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”.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
You can look at all past major wars and find major foul ups in every single one of them. I guess this one was supposed to be different because.....?
bttt
To all of you Bush haters out there: Terrorists including alQaeda, from all over the world have been flocking to Iraq to fight the U.S. Military. Is that a bad thing?
take your time...
Hindsight is great isn’t it. Makes you look sooo much smarter than the people that actually have to do the job in the first place.
I admit that my only frustration with the Iraq war was that no one was tasked with winning the peace.
See the war only lasted 28 days. The MSM keeps refering to our “ongoing war in Iraq” and that’s a false statement. We are not at war with Iraq. We already won that war...in 28 days.
What we didn’t do is finish the war with a cohesive plan to win the peace, which is the harder task in the grand scheme of things.
We would have been well served to take some of the lessons from the end of the axis powers and applied them. Even that would have been an improvement to what we did do.
At the end of the day though the people of Iraq now have the ability to decide their own fate which is something that they havent had for over 50 years. So I dont regret us going in there.
What I see is a problem is the American public expecting war/military action to wrap up neatly like a 30-minute sitcom with absolutely no mistakes and no casualties, and costing very little money. They want it gone and done away with so they can just “go back to normal.” We’re used to getting what we want fast and quickly, with minimal fuss.
When this whole thing started five years ago, I remember telling a co-worker that I had no doubt we would overthrow Saddam Hussein fairly quickly. Arabs are terrible at modern conventional warfare. The tricky part, I said, was going to be stabilizing the country.
The Bush administration DID make mistakes. But it certainly wasn’t helped by the Democratic party or the MSM, which was determined to see us fail in Iraq for partisan reasons. The constant carnage reports and “we can’t win” mantras demoralized the public and emboldened the terrorists for two years. The Bush administration should’ve done more to communicate with the public about our objectives and remind people of why we’re there in the first place, and why it’s important to win. But it would’ve had to shout over the heads of the news media, pop stars, Hollywood, etc..
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.
bttt
1. Peters has been attacking the Bush administration since the early days of the Iraq conflict when the troops temporarily bogged down in a sandstorm (while inflicting heavy casualties on the charging Republican Guard). He has raised to an obsession his hatred of Rumsfeld.
2. Peters is the journalist who most hyped Abu Ghraib “torture,” thereby undermining U.S. war efforts, mostly for his own craven purposes, and subjecting American and Bush to worldwide condemnation. Peters proclaimed that these atrocities were a stain on all our soldiers past and present, that we are all responsible for the deviant conduct of a few reprobates.
3. Shinseki’s recommendation to increase our troop strength in Iraq to “several hundred thousand” was an off-the-cuff remark to Sen. Levin and never presented to the Joint Chiefs. It was interpreted by Russert as 300,000. In short, Shinseki had no plan, and he is certainly not the father of the surge, which peaked at 168,000, about the same number Rumsfeld's generals had deployed before some drawdowns began.
4. Shinseki was the general, who in the name of equality, downgraded our special operations forces. Recall the “black beret” controversy?
5. Few SecDefs have been as well prepared for their jobs as Rumsfeld, owing to his previous experience as SecDef under Ford, his navy fighter-instructor gig, his CEO stint at Searle, and his commission's study of ballistic missile threats to the U.S. in the late 1990s. The MSM, while attacking Bush as too dumb, attacked Rumsfeld for being too smart.
6. Military leaders with experience know it would be foolish to commit all reserves in one theater, especially when North Korea, Iran and China were testing U.S. resolve and capacity to respond to other crises.
7. The preferred solution to the deployment problem of long rotations were a burden on soldier families. To go to 300,000 would require a return to the draft, which only a few Democrats advocated (Rangel), primarily to increase the intensity of the antiwar resistance.
8. I do give credit to the MSM and Peters, however, for they have proved that, if one promotes a dubious set of "facts" often enough over a sufficiently long period (The Big Lie?), even well-informed FReepers will begin to doubt their own judgment.
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