Posted on 03/20/2008 7:24:49 AM PDT by Delacon
For the record, I still believe that deposing Saddam was justified and useful. He was a Hitler, and he was our enemy. But I'm still reeling from the snotty incompetence with which the Bush administration acted. Above all, I'm ashamed that I trusted President Bush and his circle to have a plan for the day after Baghdad fell.
All of our other failures in Iraq stemmed from this fundamental neglect of a basic requirement: Our soldiers and Marines reached Baghdad without orders or strategic guidance. We became the dog that caught the fire truck. The tragedy is that it didn't have to be that way: One thing our military knows how to do is plan.
But the relevant staffs were prevented from doing so. Ideologues and avaricious friends of the administration wanted the war for their own reasons, and they didn't intend to alarm Congress with high cost estimates. So they trusted the perfumed tales of a convicted criminal, Ahmad Chalabi, rather than the professional views of the last honorable generals then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had not yet removed.
Even on the purely military side, the White House put its faith in hopeless gimmicks, such as "Shock and Awe," convincing itself that ground troops were an afterthought. Of course, it was the old-fashioned grunts, tankers, gunners and supply sergeants who had to get us to Baghdad.
Iraq just didn't have to be this hard.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Precisely. Opposition to the war wouldn’t have grown nearly as much if the immediate aftermath of the invasion hadn’t been to totally botched.
Ditto.
As an aside, the Bush administration came up with the clumsiest-sounding, most inarticulate names for military operations I have ever heard.
The problem for the left wasn't really what was done, but who did it. And hatred of Bush actually empowered him — the administration had no incentive to reach out to those who wouldn't reach back, so it just did as it pleased. Today's "antiwar" left also contains plenty of politicians who backed interventions in the Balkans and Somalia, who would be glad to send American troops to Darfur today and who voted for war in Iraq.
Both parties are quick to employ our military. It's the only foreign-policy tool we have that works. Neither party is a peace party — each just wants to pick its own wars. The hypocrisy in Washington is as astonishing as the dishonesty about security needs.
ping
Whining about the greatest success in the history of the armed forces of The United States of America.
Sheesh.
Stopped reading at “snotty incompetence”.
Suddenly everyone's an "expert" on geurilla warfare in a gigantic Middle Eastern country full of terrorists willing to kill themselves, their children, and families.
Oh, yes, and no CIC ever made mistakes in a War. Bush is the first. EEEEvvvil Bush.
That cost us many lives and billions of dollars.
Some people state that we couldn't deploy more troops immediately as it would have upset those in the ME who were somewhat on board with our actions. Appeasing neighboring muslim/arab nations who provided minimal help and such.
Others say that Donald Rumsfeld simply wouldn't follow the suggestions of those who said more troops were necessary.
I could come up with several other explanations, all equally speculative.
However the fact remains that we only turned the situation around after Rumsfeld was forced out of office and the right commanders were put in charge.
I have to ask: What was the delay in doing this from day one?
Certainly they may not have anticipated the level of difficulty they would have experienced from terrorist sponsored resistance. However once that discussion became verified fact, there should have been immediate action taken.
I'm not ready to condemn the administration for the war, however the execution of it bears scrutiny. Who got in the way? I mean other than the traitorous democrats.
Apparently they are gone now, and President Bush will have a triumphant victory in Iraq.
However his legacy will be questioned over the above concerns I have noted.
Had these problems been resolved sooner, who knows what might have been achieved in neighboring rogue nations. Perhaps the democrats might have never gained a foothold in congress, thusly crippling any future pursuit of this war on terror.
JMHO...
Oh, one more thing. This nation needs to begin executing people for high treason. The democrats have nurtured and comforted our enemies throughout this conflict and intentionally divided this nation for the sake of power.
They need to pay the price for their actions.
Rumsfeld was and is a bean counter. It was all about “doing it on the cheap” to prove that we wouldn’t have to spend billions and billions.
Outstanding article. Right on the money about Shinseki: he gave the administration the right answer about Iraq, and he was degraded for speaking the truth clearly.
We ALL now know that the 250,000 men Shinseki wanted on the ground to fight the war and maintain the peace would have been exactly the right answer.
I still find it hard to believe that we fell back into the “capture and depart” policy of Vietnam regarding enemy hotspots. It didn’t make sense then. I can’t think of a decent reason why it would ever make sense, assuming one were trying gradually to subdue an entire nation.
it is still my opinion that rumsfield and bush executed the war in just the right way to enable the killing of more jihadists than ever...
if we overwhelmed them, al-qada would have scattered like the roaches they are and infested a lot more areas. this plan, as limited and brainless as the mainstream media made it out to be, attracted the very best of the worse kind of people and allowed our brave men and women the opportunity to kill them, all of them.
jmho, of course.
teeman
“Both parties are quick to employ our military. It’s the only foreign-policy tool we have that works. Neither party is a peace party — each just wants to pick its own wars. The hypocrisy in Washington is as astonishing as the dishonesty about security needs.”
Hell, Obama would invade Pakistan.
Iraq must be assessed within the history of warfare, not within the fairyland mind-set of how liberals think wars should go! How many marines died at Iwo Jima? What was the one day casualty count at Antietam? There were many, many screw-ups that cost many lives and there were many great heroes and heroic acts. That's war.
I will disagree.
With Afghan and Iraq under our control, and with Libya rolling over as soon as they saw the American military’s power, there would have been no nation willing to harbor the Al Qaeda. The congressional authorization allowed Pres Bush to go after them wherever they went AND against any country that harbored them.
They frittered away every single bit of that momentum by allowing an insurgency to get legs in Iraq.
Remember: It took only 4 years to win WWII. We’ve been at the low intensity conflict side of this for 5 years now.
With nations on notice that they would be toppled if necessary, Al Qaeda would have been able to run, but they wouldn’t have been able to hide.
Peters is right. Shinseki was right. Our ground troops were right.
“But I’m still reeling from the snotty incompetence with which the Bush administration acted. Above all, I’m ashamed that I trusted President Bush and his circle to have a plan for the day after Baghdad fell.”
Oh, they had a plan, just not the right one. However, anyone who knows ANYTHING of military history knows that almost NO PLAN survives contact with reality in a military conflict. THERE IS NO PERFECT PLAN. Only armchair generals think that there might be.
No war and occupation of this scale has EVER been run for as long with as much success and as few losses compared to former conflicts. The problem is that nothing less than perfection would have been acceptable to the armchair generals and the anti-American left.
Has the left used these failings for their benefit, to the detriment of America, Iraq, the troops, and the civilians caught in the middle? You bet. But that’s what the treasonous left does. See, e.g., Vietnam.
Were there mistakes? Yes, BUT THAT IS THE NATURE OF WAR.
I’m not minimizing the price our brave servicemembers have paid. Each loss is awful. But unfortunately, as I said, this is the nature of war. Could it have been done better? ABSOLUTELY. Could it have been done worse? Well, just about every military conflict before this one (except Gulf War I) WAS DONE WORSE. Draw your own conclusions. But this whining about Bush and his failings serves NO REAL PURPOSE.
Yes wars are always fought with massive mistakes. US torpedoes during WW2, the flying fortress, etc. But no, one should always be critical of how or if wars are fought. We owe the future soldiers that much.
I’ll agree with most of Peters’ points. I’m still amazed that Bush and Rumsfeld didn’t have all the contingency plans in the world for what happened after Baghdad was taken.
But for Peters to say that Bush is the most inept war-time president since Madison is a bit over the top.
Peters was around for LBJ’s Vietnam experience: deciding his tactics based on opinion surveys and popularity polls. He must have been aware of JFK’s acquiescence to the toppling of the old Vietnam regime — and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, leaving Cuba and brave Cuban freedom fighters to be slaughtered and consigned to living in slavery for 50 years. JMHO.
“But no, one should always be critical of how or if wars are fought. We owe the future soldiers that much.”
VERY good point. However, I took the article as more of a BDS rant than an honest analysis of how the war was fought and what lessons could be learned from the mistakes (other than “Bush Sucks”).
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