Posted on 04/26/2007 2:42:07 PM PDT by Sleeping Beauty
Spruce, how would destroying Iran and Syria help us defeat Al Qaeda? AQ is not located in either country.
You know the reason they are meddling in Iraq, right? Syria is Sunni, Iran is Shiite. They both have an interest in Iraq become a majority of one of these sects in order to strengthen themselves.
Iran and Syria are playing the "civil war" game. US interests are agnostic on that issue. Our real problem is Al Qaeda -- which is happening elsewhere.
Taht's because they hate our country, our President, and our troops.
They cannot allow victory because once we win this war, they are dead politically due to their total investment in defeat.
kinghorse, you’re probably too smart for your own good.
Understood. That said, I think we are in fundamental agreement. I would differ with any contention, however, that we are not going after them elsewhere and with the vigor we are able to. Unfortunately, we can’t just bomb the crap out of targets in whatever countries we want to and when we want to. I wish we could as there would be holes in the ground in Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Morocco, Algiers, the Balkans, Indonesia, the Philippines and Dearborn, Michigan, by way of example...
"Bruce Riedel is a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He retired last year after 29 years with the Central Intelligence Agency. He served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Near East Affairs on the National Security Council (1997-2002), Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Near East and South Asian Affairs (1995-97), and National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Intelligence Council (1993-95)."
“The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.”Creating martyrs without killing their cult seems to be even a bit more than counter-productive.
...........Charles de Gaulle
I didn't realize it was that low. Since Iran is helping shiites attack Sunnis, I guess that will be resolved pretty soon.
Poor Syria. they lost this one.
Now back to our regular programming... What about Al Qaeda?
Thanks for the heads up. Care to give up any more information?
Well, A Cyrenian, that's the dilemma. The article I posted goes into some depth looking at the current state at AL Qaeda. We are in a quandry. I don't know if it can be solved by bombing millions of human beings. Perhaps it can. Temporarily.
In the good old days, we fought nations. Now we are fighting a religious ideal that has no borders. Can you win the war of ideas with bombs? Or do we need a more modern weapon?
A. The Rats don't have any war cred.
B. The article is not by "some guy."
C. The "argument" is inside the article and it is not a political argument.
Chi-townChief, if you're interested enough, I hope you will take a look at the link to the article, and at least scan it. I value your feedback.
The situation when the WoT began, some 25 years ago or so, was that there was an increasingly coordinated network of terrorists of all sorts around the world. Many were sponsored, trained and equipped by communist and other dictatorships, some were starting to be funded as narcoterrorist movements. And some were even encouraged by western powers as part of the Cold War.
But because they all sought the violent overthrow of in some cases governments, and in other cases, civilization itself, they sometimes found common cause.
In the Clinton years, the absence of any tangible foreign policy allowed the rise of long dormant problems, from nuclear proliferation to the very basic argument between civilization and barbarity, to come forth into full flower.
George W. Bush and his superb foreign policy team decided early on that this dangerously explosive situation should be met head on, and preempted if at all possible.
The lesser of the two problems was nuclear proliferation, which was based in Pakistan, but desired throughout the Middle East. The conquest of Iraq succeeded in not only breaking up this network of proliferation, to a great extent, but it persuaded all but Pakistan and Iran to discontinue their suicidal quest, and even Pakistan has been brought into the realm of the peaceful nuclear powers, if its government remains stable.
The greater of the two problems was that the Middle East needed extraordinary reform, reform that could only happen with the real democracy, transparency, and liberalization that had eluded it in the modern era.
And this leads back to terrorism and the clash between civilization and barbarism.
We realized that in a hundred countries of the world were a small number of terrorists who were capable of traveling to other nations to commit acts of violence. And left in their own countries, they would generate destruction and chaos for decades, and would be extraordinarily difficult to identify, much less eliminate.
However, if we could lure them to a fight in a place of our choosing, against our soldiers instead of our civilians, we could cull this dangerous minority. And this was the rationale for the War on Terror.
Historically, such Jihadist or Mahdi movements burn out fairly quickly, especially when led by a charismatic leader. However, there are now a dozen nations who symptom is terrorism, but whose actual problems are dictatorship, corruption and brutality.
A gigantic indicator that we are winning the WoT is that literally millions of Muslims are converting from their religion while holding their noses. They are less attracted to Christianity than they are repelled by the onerous and murderous barbarity they see around them.
While this is a tangible sign that we are winning the WoT, the real victory comes with Muslims who stay Muslims, but become democrats. And this is where the true brilliance of the Bush foreign policy comes into play.
Advocates of democracy are invisible revolutionaries. They can be poor or wealthy and powerful, even royals. They are not, however, disruptive or radical or anti-national; in fact they are generally very loyal to their nation and its ways. More than anything else, they see that democracy is just the better *way* of doing things.
And the virus of democracy is spreading throughout the Middle East. With every trial, every consideration given to it, as real democracy, not just in name, nations that spawned terrorism and dictatorship become more open and less hostile.
So when does the WoT end? al-Qaeda has been perhaps 75% attritted, and they have failed in their effort to destroy civilization. The Muslim public reject them more and more, and in many places such as Anbar and northern Africa, they are being driven out entirely.
Yet they are still funded by Saudi Arabia, a nation as deeply in need of reformation as the worst of them in the Middle East. For this reformation to take place in Saudi will be half the WoT.
The other half is the nation of Iran. We shall see.
Shame on you.
Of course it can be won. CFR is focussed on the enemy in this piece. If you're following the situation on the ground, you should know at least as much about our enemies as this document highlights. What this document misses however is the idea that if you're over there without real friends, then everyone besides you is a potential enemy. The longer you sit over there without real friends, the more enemies you'll make.
To win, our Army has to recruit families to their side! That's the key. That's what counter insurgency is all about. Can you do that with threats? No. Can you do that with words through a translator? maybe, but it's hard to do. Can you recruit a family with one or more jobs? Absolutely. Can you recruit a family through offering medical treatment for their sick children? Absolutely! Winning is a function of how well our forces can build trust while they mitigating the fear instilled in them by the fighting between Coalition Forces and terrorists.
CFR is not thinking about winning in this piece. These authors are focussed on how wrong it was to arrive at the situation Americans are in today. Therefore, it doesn't matter if you or CFR knows our enemy or not. There is so much more to Sun Tzu than that simple little phrase. By Sun Tzu, it is best to conquer without fighting at all, therefore it is more important to know your allies.
Here's how the Give 'em Hell, Harry (The Buck stops here) Truman Administration handled the fight against Communism in Korea and freed millions of South Koreans...it imposed full wartime censorship.
Full Wartime Censorship Placed on Korean News
Waterloo Daily Courier, front page | January 9, 1951 | UP
U. S. Eighth Army headquarters, Korea. –(UP) –The US.Eighth Army imposed full wartime censorship on news coverage of the Korean War Tuesday and threatened to courtmartial newsmen who deliberately report any troop movements without authorization.
Veteran war correspondents agreed the regulations were the most inclusive they had ever received from any army headquarters.
The rules placed correspondents under the complete jusrisdiction of the army and forbade any criticism of the Allied conduct of the war.
The regulations, succeeding the present security censorship, provide that all dispatches ...will be screened for military information which might injure the morale of UN troops or their government.
Mention of the following matters was specifically forbidden:
1. Identity of organizations in the combat and communications zones, unless anounced in communiques. When announced, no place names will be used.2. Quoting officers in any way, except as specifically authorized
3. Stating that any sector in Korea is occupied by American troops until the enemy has established it as a fact.
4. Stating that any town or village in the combat zone is accupied [sic] by American or Allied forces unless it is essential to a news story.
5. The mention of any base port, communications center or other point on a communications line. [newspaper's emphasis]
6. Ship or rail movements, unless authorized
7. Any discussion of Allied air power
8. The mention of number of troops, unless authorized.
9. The effect of enemy fire or bombarment, unless authorized.
Also listed as unauthorized was information on the strength, efficiency, morale, or organization of Allied forces.
Under this rule, no mention may be made of reinforcements, equipment, arms, plans and forecasts of future operations, or positions or descriptions of camps.
Casualties may not be revealed before official publication. [Paper's emphasis]
The Eighth Army ruled that any violator of the code will be suspended from all privileges.
"He may be subject to disciplinary action because of an intentional violation of these and other regulations, either in letter or in spirit, and in extreme cases of offense where investigation proves the circumstances warrant the correspondent may be placed in arrest to await deportation or trial by courtmaritial,' the announcement said.
Good. But we can prevail -- and we will. We just need to think outside the box and come up with a brilliant strategy.
Hitler and Nazism come to mind. Rationalize and spin this anyway you want, but we blew it by not finishing the job in Afghanistan..
Popocatapet -- Did you compose this post are are you quoting?
In the article it said — “The biggest danger is that al Qaeda will deliberately provoke a war with a “false-flag” operation, say, a terrorist attack carried out in a way that would make it appear as though it were Iran’s doing. The United States should be extremely wary of such deception. In the event of an attack, accurately assigning blame will require very careful intelligence work. It may require months, or even years, of patient investigating to identify the plotters behind well-planned and well-executed operations, as it did for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the 1996 attacks on the U.S. barracks at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton were wise to be patient in both those cases; Washington would be well advised to do the same in the event of a similar attack in the future.”
—
I wonder how this type of thinking “plays” in the “nuke ‘em now” crowd, that I often see — in discussions where there’s a possibility of another major attack on the U.S. (like 9/11)?
What I hear is that if any of these Islamic terrorists tried to set off some type of nuke in a city here (or some other catatrophic attack), that we would simply nuke the entire Muslim Middle East and be done with them all.
Now, I presume that the government would be a tad bit more discerning than that. At least I hope so. But, would the public be screaming for some action in an event like that?
As an “upside” to such an attack — it should bolster public opinion for continuing the war in Iraq...
“In the good old days, we fought nations. Now we are fighting a religious ideal that has no borders. Can you win the war of ideas with bombs? Or do we need a more modern weapon?”
That was the thing that had our military planners stumped. There was a great article that discusses Clinton’s frustration with the military refusal to adapt to an enemy that didn’t fight in uniforms and shoot from tanks. They basically told Clinton all the reasons why they couldn’t possibly fight a war on those terms. Structured thinking that they couldn’t break out of. Rumsfeld shook them up a bit I think.
That’s the same thing Obama says, “we need to pressure these Iraqis to fight their own war so we can fight the real war in Afghanistan.” And, of course, that’s pure b/s. If we weren’t there, they’d be oinking about how come we’re not in Iraq.
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