest of Iraq. The planning for the war did not include any realistic planning for the occupation after the Iraqi government and military were defeated.
Bush and his neo-conservative advisors made no plans to deal with a resistance movement after Iraq fell. They didn't believe there would be any resistance once Saddam's government fell. Just weeks before the invasion of Iraq, Vice President Cheney appeared on Meet the Press and wouldn't even entertain the idea that there might be a resistance.
"MR. RUSSERT: If your analysis is not correct, and we're not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. I've talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. The president and I have met with them, various groups and individuals, people who have devoted their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside Iraq. And like Kanan Makiya who's a professor at Brandeis, but an Iraqi, he's written great books about the subject, knows the country intimately, and is a part of the democratic opposition and resistance. The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that."
The administration's refusal to even consider the possibility of a resistance in Iraq and failure to realistically plan for the occupation is the reason we have the current mess in Iraq. Bush made the same mistake Hitler made when he invaded France. Hitler didn't expect a resistance movement after defeating the government and setting up a new "independent" government. Nor did he want to destroy enough of the country to break the will of the people to resist. Bush expected to be greeted as a savior and didn't think there would be any resistance movement. Like Hitler, Bush didn't let the military destroy the cities, food supplies, utilities, their industries, etc. Both of them thought they could win without destroying the infrastructure of the enemy.
Hitler ordered his army to do as little damage as possible to the country and still conquer it. As a result, the French mounted a resistance movement that killed Germans and French collaborators during the whole time the Germans occupied the country as the "guests" of the Vichy Government.
Bush did the same thing in Iraq. He ordered the military to do as little damage as possible while taking Iraq. In both cases the "victor" didn't break the will of the conquered people to resist and paid a high price for that mistake in blood and treasure.
Contrast that with how we prosecuted WW II against the Germans and Japanese. We fire bombed German and Japan cities. Napalm was created in WW II to bomb German cities. We bombed their factories, utilities; water, sewer, electric plants and their roads and rail lines. We also bombed their dams flooding their farm lands destroying their food supply.
By the time we conquered their government the people had no will to resist. V.E. Day was May 8, 1945 and V.J Day was September 2, 1945. There was no resistance in either country. By January 1946 battle casualties had all but totally ended.
In 1946 we occupied Germany, Japan, North Africa and Italy and we had just 6 battle causalities world wide that whole year. Contrast that with our occupation of Iraq. We've had U.S. 2,756 dead in Iraq since Baghdad fell. That means 95.8% of our battle deaths occurred during the occupation rather than during the war.
Bush apologists like to compare the country's attitude about the Iraq war to the country's attitude about WW II, but never want to compare how we fought WW II with how Bush and the neo-cons fought the Iraq war. They want to pretend the war is still going on, but don't want to say we are fighting the Iraqi people.
Well, Saddam's Iraqi government is gone. We sure as hell aren't fighting the new Iraqi government we set up there. We are fighting an Iraqi resistance that shouldn't have been there, and wouldn't have been there had we fought this war like we fought WW II.
During the occupation of Germany and Japan the people depended on the army of occupation for their daily survival. The occupation forces had the food, water, clothing, oil and coal, controlled shelter for those whose homes were destroyed, and all money. People were worried about getting a drink of water and a meal rather than who was running the government. They no longer had the will, or the popular support, to mount a resistance movement.
Compounding his failure to destroy the people's will to resist, Bush started nation building before the country was pacified. That never works.
Iraq is a country of 28 million people and 80% of them don't want us there. Nation building under those circumstances is, to be charitable, not smart. It divides the military's efforts and provides targets for the resistance without providing us with sufficient indigenous support to eliminate the resistance.
Because Bush pretended there was no indigenous resistance movement and the violence was mostly the work of foreign trouble makers rushing into Iraq to fight against the U.S. military, the resistance is no longer just a resistance to foreign occupation. It is now a civil war with a large number of factions fighting for political power. Within just the Suni and Shiite groups there are some 80 or so sub-groups fighting for political dominance. Armed militias control more neighborhoods than the police and militia members make up large portions of many police units.
Maliki's government is a joke. It can't even control Baghdad, let alone run the whole country.
Now we have a mess that Pelosiand company are going to make worse. There is no good option at this point. The American people will not stand for the level of violence it would take to pacify Iraq now. Nor is it clear that any level of outside generated violence can really pacify the country at this point. The window of opportunity for that may well be closed.
But pulling out of Iraq will leave a power vacuum that Iran will rush in to fill. The consequences of that happening would make the current situation look desirable. That is the worst possible option.
At this point, the best we can do is maintain a force powerful enough to protect the oil production and shipping, protect the Kurds, and keep Iran from taking control of Iraq's oil. We need to kill, or arrest Muqtada al-Sadr, disband all militias, and protect the borders.
Of course, this will take a larger force than we have in the country now which will demand increasing the size of our regular army. But we can also make better use of our military by pulling them off nation building tasks and using those troops to fight the resistance. There is no reason our military should be building schools, building power plants, and teaching farmers how to increase crop yields while the country is in violent chaos. But we will still need more troops in country for the short term.
In the best case scenario an Egyptian style dictator will come to power and will stabilize the country. It will be in this dictator's self-interest to keep Iran out of the country so hopefully this new dictator will be nominally pro-Western on the order of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. In the worst case, Iran will turn Iraq into a puppet and gain control of Iraq's oil.
Only three things are certain today. We can't just pull out. We can't keep doing what we've been doing. We wouldn't be in this position today if Bush fought the war the way FDR and Churchill fought WW II.
God help us. We need a leader who understands what needs to be done and who has the spine to do it. Unfortunately, neither anyone in the administration, nor our any of our Congressional leaders, is up to the task. ESR
John Bender is a freelance writer living in Dallas, Texas. He may be reached at jbender@columnist.com.
Well the source I had heard it from was the one and only G. Gordon Liddy. He would never lie to anyone....Also Bob Furman, who was involved in the manhattan project, who was also there.
Agreeded and the Dufus doesn't believe that insurgents are coming into the USA from Mexico and Canada either.
It was the Media, it was the Embeds, it was the Democrats, Lying Every day for years now that has effectively doomed the US mission to this point.
They MEDDLED in the affairs of state to in order to display their clout, and ultimately hurt this country.
I still can scarcely believe what they have accomplished with their subversive antics. They have clout, and we now have a nation on the edge of an irreparable disaster.
I despise the media more than I ever knew before this situation that I possibly could.
In WW II there were enough troops and materiel to completely defeat, occupy and control the enemy. Today a draft or using tax cuts for war bonds is not on the table. War is only for those who volunteer for it.
There's the bottom line. The Administration sold the war in a way that didn't mobilize the country, and kept everyone on a 'business as usual' footing. Subconsciously, that tells people that what you're doing isn't vital.
People rarely listen to the exact phrasing of their leaders. They get the message from key words, the delivery, and the tone. If you tell them "don't worry, keep shopping", they won't worry, and they'll keep shopping. They also will assume that whatever problem you're dealing with can't be that important, and that while winning would be nice, losing wouldn't really change anything they care about. Otherwise, why would you have said, 'don't worry, keep shopping'.
Remember, President Bush can say anything he wants about the world. How scary it is. How menacing terrorists are. People will more or less listen, but they only thing they're really looking for is leadership. How does this apply to me? What did my leader ask me to do? If it really is a crisis, surely it's going to entail some sacrifice on my part, right?
What has President Bush asked the American people to do, personally? Not think. Not vote. Not remember. What has he asked them to do, in the face of global terror, and the war in Iraq?
In the absence of real leadership, people draw their own conclusions.
Not so fast!! You're hereby demoted to the rank Pre-Newbie because of your prehistoric "spitting" in your posts! I am shocked, totally shocked, lady!!
Well I may change my mind tomorrow if you behave and stop chewing tobacco! LOL
There's no pacification to speak of. Vast swaths of land are lawless. The first big mistake was not crushing the looting that happened immediately after the fall of Baghdad. That showed us to be too indulgent. The next big mistake was using gimmicks of the transfer of sovereignty and the vote before the country was ready.
Oops! Day late and a dollar short so this poll isn't worth the pixels it took to display on my screen.
So you believe the resistance is mostly from outsiders? How do they operate without internal support? You believe they were coming into the country in large numbers within days of the fall of the Iraqi government?
As for closing the borders, who do you think should have closed the borders if not the U.S.?
One source that I have that debunks that myth is:
THE U.S. ARMY IN THE OCCUPATION OF GERMANY
1944-1946
by
Earl F. Ziemke
CENTER OF MILITARY HISTORY
UNITED STATES ARMY
WASHINGTON, D. C., 1990
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 75-619027
First Printed 1975-CMH Pub 30-6
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents,
US Government Printing Office Washington, D.C. 20402
LOL! This is a grim topic, but yours is the witty post of the day.
Quoted from the above referenced book:
"Except for black marketeering, some thefts of food and firewood, and petty violations of military government ordinances, the German civilian crime rate was low, sometimes almost disconcertingly low for the Army agencies charged with ferreting out and suppressing resistance. In October, after five months of occupation, Seventh Army G-2 believed Germany to be a "simmering cauldron of unrest and discontent" and claimed to have detected a "mounting audaciousness in the German population"; but as concrete evidence G-2 could only cite some illicit traffic in interzonal mail (then still prohibited), a "strongly worded"
[354]
Werwolf threat to one military government officer in the Western Military District, and a protest against denazification from the Evangelical Church of Wuerttemberg.38 Patrols occasionally found decapitation wires stretched across roads, ineptly it would seem, since no deaths or injuries resulted from them. Military government public safety officers from scattered locations reported various anti-occupation leaflets and posters, some threats against German girls who associated with US soldiers, and isolated attacks on soldiers. Although not a single case was confirmed, possibly the most talked about crimes against the occupation were the alleged castrations of US soldiers by German civilians. When the commanding officer of Detachment E3B2, in Erbach, Hesse, was asked to investigate one such rumor, he reported that not only had there been no castration but that there had not been a single attack on US military personnel in over four months of occupation.39 The most pressing concern of public safety officers was often with getting the German police out of their traditional nineteenth century Prussian drill sergeant uniforms and into American styles, usually modeled on the uniforms of the New York City police. Wherever troops were stationed, especially in towns and smaller cities, prostitutes and camp followers were a moral problem, placed added strain on food supplies, housing, and medical facilities (frequently also on jails), and raised mixed feelings of disgust and jealousy among the other civilians. In quarrels with other civilians and with the police, the prostitutes did not hesitate to call on their soldier friends.40"
***
The lack of any real resistance movement is also attested to by the fact that in 1946 there were only 6 battle deaths in the whole year. If there had been an Iraqi style resistance more GIs would have been killed.
If our occupation forces in Iraq only had 6 deaths a year the occupation would be very popular here at home.
You're kidding, right?
How do they operate without internal support? You're not really well-versed in the nature of cells, are you? Nor do you have a really good foundation in the long arm of al-Qaida. You believe they were coming into the country in large numbers within days of the fall of the Iraqi government? Ummmmmm . . . . . . . uh-huh!! The Islamofascists knew how much they had to lose if Iraq emerged as a democratic and free country; they couldn't afford to let that happen.
And our military didn't notice thousands of foreigners coming into the country? You have a very low opinion of our military.
However, by the same token, why should we give newly liberated Iraqis something our government won't give 300 million American citizens . . . . . secure borders??!!
To keep GIs from being killed.
"The survey by much-respected World Public Opinion (WPO)"
Huh? I've never heard of this group? If true, why do the Iraqis elect leaders that want us to stay? Also, if foreign opinion polls should dictate our foreign policy, why didn't we elect John Kerry????
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