Speaking of Dick Cheney, here’s what Cheney had to say about regime change in Iraq back in 1992:
Makes sense to me. But he’s sure singing a different tune now.
Looks like they floated the “delay the report” trial balloon in England, it didn’t take, so they’re going to release a weak report and try to spin it over here.
What a bunch of hooey. The whole frickin’ world was expecting a quick war. They should have had their postwar plans together before the first shot was fired in anger, just in case they were as good as advertised. If the ground war had taken two months, would the extra five weeks of planning time have solved the postwar problems? Do you really believe that??
The problem isn’t that there are problems. The problem is that we didn’t really expect them; our leaders believed their hired informant (Chalabi) and bought into their own belief that we’d be greeted as liberators, with roses strewn at our feet.
That’s where the indictment comes in. To quote Stallone in the original Rocky, “you shoulda planned ahead.” Our leaders didn’t - because they just assumed everything would go right.
Well, some of them are policemen (MPs and the like) and engineers (USACE), trained by the U.S. Army to be just that.
And the fact is that reconstruction and policing are just about the entirety of the mission, right now. If the U.S. military isn’t trained to do this mission, then what’s it doing there at all?? Exactly what numbers are the ‘right’ numbers for the job it’s not suited to do? What’s magic about our current force level? If more troops won’t help, would fewer not hurt? “We have the right number of incompetents with guns in Iraq now. We need every single incompetent we’ve got on the ground now, and we’re extending reservists’ tours to hold that strength level of incompetents, but more wouldn’t help.” Yeah, suuuuuuure.
I’m assuming that we’re already applying all the intelligence resources we can to this problem.
Of course, as long as we’re relying on ‘resources’ like Chalabi, who tell the theoreticians-in-charge (yeah, that’s you, Rummy and Wolfie) what they want to hear, we’re not likely to see an improved caliber of military intelligence in the region.
Look, right now, kidnapping is Baghdad’s new business opportunity. Women are shut out of public life by the fear of abduction and rape. 40 people a day are killed in Baghdad, compared with roughly one a day in New York City.
As long as this is what daily life is like in Iraq’s major cities, what you have is nobody in charge. The longer nobody’s in charge, the more groups there will be who thrive on the effective anarchy. The more groups you have with a vested interest in a lack of public order and safety, the less possible achieving those ends will be, because they will fight to protect their turf.
That’s what we’re up against, whether we like it or not. If our troops can’t do anything about that, then we’d better bring 'em home, because they’ll be coming home soon enough - just more of them in boxes. But if they can, then it seems pretty obvious that more of them are better than fewer of them.
RTF:
Sheesh, this is like from two weeks back. You must have really given my post a lot of thought. 
I recall talk of a quagmire. It certainly went quicker than I thought, and quicker than the military claims to have expected in that report. I see no reason to doubt the report, and you seem to be doing so simply under general principles. Anyway, it’s not a question fo planning, it’s a question of having the assets in place. And yes, I do beleive it. The strategy we appeared to follow was that of a rolling deployment. Typically a rolling deployment is a short sharp offensive followed by consolidation and reinforcement. In this case, our starting offensive carried us all the way to Baghdad.
Now an interesting discussion might be whether we made a tactical error in pushing are advantage or not. By pushing fast we lose consolidation but have a less bloody victory.
Everybody seems to be complaining that we didn’t do it right, but the reality of the situation is that there are trade-offs. Had we cosnolidated and moved slower it might have been much bloodier that our blitzkrieg.
Oh come now. You are better than that. Just about every single time Bush, Rummy, anybody showed up on tv, they talked about how it was long and difficult and how we were going to have to face all kinds of problems.
Saying that the administration blithely assumed everything would just go right is pretty damned innacurate.
The military version of police and engineers aren’t the same as their civilian counterparts.
Our basic military role is to retain control until the new legitimate civilian authorities can take it. We will not be able to do a good job as occupiers. I doubt our administration is under any illusions about that.
I really don’t see these things you cite as problems. I would expect that Baghdad would be a bit more dangerous place NYC, so you’re not really providing a revelation.
Their probably doing better than LA during the riots though. Civil unrest, some anarchy, and lawlessness is to be expected. We just overthrew the country and all the authority’s in it.
The concerning issue is the guerrilla warfare and foreign terrorists were facing. Frankly, I’m glad we’ve taken the fight to where the problem is rather than waiting for it to come to us again. YMMV.
YMMV?
In that case it might have been a good idea to take the fight to where the bad guys are rather than to a place where we might gain some collateral economic advantage. On the other hand, if the idea was to suck all the bad guys into Iraq where they could be efficiently disposed of in one place, big kill zone if you would, wouldn’t it have been a better idea to set up the terrorist magnet somewhere more convenient and less expensive like, for example, Alabama or West Texas.
Actually I think elucidator lives in Minnesota now.
There definitely seem to be thousands of non-Iraqis in Iraq fighting the Americans. Which is a silly situation to be in because if the Americans were not in Iraq the others would not be fighting to expel them.
Irrelevant, really. The real problem, as many of us said all along, wasn’t the war itself but what was to follow.
YOU are better than THAT. Yes, they talked about it occasionally. But there is no evidence whatever that they actually did any actual planning on that basis. No, every assumption was along the lines that evefy institution would remain intact, every citizen would gratefully welcome the liberators, and we’d be out of there as soon as the election of Chalabi was assured. Bullshit then, bullshit now.
Really? If they believed that, then what are they doing about it? Hint: Squat.
You’d do well to explain which problem you’re referring to that was there before - and especially what the word “again” means in that sentence. Are you buying the Cheney line that Saddam was behind 9/11? Why? What convinces you still, after so much discussion that I know you’ve read here? Tell us what evidence is so powerful - or even exists.
Do you actually believe that Al Quaeda was in Iraq before we moved in?
The problems were elsewhere. But it’s not only that the US is sucking some bad guys to Iraq now, as Spavined Gelding says. Once more the US created the kind of hostility against it, that makes people terrorists in the first place. Over and over I read this “bad guys” stuff just like it was inevitable that there are some assholes out there that want to kill us. What makes terrorists, where do they come from? From places like post-war Iraq for example. This place now is a whole new breeding ground for terrorists. Good job!
This just in:
“Blix says Iraq probably destroyed WMDs”
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2003/sep/17/091702041.html
See you all at Scylla’s house for Thanksgiving!
What a strawman!!! The quote should read:
Blix believes that Iraq destroyed most of its weapons of mass destruction 10 years ago
This was a result of the prior Gulf-war!
Is the “big bang,” September disclosure about Sadaam’s weapons that were an “imminent threat” to the US still on, or is it in the process of becoming the “big fizzle.” Does anyone remember that David Kay was supposed to produce a definitive report on those weapons that would smash the “nay sayers” to smithereens?
Do people care that the current gang of GW, Rummy, Wolfie et al have in the past, and still would if the subject were ever brought up, lied, waffled, evaded and changed the subject whenever their stated main reason for this atrocious premtive war is mentioned?
It seems to me that by stalling and continuing to insist that such weapons are hard to find but “they are there” the warmongers have managed to remove their lies from public attention. They have succeeded in the politicians’ main escape route, viz. “That is in the past, it is time to move on and work the current problems, not those of months ago.” Which of course, conveniently ignores the fact that the liars caused the “current problems” in the first place and should be accountable.
And it will also allow GW to run for reelection on the basis that “we are in a war” and you “don’t change horses in midstream.” It is really sickening to me that polls show that a large majority of the electorate still has swallowed the lie that there was a pre-war tie between Iraq and Al Qaeda and that Sadaam had a hand in the WTC/ Pentagon attacks.
I’m not that pessimistic, David. Sure, they’ll try that approach, but its grounding in reality is so thin that it’s backfiring on them already. The sentiment that we were lied to and that people are dying because of it is already at or near majority status, and it’s growing steadily. If they keep it up, the backlash of anger will be real. But, as you point out, there may still be enough people too unwilling to accept the horrible possibility that they bought into it that the Bush pro-war vote will still be substantial.
Scylla, do you really want to wait any longer, or might it better to just get it over with? Been working on drafts of your Post of Abjection, Abasement, and Acknowledgment of Asinity yet?
Many people still won’t believe that Ronald Reagan was as phony as a $3 bill.
And as Adolf Hitler said in Mein Kampf (Book I, Chap. 10) " All this was inspired by the principle - which is quite true in itself - that in the big lie there is always a force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation … more often victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often lie in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clear in their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there must be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes."
He’s got to admit to behaving like an Inverse Transcendental Function ? :eek:
Oops. Asininity.
Interesting development: The White House “distances itself” from Cheney’s remarks about any theoretical connection between 9/11 and Goddam Hussein.
Is this the first subtle indication that Richard “Big Dick” Cheney is about to walk the plank, fall on his sword and take a bullet for the home team? One slides into fond memories of transcripts of Nixon contemplating throwing John Mitchell to the wolves, how you had to give them somebody big, but not too big. “The Big Enchilada.”
Its a ploy with an ancient historical pedigree. Times get tough for the sultan, he executes the vizier. (Sargon of Akkad did it first. His vizier was summarily dismissed.) The people say “No, no, the Leader is good! He has evil advisors, but when they are gone, all will be well again!”
And, golly gosh, where is Mr. Kay’s thundering report? They did say the middle of September, didn’t they? That was a couple days ago, right? Wherever could it be?
"And, golly gosh, where is Mr. Kay’s thundering report? They did say the middle of September, didn’t they? That was a couple days ago, right? Wherever could it be?
Relax young elucidater, the nature of a suprise is to suprise, not to let the jacklegs of this board predict. Your September suprise is coming.
Your dime to my dollar?