Posted on 09/07/2007 6:00:41 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
Washington - The world will watch Monday when Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, delivers a long progress report to Congress.
He will appear with the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, at a morning hearing on the status of the war and political developments in Iraq.
On Thursday, as a warm-up act, the same House lawmakers who will hear from them enlisted the views of retired military experts.
The result: a war of words between two former Army generals.
One was Gen. Jack Keane, a top architect of the "surge" in U.S. combat forces in Iraq, the plan which President Bush embraced.
Keane was the Army's vice chief of staff at the time of the March 2003 invasion.
He's foursquare behind the surge, saying: "I believe there's been remarkable progress" in Iraq.
He cautioned against throwing in the towel, questioning how "losing a war in Iraq" helps strategically with respect to regional security.
The other was former Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who led the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq and has publicly and prominently broken with the Bush administration over prosecution of the war.
Batiste, 54, an Army brat who grew up around the world, is the son of two Wisconsin natives. His mother, Mary, hails from Jefferson and his late father, John, an Army colonel, was from Madison. Both graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Batiste, who left the Army in 2005, is president of Klein Steel Service, headquartered in Rochester, N.Y.
Batiste testified first, giving a pessimistic forecast. He called the surge "too little, too late" and condemned the Iraqi government as incapable of stepping up to meet its responsibilities.
He said U.S. military doctrine requires 20 soldiers for every 1,000 people in the local population, so assuming that 6 million or 7 million people live in Baghdad, more than 120,000 combat troops would be needed there alone. Overall, there are fewer than 80,000 combat forces in country, even with the surge.
"What we are seeing is the myth of Sisyphus being played out over and over again," he said.
He said that in general, U.S. forces were stretched thin and the surge could not be sustained indefinitely. He said military families "are at the point of no return."
"When the surge culminates, and culminate it will, the civil war (in Iraq) will intensify," Batiste said.
Keane followed with a sharp rebuke.
"I couldn't disagree with him more," he said of Batiste. "He's mired in '06, not '07."
Keane just returned from two weeks in Iraq after two weeks there in May and two weeks in February. He said he roams the streets and bases his assessments in part on talks with average Iraqis. He said the quality of life had changed dramatically, and the Iraqis don't want U.S. forces to leave.
Keane said the surge wasn't to be a military solution to all the troubles in Iraq but rather a way of stopping the violence just as the "fledgling government of Iraq was being pushed off a cliff."
The surge, he said, "is intended to buy time. The time is 12 to 18 months. Sometime in '08, the troop levels are going down."
Today, al-Qaida, while still dangerous, "is on the run," Keane said.
The Iraqi national police force is "fundamentally broken . . . a hopeless situation," though Keane said they could be removed to the provinces and improved.
The men spoke before two large House committees: Armed Services and Foreign Affairs, with 107 members collectively. They are poised for Monday's hearing, which congressional staffers said could run up to six hours.
Batiste called the U.S. military "the best in the world, solid titanium and high performing." He had little good to say about Iraqi political leaders.
"The Iraqi government is ineffective and exhibits no inclination or capacity to reconcile the Rubik's Cube that defines Iraq," Batiste said.
The U.S. national strategy for the global war on terrorism lacks strategic focus, he said, and "our nation has yet to mobilize to defeat a serious threat which has little to do with Iraq" - a threat that Batiste defined as radical Islamic terrorism networks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other parts of the world.
"History," Batiste said, "will rate Iraq a sideshow that is diluting our focus."
In the Senate, meanwhile, an independent commission of military experts established by Congress to assess Iraq's military and police force told the Armed Services committee Thursday that the "Iraqi security forces as a whole cannot yet defend the territorial integrity of Iraq."
But retired Marine Gen. James Jones, who led the commission, said "this is not necessarily an alarming conclusion," and there had been sufficient progress in Iraq that it was possible to envision a strategic shift in the role of the American military and a reduction in forces as early as next year.
I am always amazed at how "radical Islamic terrorism" manages to avoid Iraq altogether. Truly a miracle!
Now all we are going to get is arm chair Gen. for awhile.
“Now all we are going to get is arm chair Gen. for awhile.”
My thoughts, exactly.
I really miss Stormin’ Norman. Now there’s a General who didn’t take any cr@p from any politician and ran an efficient war! (I served under him during Operation Desert Storm.)
He was pretty p*ssed that we didn’t have the authority to take out Saddam back then, but he played the hand he was dealt. *SHRUG*
I’ve never had cause to doubt my military leaders. I’m not about to start now. If the MSM and the LibTards HATE someone in uniform, you can rest assured that they are the right person for the job. :)
Also astounding that Batiste doesnt notice Iran. My take is that Batiste is a democrat Shill.
Proof that a capable general is not necessarily a good politician.
WE know what the region would be like today if Saddam were still in power. Do they think we could have enlisted him in the war against Iran? We tried that ploy and he decided to take Kuwait, an easy target, after Iran proved too tough.
But like you, mobiization would have been the way to go.
One can take Batiste's statistics of 20 soldiers per 100K of population and shove them up his hind end fairly easily. He negligently forgets the tens of thousands of Iraq army soldiers added to our numbers. I may be wrong, but I haven't heard of him touring Iraq at anytime in the last couple of years.
true but what how much are they worth in terms of US troops. If 1 Iraqi = 1 US then you’d be right. There’s I think 360K Iraqi troops but they’re probably equivalent to less than 100K US and probably far less than that.
If you go by the 20 to 1 doctrine which isn’t just Batiste but was used in Kosovo and in post WW2 Germany and Japan, we’d need something like 500,000 troops in Iraq total. Probably less since Kurdistan is pretty much peaceful.
I don’t think you can dispute that if we had closer to 500K than 160K things there would be a whole lot better.
You can’t make up for manpower. We had 15M men in WW2, 100+ divisions. How do you think we would have done if we fought Germany with say 40 divisions?
Going in small and staying small will go down as one of Bush’s and the Pentagon’s fundamental mistakes
So right
And the strain on the troops is criminal
Roger that...
We must be fighting the “Moderate” Islamists in Iraq..
Sound like this discarded General wants us to fight the “Radical” Islamists once they open up in Detroit or New York....
I say, anywhere the killing fields attract Jihadists - THAT is where we should be killing them at every opportunity....
So far - both Afghanistan and Iraq have been performing beautifully as “shit magnets”——attracting Jihadists to their suicide.
I mean we fought GW1 with 750K. How would we have done if we fought it with 150K? Who knows, but probably a lot worse.
How would battles like Iwo Jima and Okinawa have gone if McArthur said lets’s go in small, use a “light footprint”?
The troops are doing the best they can but there’s no way that 160K will be anywhere near effective as 500K would be. None.
Yes, things have gotten better in Anbar. But Baghdad hasn’t gotten much better and the south and the north have gotten worse. Even Petraues and Bush admit that the surge ends in April. How long do you think it will take AQI to reestablish themselves and reinfiltrate Anbar. By this time next yr they’ll likely be back to pre-Surge levels.
This war an insurgencies can never be won if they have outside support and there are unsealed borders and un-punished and and un-cleared sanctuaries.
Just like in Nam when the NVA and VC had haven in Laos and Cambodia and we didn’t do a thing to stop the PRC and the USSR from keeping them armed and funded and just like in Afghanistan when the USSR couldn’t seal the border with Pakistan and stop us and the Saudis from arming and funding the muj.
As long the Syrian, Saudi and Iranian borders remain porous and we don’t deal with the IRCG and Syria arming and funding them, well never defeat them. We may improve things but never really do anything about it.
Even in Petraues’ letter which one has to assume is the best face he can put on it, he says there’s been no tangible political progress and security progress is uneven. What does he think will happen once April comes and things go back to how they were in 2006?
Bush has always said Iraq is the central front and he’s given it piddling resources. If it’s really that important it demands our maximum effort. All the troops we have, a draft if necessary. It demand at a minimum the 500K suggested by doctrine. It demands Iran and Syria to be held ot account. In short, it demands much more than Nush has given it. And that’s a real shame.
"How do you think we would have done if we fought Germany with say 40 divisions?"If the Germans primary weapon was a pickup truck, instead of a Navy, submarines, air force, world class tanks, artillery and V2 rockets, I'd say 40 divisions would have been overkill in the extreme.
we disbanded the army gecko!
The point is that you need sufficieint manpower to win. We don’t have it right now and never really have. We had enough to break through and convince the Iraqi military to fold and melt away but we never had enough to really control the country. I don’t care how good the plans are, how good the strategy is, how good the genrals are, if you go in too small, you’re going to be in trouble. If Ike stormed Omaha and Utah with a handful of ships off the coast and a few thousand guys, the Germans would have slaughtered us. Now were not in that bad shape in Iraq, but we’ve never had the right number of troops to really handle things. And without the right number you can only go so far.
The point is that just about every objective military scholar, analyst, soldier, etc... knows that we’ve had too few troops there. Even Bush and knew it and that’s why he ordered the surge which only added 30K or a 20% increase. Shinseki was right about the #s and even the plans had much larger #s. But Rumsfeld was high off the small footprint SOF Afghan war and convinced Bush to go with the lower numbers for various reasons.
In a 1975 interview, Reagan gave an answer when asked about Vietnam that applies today. he said:
Once you are going to commit yourself to a combat role and you’re going to ask young men to fight and die for your country, then you have a moral obligation as a nation to throw the full resources of the nation behind them and to win that war as quickly as possible and get it over with, and this is where we made the mistake: to pour half a million men in there, to kill 54,000 young men in a cause that Washington, that the government was unable or unwilling to win
Don’t tell me that in a war that is the issue of our time, in a front that is the central front for the future of freedom as Bush has described ot, that will determine the outcome of the war on terror, that 160,000 troops, lax ROE, not going after Iran and Syria, etc... .represents the “full resources” of the nation. I know you don’t believe that. If the exact same things had happened in Iraq and Clinton had been president the past 6 yrs, conservatives and republicans would have torn him to shreds. he’d be a luaghingstock, a despised, hated figure. That’s the central paradox. If Iraq is really that important why has Bush given it so few resources, failed to really attempt to mobilize the nation and the people on a war footing, etc...?
To compare it to say Israel. It would be the equivalent of an Israeli PM declaring that a certain war was the central front for the future of Israel and then sending in all of 3000 troops to do the fighting. In 1967 and 1973 when Israel fought wars that fit the central front category they mobilized 275 and 450K, upwards of 10% of the population each time, similar to our #s in another central front struggle WW2.
In Iraq, we’ve mobilized less than .1% of that total, or less than 100X the amount. Do you think that Iraq is 100X less important than WW2? Does Bush? And if it is then why is it such a big deal that he’s made it out to be. If he thinks it’s only worth 160K out of a 300M population, less than .1% of the forces mobilized for WW2, then why will end up spending close to a trillion dollars or more by the time all is said and done and having over 5000 and 30000 injured? What’s it all for if not worth a total commitment?
It’s absurd.
With 160 and soon to be 130K troops, victory will never really be possible, certainly not to the extent that it would be if we had the right number of troops. What would Petraeus say if you asked him how he could do with say 500K instead of 160K? What would he say if he had 500K from the beginning back in 2003? Where would we be now?
Like I said, the troops are doing the best they can, but at the end of the day, 130-160K can only accomplish so much. Bush, his advisors and the Pentagon never accepted or realized that and never called on the people to sacrifice to achieve it. If after 9/11, he had gone before Congress and called for a mass enlistment, instituted a draft to at least build up to say 1M active army instead of closer to 500K, still low #s, asked the people to come together, to go on a war footing a la FDR in WW2, things would be a lot different. You can’t say this nation has been on a war footing at all these past 6 yrs.
99.9% of Americans aren’t fighting in this war, haven’t fought in it, haven’t felt any sting from it, etc... Compare that to WW2 when upwards of 10-15% served and millions more were active on the home front in various ways. Virtually everyone either fought or knew or had family who fought or contributed. What % do you think that is today? Do you think Bush has done an acceptable job in putting the nation on a war footing? on mobilizing the people?
People in Iraq agree on one thing: Iraq is not monolithic. It is nearly impossible to generalize about the entire country. So these metrics like x troops for every y inhabitants are nonsense. There are quiet provinces that have been completely turned over to the Iraqi Security forces and others where our troops are fighting daily. By the end of 2003 Gen. Patreus was covering the Kurdish region with a tiny number of American troops. Simplistic metrics are worthless. They are just conjoured up to lend credence to various policy positions.
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