This "government that functions well. What does that mean? Is that a government that functions as US decoded what constitutes “well,” or a government that suits a nation made of of Moslems of at least two varieties, a lot of tribes, Kurds, etc., etc. The two are not necessarily equivalent.
And this army in the “pretty bad neighborhood.” Will it need nuclear and biological weapons for defense? We seemed have felt that we needed them at one time. Will we, or the Iraqis decide what defense they need in that “pretty bad neighborhood?”
And I think your comparison of our length of stay in Korea and Saudi Arabia is false. We were not in either of those two countries as a defacto government because we had kicked out their previous govnment by a preemptive war.
It strikes me as funny how many people assume that there was/is no after war planning. How many public projects can you point to in your home town that completed on time and on budget? I’m looking out my window at a section of I-40 that was supposed to be completed 2 years ago? So, I guess there was no planning for this road. They just went out and started digging and pouring concrete. There couldn’t have possiblely been any planning right? I guess in your world things always go perfectly according to plan.
I know this was supposed to have already been wrapped up and turned over to the Iraqies(sp) by now because we do this so frequently that we have the time table and procedures down pat. Anybody who thought this would take months and not years wasn’t paying attention. To answer the op we continue along the path we started. We continute to repair or build vital infrastructure. We continue to introduce self government at the local level and build slowly toward a national government. I can’t see how it would be possible to leave before at least one peaceful exchange of president/prime minister in the new government. If this does lead to modern, stable, democratic Iraq then it will be worth the cost.
Sorry, but that’s just a repeat of the same bullstuff lie – that “Kenneth Joseph”, a pastor with the Assyrian Church, went to Iraq as a human shield, learned about Saddam’s atrocities with the plastic shredders, and got so nauseated he went back home and supported the war. Unfortunately, Kenneth Joseph doesn’t exist.
Cites:
Bottom line: The whole “plastic shredder torture story” is pure Republican porn, with no basis in fact.
I mean a government that can maintain an infrastructure, provide a police force, stabilize the currency, manage the oil assets of Iraq, and fund and keep a military that stays under the control of the government.
Whether that government is a democracy, a theocracy, a dictatorship, or is run by aliens from Rigel V is irrelevant to this requirement. At the very least, a functioning government must be in place before the U.S. leaves. Do you agree?
Who seemed to have felt that they needed them at one time? The only person I know who feels he needed WMD was Saddam Hussein.
No, obviously Iraq needs a large enough military to police its borders and discourage adventurism from Syria, Iran, or Turkey. Security guarantees from the U.S. will help that a lot, as will a largish U.S. military presence.
Fine. Use Okinawa as an example. Or West Germany. No one is saying that a U.S. presence there for a generation means that the U.S. will occupy and control the country for that long. I expect a sovereign Iraqi government will be operating within five years. I also expect that that government will ask the U.S. to stay there with a fairly large force for the foreseeable future, because it will be in their own interests.
The analogy with Germany or Japan might be useful here. I don’t think anyone would claim that the German or Japanese governments were just puppets of the U.S. after the 1950’s, and yet in both countries a large military presence remained. The U.S. would not allow governments to be formed which were overtly hostile to the United States, but within that very large area of lattitude the governments of those countries were free to do as they chose.
Have you ever heard of the Office of Special Plans?
You see, it’s not so much that there wasn’t pre-war planning for the post-war phase so much as the Bush Admin decided to use the politically pleasing and expedient info and analyses instead of the ones coming out of the State Dept, CIA et al. The info and analyses coming from our established professional agencies showed that the job would be too hard to sell to the electorate and Congress. The projection based on the intel provided by the Iraqi National Congress’ Ahmed Chalabi and the cabal in the OSP showed that we’d be greeted by the Iraqi people and that we’d have an Iraqi government up and running by early June.
This isn’t a case where the best planning and intel were used and mistakes happened anyway. This is an instance where intel and analyses that were known to be unreliable and untrustworthy were cobbled together to not only to find sufficient justifications for launching the invasion the way that we did, but be find a reconstruction and exit plan that was palatable to the electorate and Congress.
The CIA and the DIA repeatedly warned the Bush Admin before the war about many of the hazards and pitfalls that Wolfowitz has described as “hard to imagine.” Wolfowitz has tried to act like there was no way that anyone could’ve forseen some of the difficulties that the reconstruction efforts have faced.
Several intel agencies put together plans and advice about the reconstruction of Iraq that were ignored in favor of more favorable, (though less realistic), projections.
This why there was a projection for an interim Iraqi government in early June.
For some strange reason, (that I’ve not been able to track down even the official explanation of), the Pentagon was put in charg of nation building in Iraq instead of the State Dept who’re the traditional ones for such jobs. The State Dept has more experience in such things. I suspect that the plans and projections that the SD wanted to use were not as pleasant as those of the Pentagon.
This is exactly the objection to what the Bush Admin was selling and sold. Exactly the objection to their mismanagement of the whole affair. They have yet to provide a comrhensive projected budget for what is estimated to be at least a hundred billion dollar project of reconstructing Iraq.
Using your road building analogy:
It turns out that the highway Dept won’t authorize a budget sufficient to redo the 100 miles of road between A and B. What we’ll do is make a road measuring group that’ll give us a “better” measurement of the distance between A and B. If they can measure it in such a way that A and B are only 50 miles apart, then we can get authorization for a project to redo the highway between A and B.
When it became apparent in the planning stages that we wouldn’t have enough MPs to deal with the expected number of POWs, the number of expected POWs was revised to accommodate the number of MPS we had rather than finding a way to get more MPs.
Was I dreaming or didn’t the US have, and still have nuclear weapons including hydrogen bombs up to 50 megaton yield? And aren’t we now in the process of destroying serin gas containers right now? So at one time, I repeat, we thought we needed such weapons.
My question was, since you seem to agree that that is a “bad neighborhood” who decides what the future Iraq government needs for defence?
And, while I’m at it, is your definition of what will constitute a suitable Iraq government the same as GW’s, or for that matter Iraq’s?
If you look around at the US and its infrastructure, unemployment, poverty and other internal problems, I’m a little put off by your arrogant assumption that we know best.
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As far as I can tell, no. After researching this for another thread (about detonating bombs in Antarctica or Greenland), the biggest I could come up with from the U.S. was 9 MT. The Russians had 100 MT devices, and did a test of one of them @50 MT.
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Dismissing one source doesn’t dismiss the entire argument, december. Or are you telling me that “Kenneth Joseph” actually exists, just because a source you disagree with says otherwise? At the very least, I find it odd that a guy with a story as horrifying as his couldn’t even get five minutes on 60 Minutes or The Today Show to share his tale with the rest of the world – instead, it all boils down to the same bogus name, the same bogus UPI story, the same Republican porn.
(Say, how many “industrial-strength plastic shredders” have we found in Iraq, anyway? Or are they buried with the 500,000 tons of WMDs Saddam supposedly had?)
Sorry, I misunderstood the message to suggest that we thought SADDAM needed WMD. Which is reasonable, because otherwise it’s a bizarre point to make. Whether or not the U.S. thought it needed nuclear weapons is irrelevant to whether or not Iraq needs them.
Preach it, brother. Another thing that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the gang screwed up in prewar planning was the number of troops they’d need for the mission. Anyone remember the grumbling from the military about the small number of troops assigned to the mission while the war was on? What was on hand at the time was enough to win the conventional war, but inadequate to police the country afterwards. They’d planned on the Iraqi Army of all things to help them in post war security. It didn’t take a genius to realize that the troops available in field were likely to be insufficient, I could have told them that myself. Rumsfeld had his revolution in military affairs to sell, though.
The prospects in Iraq are not good. The public order and safety situation is not getting better; if anything, it’s getting worse by the day and the situation may become politically untenable. The authorities installed by the US are seen as puppets by a large part of the population and, in any case, the chances they would be accepted by everybody were zero. There’s no country in the world where there are no political rivalries and discrepancies and any group who has outside support, ipso facto loses points and credibility.
The occupation forces are incapable of keeping order and making reconstruction possible. The USA does not want to dedicate the resources it would take.
I just can’t see things getting better. The US cannot win and it cannot quit; all it can do is muddle along. I think in the end it will turn out to be a very expensive lesson.
