I have to ask. Have you been paying attention to the war in Iraq? If you have how would you describe the attacks that have killed our soldiers?
I think I’ve called you on this several times, Sam, but what the heck, let’s give it another go.
Sez who? Clearly, it is the Bushistas oft-repeated assertion: the “untidiness” is caused by “dead-enders”, Baathist remnants and deranged Saddmite loyalists. It is most definitely not a popular political front, most assuredly not a nativist anti-American movement with support from the populace, absitively, posolutely… Because that would be bad.
I harbor the opposite suspicion. Throughout history, the presence of soldiers in alien uniforms who don’t speak your language has been a severe damper on cordiality. Even Americans are endangered by persons unwilling to accept the blessings of our civilization. Such ingratitude is puzzling, to be sure, but there you have it.
So, to reiterate, belabor, hound and badger: how do you know that the insurgency is not rooted in popular support? What evidence (and “cross my heart” testimony from Rummy et. al. is not evidence) can you offer that this is so?
If we kill Saddam Hussein and the fighting continues, will it change the story of who the fighters are?
Sam all your points are irrelevant as long as you have people fighting who are not easily distinguishable from the local population. The guerrillas do not come out of the jungle; they emerge from the population and go back to the population and there is no way to fight them effectively unless you assume every civilian is an enemy. Your assertion that the guerrillas do not enjoy the support of the population contradicts the evidence. In any case, the situation can only get worse: For every US soldier killed the American public will gradually withdraw their support for the occupation while for every Iraqi killed the anti-American sentiment of the Iraqis and their support for the guerrillas will grow.
The US has got itself in a bind: to reconstruct Iraq it needs to provide safety and order but that makes US forces easy targets. One of the soldiers killed in the last few days was guarding a hospital and was an easy target. But if you do not provide this service then reconstruction is impossible.
Well gee, if I’m not allowed to use the opinion of the military, the administration, or the reconstruction authority, just what evidence am I supposed to offer you?
My characterization of the resistance is as follows:
- It is not centrally controlled, as far as we can tell.
- It’s well funded and armed. There are almost daily discoveries of huge caches of weapons, including surface to air missiles, RPGs by the thousands, and sophisticated explosives. Clearly weaponry belonging to the former regime.
- Some of the ‘hit men’ are young disaffected Iraqis who are very poor and can be bought. Give a young man a gun and a thousand dollars, and he’ll take his chances in being able to run up behind an American and shoot him in the head and get away.
- The larger attacks that are happening show training in squad level tactics. Remote control bombs, zones of fire, etc. For example, there was one attack in which a bomb was designed to cluster the Americans onto the road - where much larger explosives were buried. Luckily, they didn’t go off.
My conclusion, and that of the military and administration, is that there is a core of ex-Ba’athists and Fedayeen, who are launching their own attacks and also paying others to attack. There may also be some other groups from out of country, and sure, maybe the odd pissed off Iraqi. Some attacks show sophisticated tactics, and some don’t require it.
There is no evidence that there is a popular uprising. People are mad about the pace of reconstruction, but they aren’t fighting for their freedom.
If Collounsbury has better information than this, I’d like to hear it.
elucidator, I think you might be blinded by your prejudice. You see the Americans as an illegal invading power, so it makes sense to you that the Iraqis are rising up against them. I see them more as bumbling liberators, who the Iraqis are glad showed up, but who are screwing up in some important ways now, which pisses people off. But that’s very different than being invaders that the people didn’t want to have show up in the first place.
Thanks for the quote. This is new information for me. I never realized there was a substantive post WWII guerrilla war in Germany after the surrender.
Sam
Which means what, exactly? Are you suggesting that a lack of central control can be taken as evidence as to the character and nature of the insurgents? Why? Indeed, wouldn’t one expect exactly that from a widespread popular movement?
It is? We know this? We have quartermasters reports, paystubs, spreadsheets? Your level of detail in this intelligence briefing is, well, incredible is the only word. They might very well attack in precisely the same way if they had no funds at all, using leftover and abandoned weaponry.
I guess we can sure count ourselves lucky they didn’t break into any of those “massive stockpiles” of nuclear anthrax gas! Boy, we’d really be in trouble, huh, Sam? Lucky break there.
Another astonishind detail! Clearly, you have some remarkable intelligence resources at your beck and call. Share them, we beg you. A cite would be a big step in that direction. Be that as it may, even as a pessimist I know that not that many men are willing to kill on a cash basis, even fewer are willing to die for it.
As the Cheesmeister pointed out in a different context, a number of Iraqi men have some military training and experience as conscriptees. A basic sense of military organization and tactic and a familiarity with small arms would be, thererfore, entirely unremarkable and ordinary.
Is it your contention that these are men trained before the fall of Saddam for precisely this end? After everybody is all shot to shit, Plan B goes into effect? Plan Z? Plan 9 from Outer Space?
Think about it this way.
We’re so used to winning, and winning big, that we are no longer willing to accept that people die in combat.
During WWII, we lost 290,000+ in less than 4 years. That’s about 80,000 a year.
During Korea, we lost 50,000+ in 3 years, for a rate of 16,000 or so men per year.
Vietnam: 58,000+ people dead, but over 7 years and change of full involvement, for a rate of 6,300 or so per year.
The little stuff like Panama and Grenada are barely worth mentioning as casualties were so low.
Then we have Gulf War I, where we lost 147 people total in just a few months, and half of them were self-inflicted (aka friendly fire). That averages out to about 600 soldiers per year if it hadn’t ended so quickly. It’s not even close to previous numbers.
By those numbers, it’s obvious that our military superiority has actually grown by leaps and bounds. But along with that comes the idea that these magic weapons we have should be able to do the job. People have forgotten that to truly win you have to have boots on the ground, and some of them will inevitably die. The WWII generation sustained losses 100 times what the Gulf War generation has, and they understood that that’s what happens in war, and accepted it as a matter of course.
What I’m saying is that we as a society have become captivated by our own success, and anything that looks even remotely like failure makes people panic. 200 people in a war that took over a whole country is still acceptable. Compared to what it took to take over Germany and Japan, that’s just a small skirmish.
Stay the course. It would be despicable to leave the Iraqis high and dry by bugging out on them now after what we’ve done, simply because we lose about the same number of soldiers as an average car accident per day.
I agree that we should stay the course now that it’s irrevocably set. The ojections to the price we pay in casualties seems to center around the value of what we get for the price.
Relatively soon, there’ll be talk of “ungrateful Iraqis”.
Of course, one has to consider the opposition. The enemies in WWII were leading industrial nations. In Korea, the enemy was a huge but much poorer country. Iraq had/has neither the manpower of China nor the technological and industrial capacity of Germany or Japan. Were the US to go at it hammer and tongs with the WWII Axis powers today (or, gods forbid, China), I strongly suspect casualties would be back up near WWII levels.
It’s not so much a growth of military superiority as it is getting into fights with weaker opponents. Not, I might add, that US military superiority hasn’t grown - but the evidence you cite doesn’t really demonstrate that point very convincingly.
I think that the question isn’t wether or not we should stay or leave. The question is “Are those soldier’s deaths necessary?”
Because they are dying largely because the Bush administration is unwilling to start setting up democracy in Iraq.
For some reason, reconstruction efforts were shifted, (pre-war), from the State Dept, (the usual body for these sorts of things), to the Pentagon, which has no experience in this sort of thing. Why this is I can only speculate. Maybe someone has better info.
Apparently, the folks on the ground in Iraq are doing a great job for what they have to work with; however, the recent Pentagon funded CSIS report reveals that the reconstruction efforts have serious deficiencies that need to be addressed posthaste.
I’d append the question to “was the war necessary?” Because beyond the legality issues and the opposition to it, it clearly wasn’t. It only follows that neither are the subsequent deaths.
**
Not sure if it’s a matter of “unwillingness” as much as a combination of “wishful/specious thinking” and “dubious goals.” In fact, can anyone tell me, beyond speculation, what the real goals are? Because nothing the Administration said prior to the invasion seems to conform with what is happening on the ground.
That’s an interesting cite which I would not have thought to offer, december. However, we also have to note the differences between Germany in 1945-1947 and Iraq in 2003. I’m not even going to try to compare the psychological makeup of the populace or the money which will be spent on reconstruction.
Instead I’ll simply focus on one comparison for which we can make some fairly solid guesses: the application of force to space. In this thread I tried–and failed–to accurately calculate how many troops were in Europe in June, 1945. It numbered in the millions, and many if not most of those millions of troops were occupying Germany itself, which is about 100,000 square kilometers smaller than Iraq. However, Germany’s population in 1945 (perhaps 60 million, East and West?) seems to be at least twice that of Iraq today (24 million).
Before this war I had not thought that such a small force would be able to be as successful as it was, largely due to the opportunity the Iraqis appeared to have in exploiting the weak application of force to space. Now I’m ready to concede that the American and British forces are capable of employing so many force-multipliers that their numbers were more than adequate to quickly eliminate organized military resistance.
However, I am not convinced that those force multipliers lend themselves to the task of occupation as well as they augment their fighting ability.
I hope I am proven wrong again.
All right, bub, you’ve clearly OD’d on the flag-waving. I’m putting a hold on your tab until you sober up.
(I suspect that the growing jingoism from the right wing is happening because of greater cognitive dissonance between Bush’s “mission accomplished” bullstuff and the reality of ever-increasing casualties overseas…)
Oops. I’m sorry, somehow I managed to make a force to space comparison without counting the forces currently in Iraq.
As best I can tell there are about 162,000 troops in Iraq, which equates to a troop/civillian ratio of about one soldier for every 166 civilians, or one solder for every 2.66 square kilometers of area.
Very conservatively estimating the number of Allied troops in Germany itself in 1945 at one million, we can guess that the ratio of troops to civilians was probably more than one soldier for every 60 civilians. (That ratio of course increased over time as occupying troops were sent home.) Using the same ass-pulled number of troops, I’m guessing there must have been at least one solder for every 0.35 square kilometers of area.
If you for some reason wanted to increase the ratio of troops to civilians from 1:166 to 1:60 in Iraq, you would require approximately 450,000 occupying troops. If you wanted one solder for every 0.35 square kilometers, you’d need over 1.2 million occupying troops.
I’ll freely admit that these figures are mere guesswork and therefore necessarily incorrect, but I don’t think that I’m egregiously mistaken.
Remind me of what Shinseki’s numbers are supposed to’ve been.
This just in from Wolfowitz: The proper phrasing for intelligence information is not ‘WAG’ or ‘pulling stuff out of their ass.’ It is ‘murky intelligence’ that must be acted upon regardless.
Screw the numbers.
Why are Americans getting shot in Iraq?
Simple.
They don’t much like us. Some of them hate us. Some of them are totally fucking rabidly consumed with hatred for us. And I wanna see someone refute THAT.
This is not surprising. Hell, the Arabs don’t even much like each OTHER, much less weird-assed foreigners who come in and take over at gunpoint, which is largely what they have done to each other for much of the past thousand years. It was due to one of these incidents, in fact, that most Americans first HEARD of Saddam Hussein.
…which brings us to some questions. Since so many people here seem pretty full of answers, perhaps some of you could, like, educate me a little, here. I’ve been accused of being a Bush basher, and I suppose I am, so I won’t say anything about the President except things that can be cemented down by cites from public news sources, okay? LARGE public news sources.
The questions here I’d like some solid answers to include:
- Why did we invade Iraq due to WMD action, but we continue to ignore North Korea? Iraq denied they had any WMDs. Inspectors failed to find any signs of WMDs. Korea stood up, announced their intention to make the damn things, announced they’d begun production, and now announces that they HAVE the damn things, and are working on more. They have done everything but hold up a neon sign saying COME GET YOUR NUKES HERE AND ALL ROUND EYED AMERICAN BABOONS CAN KISS OUR ASSES…
…but we invaded Iraq. Why?
-
It has been pretty firmly documented that Saddam Hussein used WMDs – nerve gas agents – against Iraqi Kurds a while back. He had WMDs and he used them. Why didn’t we do anything back then? And if it has ever been a matter of importance, why did we wait so freakin’ long?
-
The current administration has spoken at length on the necessity of establishing a democracy in Iraq. Are we going to allow one? From what I’m hearing, there’s a pretty good chance that, in the absence of a hardassed dictator to get the trains running and the paychecks signed, an Islamic regime is in the works among more than a few Iraqis. If a majority of them WANT this… are we going to allow it? This REALLY seems like a no win situation here… for US, anyway.
As to the casualties… well, it’s a war, for all that some have declared that it’s over, and that we won. People get kilt in wars. This is the chance you take when you sign the papers and put on the uniform.
…but these fine American boys are not being shot by enemy soldiers on a battlefield while they fight for democracy.
They are being shot by enemy civilians, guerilla snipers, while trying to protect the friends and families of the same people who are shooting at them. They are not given opportunities to shoot back, or to defend themselves. They are doing their job… doing their duty as American soldiers… protecting Iraqi hospitals and Iraqi schools from Iraqi criminals and looters and terrorists…
…and then they drop dead, bullet through the skull, as some snickering asshole on a rooftop a hundred yards away mumbles “Allah akbar,” under his breath and hauls ass.
…and that same asshole is going to merrily keep shooting American soldiers until someone finally spots the bastard and nails him, or until we catch him.
…and then, his replacement will step out of the wings, and the circus will go on.
This is not exactly the war our boys trained for, to quote a general the President isn’t very happy with right now.
Makes me wonder how long the voters are going to sit still for it…
We aren’t exactly sitting for this’n. We’re in a different position.