Posted on 12/15/2006 6:58:38 AM PST by Man of the Right
Your analogy is fatally flawed. First of all, Marxism was only 150 years old before it failed in the USSR; secondly, Russians had an intrinsic desire to live.
Islamism is 1,400 years old. Even though it's a proven failure, it keeps on ticking, primarily because practicing Muslims believe a future paradise awaits them.
The only way to defeat the Muzzies is to either convert them or kill them.
That would be one bloody war. No thanks. The U.S. was founded on freedom of religion. How the Koran and Hadith is interpreted, and how Islam is practiced d is open to suasion by demonstration, persuasion, and coercion. That's how we'll win the War on Terrorism: Not by killing or foreceably converting a billion Muslims.
Why don't we take Tony Romo, the Dallas QB, to Kamino, and raise a 150,000 clone army??
I agree with most of what you wrote. I don't blame Bush for the decision to go in. Unfortunately for Republicans, Saddam wasn't close to possessing nuclear weapons, there weren't significant WMD stocks, and the Administration was unable to pacify the country. If this wasn't a democracy, a Putin could spend $100B qa year and abscorb 1K KIA and 7K WIA a year indefinitely. Fortunately, this is a democracy. The American people are prepared to delegate considerable authority to a Commander in Chief if he's successful. The current stalemate isn't working and isn't likely to be crowned with success, given a lack of political support, a limited ability to sustain the current deployment millitarily, and the lack of an Iraqi nation state. Bush can't build a democracy in Iraq because the Shiites and Kurds -- perhaps 85% of the opulation -- want no part of an Iraqi state. Only our Baathist enemies want an Iraq. Iraqi Kurdistan is a democracy, and a good ally of the U.S. I would give the Shiites, Kurds, and Sunnis a reasonable period to federate or separate, train an Iraqi central army if the people want it (which I doubt), and redeploy our major combat units there to Kurdistan, Kuwait and home
**They are exhaused and their equipment is worn out.**
Yet they keep reenlisting at record rates.
Fortunately, morale is good. For the rest, read Schoonmaker's testimony.
Bush is leaving office on January 20, 2009. I started this thread to discuss lessons learned in Iraq and how we go about winning the War on Terrorism.
We're offering some pretty nice financial incentives, which does retain a lot of people on the fence. It's hard to turn down a 4A bonus in a tax free zone. While I decided to reenlist after 9/11, even though I was already getting out, getting a fat bonus eased that pain. Especially since the rest of my salary was tax free at the time. For struggling guys with families, or single people that want to live large and drive new cars, the money is not immaterial.
Most of the troops you identify are supporting deployments worldwide or are surrvcing in under-strength combat units. There is a useful presentation of the U.S. order of battle at:
http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/9059/usaob.html
Also, James F. Dunnigan reports on the hollowing out of U.S. ground forces regularly on his Strategy Page site.
According to the 2004 Quadrennial Review, the U.S. is supposed to be able to fight two theater wars simultaneously, one on the offensive, one on the defensive. With moree than half of U.S. ground forces tied down in Iraq indefinitely, the ability to do so is questionable.
Conservatives have paid a high price for Iraq. We've lost Congress. The Bush tax cuts expire in 2010. Social Security reform is dead, at least for the next two years. It's questionable whether any Republican can win the White House in 2008 if saddled with the Iraq albatross.
Lyndon Johnson was faced with a similar dilemma in 1968. As a result of Vietnam, Republicans have controlled the White House for 26 of the last 38 years.
**For struggling guys with families**
Much of what is wrong with the Active Duty components is the incentive for young underpaid soldiers to get married for BAQ, BAS, etc.
That causes problems for the Military for deployments, social support for families on base, etc.
Instead of constant 1 year rotations in and out of Iraq. I say just offer soldiers who want to stay in country a nice yearly tax free bonus to stay in Iraq another year every year until either we get out or the crisis is over.
I bet it would be cheaper for the Military to end up with 100,000 or so very well paid fighters in Iraq who has been there for years than the cost of rotations, callups and increasing the size of the military.
Besides I suspect any real increase in the size of our military will only be temporary. Social Security and Medicare shortfalls is predicted in only a few short years.
We could withdraw our forces from Iraq if we can solve the strategic dilemma in Iran. Those troops are in Iraq because the persistent interference by Iran/Syria.
Once the Mullahs are destroyed and Syria is out of the picture, Iraq can handle what's left of the Sunni and Shia terrorist.
Speaking of political support, do you really think that we could have maintained ed an army designed to fight the Red Army? You seem to forget the holiday from history during the 1990s.
Here is the transcript from a 2002 broadcast that Vice President Cheney did with "Meet the Press": click here. Go back and read it. What you'll find is that Cheney said was that Bush was staking his presidency on Iraq! What also leaps out at you is the following:
MR. RUSSERT: The army’s top general said that we would have to have several hundred thousand troops there for several years in order to maintain stability.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I disagree. To suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don’t think is accurate. I think that’s an overstatement...
Now, of course, the backtracking begins as nearly everyone in the administration agrees that there was a massive underestimate of the numbers needed and that the generals (who know about how war is fought) were correct. So, if Bush and Cheney, are men of their words then the presidency was staked on achieving success--something we haven't yet seen nor, IMHO, will see unless the boots on the ground grow substantially!
I forget much, but not a whole decade.
George Kennan enunciated the containment strategy which was employed for 35 years before Ronald Reagan went successfully for a win. We won the Cold War without invading Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. We used Communism's weakness to destroy it, largely peacefully.
You might also have forgotten the battle between Ike and Matt Ridgeway. Ridgeway advocated a WWII size army. He quit when things didn't go his way but never changed his mind. Ike proposed an army of 880,000, and to Ridgeway that wasn't enough because he was thinking in terms of WWII and Korea.
Eisenhower won two landslide elections as President. Ridgeway, while a great general, never ran for public office. Clearly, Eisenhower was right. The American people barely tolerated a World War II-size army for the first three years of World War II. Support was ebbing fast following the German surrender. Accordingly, Truman threw everything but the kitchen sink at the Japanese to end the war in 1945, rather than 1946 or 1947, which would have been politically unacceptable. At the time the saying was "Golden Gate in '48."
You missed the 1 up two back need. That gets you to 450,000. It also doesn't count the troops in Afghanistan, or the folks in Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, Diego Garcia and on ships in the Gulf and Indian ocean in direct support of those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Plus a contingent in Djibouti, arguably the armpit of the world. Keeping an eyeball on that secondary snake pit of Islamic terrorist vipers. Plus you've got all sort of folks who are in less direct support, but still in support, stateside. (B-2 and B-52 missions have been mounted direct from the US for example, and lots of folks are flying C-17s, C-5s, KC-10s and KC-135s to and from wherever.).
Then there are the other required missions, such as the Navy and Air Force folks babysitting our nuclear retaliatory forces, just to keep the ChiComs, Soviets and even Little Kim honest, or at least afraid. Then you've got the general "overhead" of trainers, trainees and R&D, types, which include some active duty uniformed folks.
If only 1% of Islamics are Jihadies, that's still 5 million Jihadies. Enough of the others, wittingly or not, provide their support forces. The Russians, Chinese, Syrians and Iranians provide much of the rest, directly or indirectly.
The only UP he could go to is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. That's not likely to happen, considering he was pulled out of retirement for his current gig, and he's a snake eater. (Special Forces) That means he's got little to lose. That doesn't mean that what he said wasn't God's Own Truth, just that it wasn't quite so difficult to say as you might think.
Bush I did not cut quite that deeply. Two of those active divisions and a goodly number of reserve forces divisions were cut by "I loathe the Military" Clinton.
Here's a nice little quote I found from The New American Century. Dated September 10, 2001.
In continuing Clinton-era policies, President Bush is retreating from the post-Cold War standards set forth by his father. In 1992, the first Bush administration called for an active force of 1.6 million in 12 Army divisions, 20 Air Force wings, 12 Navy carrier groups, and so on. While Rumsfeld has yet to decide on the final details of the future force, it might well have just 1.3 million men and women on active duty and as few as 8 or 9 Army divisions, 11 to 12 Air Force wings, and 10 carrier groups. At the same time, the promise of conventional-force transformation, global missile defenses protecting America and its allies, and control of space will be deferred until the distant future.
President Bush came to office with an extraordinary opportunity to rebuild and reform the U.S. armed forces and to preserve the peace of the post-Cold War years. If he had made a defense build-up a priority, he would have found plenty of support in Congress. Instead, on his watch, the situation is getting worse. As Rumsfeld himself recently said, "Each year we put off these critical investments, each year we kick the can down the road, we are digging ourselves deeper and deeper in the hole." He continued: "It's like having a credit card. If you pay only the minimum every month, the interest will accumulate and the cost of digging out of debt gets bigger and bigger."
Thanks for a very informative post. The depth of the proposed Clinton cuts began to come back to me after you furnished the detail. The Martha's Vineyard set wouldn't be satisfied until we lost the ability to repel an invasion by Lietchtenstein.
With commitments in approximately 100 nations, we have the smallest active military since the 1930s, when we had only the CONUS, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Canal Zone, the Philippines, Guam and Wake to worry about. Before we turned it around, we had lost the latter three plus the western Aleutians.
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