Posted on 04/20/2015 5:10:42 AM PDT by elhombrelibre
Aloof. Polite. Cajoling. Extremely attentive. Restrained. Dishonest. Inscrutable. Malicious. The rebels from northern Syria, remembering encounters with him months later, recall completely different facets of the man. But they agree on one thing: "We never knew exactly who we were sitting across from."
In fact, not even those who shot and killed him after a brief firefight in the town of Tal Rifaat on a January morning in 2014 knew the true identity of the tall man in his late fifties. They were unaware that they had killed the strategic head of the group calling itself "Islamic State" (IS). The fact that this could have happened at all was the result of a rare but fatal miscalculation by the brilliant planner. The local rebels placed the body into a refrigerator, in which they intended to bury him. Only later, when they realized how important the man was, did they lift his body out again.
Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi was the real name of the Iraqi, whose bony features were softened by a white beard. But no one knew him by that name. Even his best-known pseudonym, Haji Bakr, wasn't widely known. But that was precisely part of the plan. The former colonel in the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein's air defense force had been secretly pulling the strings at IS for years. Former members of the group had repeatedly mentioned him as one of its leading figures. Still, it was never clear what exactly his role was.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
This wasn't a question of sophisticate vs rustic - it was a question of Bush officials so convinced of a WWII-era European-style reception to GI's in Iraq that they blinded themselves to sectarian realities. We are Christian and they are Muslim. We are European whereas they are Mesapotamian, and that made all the difference in the world. Inside every Iraqi isn't an American struggling to get out. Bush adopted the political correctness of the liberals, and the GOP took the hit while he rode off into the sunset. Instead of slaughtering the Iraqi army in the course of conquering Iraq, he let most of it go while striking at the head. Instead of making peace with a Syria he had no political capital to conquer, he kept threatening to attack it, despite the fact that a Sunni Arab regime would have been even more supportive of Iraq's Sunni Arab rebels.
They also blinded themselves to the what-ifs in the event things should turn out less amicably. Bottom line isn't that they weren't sophisticated - it's that they had tunnel vision and never bothered to think it through. And the European critics were even more retarded. If you want to bring someone around to your point of view, calling him stupid is not the way to do it. But that's Europeans for you - always short-sighted and reflexively attracted to self-defeating point-scoring at the expense of long-time allies.
Americans who supported Bush's invasion thought he knew what he was doing. And, as someone whose entire job was to figure these things out, the buck stopped with him. When your plumber tells you he needs to do something, you ask him about the price tag but don't question his expertise. When he floods your basement, however, you hold him to account. And that's what's happening to Bush.
I get your point. So when you deflect the story’s points about Assad to bring up Bush, that’s okay. It makes sense to always bash Bush. It’s all his fault. It explains everything including the deaths of Americans after he left office. And in your eyes Assad is just a victim of not getting enough largess. And it’s insulting for me to be critical of your cowardice and moral weakness that offers submitting to extortion by a terrorist regime like Assad because we assist our allies, and because it’s not fair to shift the argument like you do on Assad to Bush. Got it.
Assad is nobody's idea of a good guy. But bad guys have their uses. Assad's was keeping Sunni Arabs down, just as Stalin's was killing Germans after Hitler tore up the Molotov-Ribbentrop plan. Pol Pot wasn't a good guy, either, but we made common cause with his Khmer Rouge movement after Vietnam invaded Cambodia, thereby leading to Vietnam's withdrawal a decade later. Similarly, we paid $3b a year to Egypt and Jordan so they wouldn't attack Israel, or harbor Palestinians to conduct attacks against Israel. Why the vociferous objection to paying Syria off not to allow jihadists to attack GI's in Iraq?
Like it or not, the buck stops at the White House. Any president who achieved the kinds of results Bush did in Afghanistan and Iraq would be up for relentless bashing. Obama took a bad situation and made it worse, but it was Bush who made it a bad situation in the first place. I can accept that a dove like Obama has a fantasy land view of the world. The problem with Bush is that he had an equally deluded view of the world, one that denied the possibility of large scale resistance, and instead of slaughtering the Iraqi army in place, left it around to kill 5K GI's and burn $1T of American taxpayer dollars. Shinseki was right. We needed 500K men to keep the insurgency at bay while keeping casualties low. Bush tried to do Iraq on the cheap and ended up being penny-wise and pound-foolish. Neither Bush nor Assad are the victims of Bush's folly. The conservative movement, the American people and, most of all, the 5K dead GI's are.
Assad wasn’t “keeping Sunni terrorists down” when he was letting Zarqawi and Krekar’s al Tawhid and Ansar al Islam transit and train in the country....
while simultaneously supporting the Shia Hezbollah and Imad Mugniyeh.
It was Syria that trained and planted Captain Yee as a US military chaplain and had him smuggling material out of Gitmo.
The difference between you and me is that I view Bush (or any other president) the way I view a plumber or a tax preparer, and you view him as a saint. If a plumber floods my home or a tax preparer causes me to be audited, I give them a piece of my mind. I pay their salaries and I expect results. You view criticisms as borderline blasphemy. I view them as a normal response to bad service.
Assad needs Islamic State’s help in destroying the rebels in Syria. Then afterwards, Assad will go after the Islamic State, this time the West will help him.
He was supporting anyone who would make trouble for the US in Iraq to forestall an invasion of Syria, a possibility that senior DoD officials kept muttering about (and I supported at the time, largely because I trusted them to make the right calls). But he was killing Sunni Arab Muslim Brotherhood types who opposed him, and many of those also oppose the US. Note that al Qaeda is a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, as are Nusra and ISIS.
Note also that this idea that Assad had full control over the country is not a good assumption. The Hama rebellion in the 80's almost killed Assad's dad. The Syrian economy was in worse shape in 2003, probably because oil-rich Iraq's economy was in a shambles due to sanctions, and Syria probably relied a great deal on that trade. Meaning that dissent, while below the surface, was bubbling along, breaking out into outright revolt in 2011. Any serious suppression of Sunni Arab activities vis-a-vis supplying the Iraqi insurgency would have resulted in an even more rapid deterioration of his popularity which was never high in a Sunni Arab majority country. Any financial aid would have served to help him buy off dissent, i.e. the same function served by the $3b a year handed out to Jordan and Egypt.
bflr
I don’t view Bush as a saint. I view him as a man who tried and made some mistakes. I see you’re still keen though to dump on him and change the subject from Assad and the thread. In this, you are an apologist and a sophist. The article wasn’t about Bush. You can blame Bush all you want for forcing Assad to support terrorism. But do you know what? Assad was in bed with terrorists before the Second Gulf War. It’s true. Bush didn’t cause Assad to kill Americans. It was the way the Assad gangster family operates. Now, it’s come back to haunt him. Now, you can reply and tell me that Bush ruined Obama’s naïve world, or that if not for Bush Assad would never have got in bed with al Qaeda, but you’re just going in circles.
In your opinion, what mistakes did Bush make? Was he too nice? Did he work too hard? Did he love his family too much?
You’re clearly too obtuse to understand this, so I’m forced to be blunt. The thread isn’t about your creepy, weird obsession with Bush or your attempts to make it about your deflection. Consequently, I’m not answering your self-evident and troubling perseveration. Seek help while you still can, loser.
I'm not obsessed with Bush at all. The fact is - the author rightly mentions Bush's failure as a key reason for the disaster in Iraq. Whereas you deny his culpability without actually providing a good rebuttal, choosing to resort to personal insults in the absence of a good argument. I find it amusing that you've not even entertained the possibility that he might have screwed up, let alone looked at the ways in which he dropped the ball.
In my humble opinion, a man who calls himself elhombrelibre ought to spend some time thinking things through for himself rather than repeating the shibboleths of the talking heads. Anyway, I've spent quite enough time trying to get a debate going. Since you're obviously not interested, I won't press the issue. Feel free to have the last word with yet another fusillade of insults. I'll file them away and combine them for the next time I'm stuck in traffic and feel like giving the motorist who's blocking the road a piece of your mind.
I can see your point about the Bush Administration underestimating the difficulty of reforming Iraq (or deliberately underselling the reality to muster political support), but I would argue that we were strong enough to effectively do it. By the time he left office, Iraq was under control and improving.
The carpet was pulled out from under Iraq by the Obama Administration, who let Nouri al Maliki keep office after losing the election to the solidly pro-American Iyad Allawi, released all the bad guys (including the leadership of ISIS) from jail, and then totally threw Iraq to the dogs with a complete pull out. Iraq would be a very different place today if Allawi had been in charge, and Americans had maintained security - despite Assad’s best efforts. (...and if we had not destabilized the rest of the Middle East and North Africa under Obama - including the actual attack on Syria using surrogates.)
My position is that Iraq had painfully been moved to a position dramatically less threatening to the West and Israel by Bush, and that this has been completely sabotaged by Obama.
In your other post about Islam, it is true that under Sharia, different legal standards apply to different classes of people: Muslims, People of the Book (Christians, Jews and sometimes Zoroastrians), and Pagans (anyone else); Males vs. Females; Slaves vs. Free.
In practice, standards have varied widely from one time and place to another. The bottom line is that it depends on the Government. The continued existence of large Christian and Jewish communities throughout the heart of the Islamic World well into the 20th century, clearly shows that the currently popular genocidal approach is the exception rather than the rule. Yes, Islam allows genocide, but it grants huge discretion to the despotic leader (the true purpose of Islam was a design to support Muhammed’s absolute dictatorship).
It is not technically permissible for muslims to just kill non-muslims under sharia, but there are plenty of loopholes that Governments and non-governmental organizations (like al Queada or the Muslim Brotherhood) can invoke. Pakistan does it with anti-blasphemy laws which are easy to abuse, the terrorists do it by declaring wartime exceptions and assuming leadership authority.
I see the governments and the ideologies of the main terrorist groups as the current problem, exploiting the potentials for abuse in a system established to support the arbitrary dictates of a Despot (i.e able to legally bend in any direction, just as Hitler’s actions were “legal” under the structure he had put in place).
Just as Christianity has been co-opted by power hungry leftists to form of Reverend Wright’s “Church” which Obama attended, or Liberation Theology, which had Catholic priests carrying AK-47’s with guerrilla groups in Latin America; Islam has been co-opted by by power hungry leftists and dictator wanna be’s. The Muslim Brotherhood is clearly in this camp, and al Queada is an outgrowth of it.
The Islamic State is primarily a political/intelligence agency operation (Saddam’s former intel services), using Islam as their cover story. The leadership are driven by a desire for absolute power on Earth, not a spiritual desire for moral perfection. Just as with Muhammed however, the apparatus of indoctrinating the population and enforcing the dictatorship may well outlive the purposes of its founders.
Also on another note, I would propose that it was not Tommy Franks who turned away from defeating the Republican Guard in detail.
I believe that Schwarzkopf had responsibility in issuing countermanding orders, and it was Powell (and/or higher) who flinched at the actual slaughter.
I believe this strongly, having served in that war, and having some insight from there. It was a point for some argument afterward. When the dust settled, Franks was promoted and Schwarzkopf retired.
These are executive decisions. The buck stops at the White House. in 1991, the right thing to do was to stop the killing, if the decision was to leave Saddam in power. What truly screwed things up was Bush giving the Shiites cause to believe that the US would intervene on their side, thereby resulting in a revolt that was crushed with great slaughter by Saddam. That was probably a factor in Shiite distrust and resentment of the US occupation during the Operation Enduring Freedom, a sentiment that manifested itself in the decision to evict US troops.
I'm not blaming Franks for not slaughtering Saddam's army in 2003 - I'm blaming Bush. Again, how many of the enemy to kill is ultimately an executive decision, because of the foreign relations and international law aspects of the decision.
After 9/11, the right thing to do was to ask Congress for 20 additional army divisions, in preparation for occupation duty and future military operations. Instead, he did a tax cut and asked people to go shopping.
I thought then that this administration was either awfully confident or awfully wrong about the outcome of future military operations. I had expected, at minimum, an expansion of ground forces or even a limited draft for occupation duty. Political capital has a limited shelf life. If you don't seize the moment, that moment is lost forever.
We garrisoned postwar Japan with 350K troops for 5 years. This was a country that lost 4% of its population including perhaps 1/3 of its 18-28 fighting age men. It was also a country that had been near starvation for years, and had suffered 500K civilian deaths through firebombings and nuclear strikes. And Japan is an island nation, whose waters were extensively patrolled by the US Navy, apart from which no neighbor (all of which had suffered from Japanese attacks) was likely to want to help the Japanese fight the US. On top of it all, Japan's God Emperor, Hirohito had, in exchange for immunity from prosecution, told his people to surrender and stop fighting. As a living god, the odds were good that his orders would be followed.
Nonetheless, 350K occupation troops were allocated for a beaten nation that would have seen millions of famine deaths if not for the end of the war. And Bush thought 140K occupation troops would be enough for Iraq, whose fighting age Sunni Arab troop numbers had barely been grazed.
You might say this is Monday morning quarterbacking. My response? I'm just a keyboard jockey doing this analysis for fun. If I were the decisionmaker, on the basis of my resources and my time (a few hours a week), I'd cut myself some slack.
Bush had an army of millions in the Federal bureaucracy working for him, and thousands of analysts whose job was ultimately to answer any questions he cared to ask. All he had to do was formulate those questions, or appoint people to do it for him. He had no excuse for dropping the ball. If we had 350K troops in Iraq (or Afghanistan), we would have suffered fewer combat deaths. Instead, Rumsfeld went with the nutty notion that penny packet deployments necessitated by a small occupation force would lead to fewer casualties (his "more troops = more casualties" assertion).
My view is that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney had too much business experience. They ran the war like an established profitable business, trying to squeeze out efficiencies. Except the ultimate success of the enterprise was in doubt from the beginning, not because the US lacked resources, but because it lacked the popular support to lose thousands of men for complete strangers in a country with an alien, hostile and, frankly, barbaric culture. The time to ask for the manpower and money necessary for victory was right after 9/11. Bush dropped the ball then, and then divided up the limited US forces available for an invasion of Iraq. This is the definition of incompetence. Instead of overkill (500K troops for 5 years or so), they placed 140K troops there and suffered 4K dead at the end of Bush's 2nd term, thereby paving the way for an Obama victory in 2008.
Note that I’m not suggesting that historically, it has been impossible to subdue a conquered population with small numbers of garrison troops. Mongols placed tiny garrisons in the towns and cities they conquered before moving on to the next objective. And much of the time, this worked well. Mainly because any locale that killed the garrison was exterminated to the last man, woman and child, once the Mongols found out about it. Bush obviously did not have that option in Iraq.
What was even funnier was that Bush claimed he had enough troops in Iraq, but somehow, more troops (i.e. “The Surge”) seemed to help turn the tide. If he had placed 200K additional troops there from the beginning instead of the piddling 30K during “The Surge”, would he have had to account for 4K dead GI’s when he left office?
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