Are they going to be combat brigades, or are they going to be engineering or support or what? You’d think they’d need to be combat brigades to do any good, but we only have a limited supply of them:
That would leave roughly 10 combat brigades to act independently. That may or may not be good, but we’re running into basic force limitations here. Ideally, you’d like each combat brigade to have two years out of country for every one year in the combat zone. Right now it’s running at one to one, and if we wind up with most of our combat brigades in either Iraq or Afghanistan at any given time, they’re going to have to reduce even that one year back home for each year in combat.
As I understand it (from stuff I’ve read along the way but don’t have a cite for now), it’s because combat is stressful on both men and machines, and apparently a year for troops to just plain recover (and permanent casualties replaced) and equipment to be replaced, and then another year for the refitted unit with new troops in it to train together before returning to combat, is the ideal.
Just from anecdotal evidence, it appears as if the more the cycle is speeded up, the more soldiers you have that just plain snap in one way or another.
Baghdad can never be stable as long as there are people like al-Sadr with his own armed followers. He’s every bit as crazy anyone else, and has no interest in working with the Sunni population. There should be an investigation into his part in the killings by the Shia death squads and a trial if warranted, which I believe to be the case.
My favorite part was how he said a victory won’t be like our fathers’, with treaties signed on battleships. No, we’ll just have a premature ejaculation on an aircraft carrier.
And FOX’s military consultant finally said the words I’ve been waiting to hear: “The region sits on 65% of the oil supply. We must secured the area.” Finally someone states the military objection clearly.
An amazing bit of unintentional irony on Bush’s part.
I think you meant ‘objective’, but yeah. And after the way everyone made fun of the “no blood for oil” crowd four years ago!
And there should be a chicken in every pot, a Mercedes-Benz in every garage, and yada yada yada.
The problem is, who is there to deal with in non-Kurd Iraq? The Sunnis are, by and large, supportive of the insurgency. On the Shi’ite side, the two big players are al-Sadr and Hakim, and both of them are ruthless, dangerous men with sizable militias and millions of supporters.
Any Iraqi government pretty much has to have either al-Sadr or Hakim in charge, either directly or as power behind the throne. Currently, al-Sadr’s the guy pulling Maliki’s strings. It’s a lousy situation, but what’s the brilliant alternative?
But isn’t everything prepared by writers who should know better? I know what they were trying to do–say that there’s no clear definition of victory, and wars these days are messier. Which bring up the oft-repeated “How will we know when we won?”
The speech-giver goes over everything. Bush himself, to his ever-lasting detriment, coined “axis of evil” after deciding that David Frum’s version, “axis of hatred,” wasn’t strong enough.
If we want to be ruthless to the Iraqi people, we’ve already accomplished that; they’re killing each other in droves. Does your desired ruthlessness have a particular objective, or can we leave now?
We should leave now. However, the objective is to stop internecine warfare. That’s why people like Sadr need to be put down. The present govenment if you want to call it that is ineffective at best not worth propping up.
Sadr city should be bulldozed. Any area that harbors bad guys either delivers them up or is raized. They can’t have a civil war if they’re disarmed and beaten down. We can give the reigns back a little at time. Maybe I’m nuts but I can’t see having more of the same being effective. More kids will die, Iraq will continue on its way to civil war and we’ll eventually leave as most people think we should right now.
The Iraqi government is never going to start bulldozing parts of Baghdad, and what you’re proposing would make the civil war situation worse. That would involve the government attacking both Shi’ite militias and Sunni areas. It sounds more like fuel on the fire than anything else.
The whole point is that you can’t disarm and beat them down. Every Iraqi you kill is going to be replaced by another, if not a greater number, because they don’t want the soldiers to be there in the first place.
That would require us to take the reigns back in the first place - which won’t happen.
I think that’s the one thing everybody agrees on. Except the President, that is.
Bad idea. As in very. If Sadr City is populated by Shia civilians who are more or less held hostage to Shia militia, they cannot be held accountable, they certainly cannot be fairly expected to “deliver them up”. Even if, as seems as likely as not, Sadr City is populated by civilians in complete and unanimous sympathy with the Shia militias, they are nonetheless civilians. Reprisal on a population is a repulsive proposition.
