Posted on 03/20/2008 7:24:49 AM PDT by Delacon
There’s no good reason for spilling blood the THIRD time to take the same hill. If it’s such an important hill, then KEEP the frick-frackin’ hill. (Ramadi, Samarra...)
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the fact that there was a detailed plan for the post-victory administration of Iraq, and that Jerry Bremer threw it out entirely. Now why he wasn’t immediately sacked and someone put in who would enact the plan, I have no idea.
I've been saying that for a long time, too. The Dem and MSM support for the war, such as it was, became opposition the day Bush flew onto that carrier, with a great backdrop, and gave a good speech announcing the end of "major combat operations". They saw a Republican triumphant, and riding a wave that would create dominance for a long time, and they fought back with everything they had, to deflate the glory. Well, "Mission Accomplished", they did it. It took several years of ceaseless, negative, pissy stories, day after day after day, but eventually, they people wore down, and they said "enough of this war." They just weren't smart enough to realize that they said "enough" because the MSM conditioned them to get tired of it, not because it was all that horrible or unsustainable.
There were many problems with the Bush Administration's handling of Iraq after the successful defeat of Iraq's Army, but truth be told, they had fewer mistakes and less costly ones than Dems did in places like Normandy and Vietnam. Those Dems just didn't have an antogonistic press sniping at every decision, small and large.
Of course, this goes hand in hand with his failure to clean out the State Dept. in the first place. Had it been a decent set of foreign policy experts, headed by a Jeanne Kirkpatrick or a John Bolton with a group of young, conservative intellectuals doing the policy work, we could potentially have trusted the Dept. But we instead had Powell, that bald sucker Armitage and a bunch of people who claimed expertise, but were just Dem and leftist hacks.
You're just reaffirming the point that mistakes are made. Yes, mistakes were made by the Bush administration. More important, more right actions are making the war/peace winnable.
Right. That’s why they shouldn’t have even been there the FIRST time if the United States wasn’t going to make the necessary commitments to “keep that hill.”
You forgot Anzio, the Hedgerows and even Gallipoli in WWI. Our side failed to plan all of those properly, and won both of those wars because we did not quit.
Ain't that the truth.
Rumsfeld isn't some short-sighted bozo and this war hasn't been a surprise to those who are waging it.
The Administration rightly realized a draft would be not only counter-productive in this modern age of warfare, but the country would not stand for it.
Five years is a long time, and people are understandably tired of spending one-half trillion dollars on something that has seemed to bring them less prosperity and $4/gallon gas prices.
Four hundred thousand Americans died in four years in WWII. Four thousand Americans died in five years fighting in Iraq.
There is still only one superpower on this planet and it continues to be our home address. I don't believe this remains true because this government makes strategic mistakes.
Creating expectations at home doesn’t change the unique problems each war creates.
Bush should listen to the Generals, I feel he did.
But even Lincoln had to struggle there too.
Personally, I myself thought that we would have had far more troops killed, and that things would be farther along by now.
So it is taking longer then I expected, but far less have died then I expected.
But again, nobody has ever done anything like this before on this kind of scale. It is the first time.
sure there are parallels with other wars, but this one is incredibly unique because of the nature of the enemies.
I also think the Iraqis had to become war weary.
It took suffering under the islamo facists for a while for that to sink in. I dontthink the surge would have worked until that happened.
stressing that is just my opinions, I am no military expert. But I think I am not too far off.
Not to mention the speed with which they caught Saddam and his 2 sons which was brilliant.
President Bush took the offense from DAY ONE and has never let up. He has won this war with very low US casualties and thousands of terrorists have been killed.
He has done an outstanding job IMO.
A lot of tiptoeing went on regarding the issue...and rightly so. Now the common consensus is that we were fools for believing it, but the bad intelligence of the 90's had resulted in a pervasive culture of fear regarding the issue. Again, Pres. Bush did a wonderful job in prosecuting the war while negotiating all those issues as well. I will never take for granted the relative security we enjoy today. It was far from a foregone conclusion in those early, fearful days.
In this case, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters probably comes closer to it than most people on this forum. Being a career Army intelligence officer and military scholar. He's been publish many, many times in the US Army War College's publicans "Parameters". Here's a review of one of his books, Fighting for the Future", from that publication.
One thing y'all might have in common with him is distaste for the French:
France should be made to suffer, strategically and financially. The French stabbed us in the back. In response, we should skin them alive.
If today’s America is the new Rome, France is a garbage-dump Carthage. And Carthage needs to be broken.... And we should pursue every possible avenue to reduce American purchase of any goods produced by the French. Perfidy must be punished. The French, who would be eating sauerkraut for breakfast, lunch, and dinner if we hadn’t liberated them, need to have their treachery shoved down their throats.
Here's some of his books, mostly non fiction, but some good military fiction as well.
bttt
I think you took it wrong. If it was just BDS, it would not have contained this:
It's a lesson that the left, as well as the right, needs to take to heart. While the Bush administration deserves every lash it gets, domestic opponents of the war have been hypocritical, dishonest and destructive. As this column long has maintained, had President Bill Clinton sent our troops to depose Saddam Hussein, Democrats would have celebrated him as the greatest liberator since Abraham Lincoln.
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
As horribly as Bush performed for our first four years in Iraq, it's still possible to do worse. Both of the Democratic Party's presidential aspirants believe that the answer is to flee, handing the terrorists we've defeated a strategic victory, inviting a genocidal civil war, further destabilizing the Middle East, and sending the message to the world that Americans lack the courage and staying power of our enemies.
Declaring failure isn't the correct re sponse to failure narrowly avoided. Both Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would kill a struggling convalescent. Bush's shambles would become the next administration's catastrophe. As president, Obama or Clinton would finish with far more blood on his or her hands than President Bush has on his.
True, but where would 250,000 troops have come from after 8 years of Clinton cuts, and 2-3 years of GHW Bush cuts before that. Cuts in which Shineki acquiesced, at least in part.
But he is. A military historian at least.
From the bio listed for his book "Beyond Terror":Ralph Peters retired from the U.S. Army in 1998, shortly after his promotion to lieutenant colonel, in order to write and speak freely. His service took him from the enlisted ranks to the Executive Office of the President, from the former Soviet Union to the Pentagon, and from the Andean Ridge to southeast Asia. Post-military travels have taken him to India, Indonesia, Egypt, and various other troubled regions. He believes that only firsthand observation allows a practical understanding of the world's problems. In addition to his first influential book on strategy, Fighting for the Future:
It’s because for the BushBots, this sort of heresy can’t be allowed....
But then you have to read those who think Blair is full of bunk and is re-writing history. . .and then figure out if maybe Blair's critics have their own agenda. . . .the point is War is ugly and compared to the history of warfare, the Iraq War has been an incredible victory. Extreme progress with minimal cost. By the way, remember one thing. ..the true measure of success: NO ATTACKS SINCE 911!!!
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