Bush's IRAQ WAR -The Biggest Fool since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C

muckraker10021 · Dec 4, 2005

<img src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_ZT57hhyN7vU/R9hTm-LF1OI/AAAAAAAAAjo/0Xz2r12dW-Y/s320/270_1_crefeld.jpg" width="231" height="320">
Professor Martin van Creveld

For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.

<hr noshade color="#333333" size="14"></hr>


Costly Withdrawal Is The Price
To Be Paid For A Foolish War

'Bush has launched the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C'


<h3>By Martin van Creveld
November 25, 2005</h3>

The number of American casualties in Iraq is now well more than 2,000, and there is no end in sight. Some two-thirds of Americans, according to the polls, believe the war to have been a mistake. And congressional elections are just around the corner.

What had to come, has come. The question is no longer if American forces will be withdrawn, but how soon — and at what cost. In this respect, as in so many others, the obvious parallel to Iraq is Vietnam.

Confronted by a demoralized army on the battlefield and by growing opposition at home, in 1969 the Nixon administration started withdrawing most of its troops in order to facilitate what it called the "Vietnamization" of the country. The rest of America's forces were pulled out after Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated a "peace settlement" with Hanoi. As the troops withdrew, they left most of their equipment to the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam — which just two years later, after the fall of Saigon, lost all of it to the communists.

Clearly this is not a pleasant model to follow, but no other alternative appears in sight.

Whereas North Vietnam at least had a government with which it was possible to arrange a cease-fire, in Iraq the opponent consists of shadowy groups of terrorists with no central organization or command authority. And whereas in the early 1970s equipment was still relatively plentiful, today's armed forces are the products of a technology-driven revolution in military affairs. Whether that revolution has contributed to anything besides America's national debt is open to debate. What is beyond question, though, is that the new weapons are so few and so expensive that even the world's largest and richest power can afford only to field a relative handful of them.

Therefore, simply abandoning equipment or handing it over to the Iraqis, as was done in Vietnam, is simply not an option. And even if it were, the new Iraqi army is by all accounts much weaker, less skilled, less cohesive and less loyal to its government than even the South Vietnamese army was. For all intents and purposes, Washington might just as well hand over its weapons directly to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Clearly, then, the thing to do is to forget about face-saving and conduct a classic withdrawal.

Handing over their bases or demolishing them if necessary, American forces will have to fall back on Baghdad. From Baghdad they will have to make their way to the southern port city of Basra, and from there back to Kuwait, where the whole misguided adventure began. When Prime Minister Ehud Barak pulled Israel out of Lebanon in 2000, the military was able to carry out the operation in a single night without incurring any casualties. That, however, is not how things will happen in Iraq.

Not only are American forces perhaps 30 times larger, but so is the country they have to traverse. A withdrawal probably will require several months and incur a sizable number of casualties. As the pullout proceeds, Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge — if, indeed, it can do so at all. All this is inevitable and will take place whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice like it or not.

Having been thoroughly devastated by two wars with the United States and a decade of economic sanctions, decades will pass before Iraq can endanger its neighbors again. Yet a complete American withdrawal is not an option; the region, with its vast oil reserves, is simply too important for that. A continued military presence, made up of air, sea and a moderate number of ground forces, will be needed.

First and foremost, such a presence will be needed to counter Iran, which for two decades now has seen the United States as "the Great Satan." Tehran is certain to emerge as the biggest winner from the war — a winner that in the not too distant future is likely to add nuclear warheads to the missiles it already has. In the past, Tehran has often threatened the Gulf States. Now that Iraq is gone, it is hard to see how anybody except the United States can keep the Gulf States, and their oil, out of the mullahs' clutches.

A continued American military presence will be needed also, because a divided, chaotic, government-less Iraq is very likely to become a hornets' nest. From it, a hundred mini-Zarqawis will spread all over the Middle East, conducting acts of sabotage and seeking to overthrow governments in Allah's name.

The Gulf States apart, the most vulnerable country is Jordan, as evidenced by the recent attacks in Amman. However, Turkey, Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Israel are also likely to feel the impact. Some of these countries, Jordan in particular, are going to require American assistance.

Maintaining an American security presence in the region, not to mention withdrawing forces from Iraq, will involve many complicated problems, military as well as political. Such an endeavor, one would hope, will be handled by a team different from — and more competent than — the one presently in charge of the White House and Pentagon.

For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.


Martin van Creveld (1946- ) is an Israeli military historian and theorist. He is the only non-American author on the U.S. Army's required reading list for officers. He was born in the Netherlands but has lived in Israel since shortly after his birth. He holds degrees from the London School of Economics and The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he has been on the faculty since 1971. He is the author of fifteen books on military history and strategy, of which Command in War (1985), Supplying War (1977), and The Sword and the Olive (1998) are among the best known. van Creveld has lectured or taught at virtually every strategic institute, military or civilian, in the Western world, including the U.S. Naval War College, most recently in December, 1999 and January, 2000. Some people consider his 1991 book, The Transformation of War, among the most important treatises on military theory ever written.


http://forward.com/articles/2314/costly-withdrawal-is-the-price-to-be-paid-for-a-fo/



<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="14"></hr>

nittie · Dec 4, 2005

Never heard of him but I'm sure Martin van Creveld is a intelligent man whether he has the experience and expertise of a Colin Powell or the democratically elected Reps who overwhelmingly voted for this war is another question. His opinion of this fight is no different from anyone else's assholes and elbows we all got em, truth is some people believe America cannot wait for another 9-11 and some people think if we are good little Americans and just treat the poor Islamic fanatic terrorist with kid gloves we won't be hurt again.

glueguy · Dec 4, 2005

the author of this article represents my sentiments much more eloquenlty than i ever could

Havoc · Dec 4, 2005

Wow. Normally there would be opinions floating all over this forum. Maybe they're taking a break right now...

dutchmaster · Dec 4, 2005

Martin van Crevel has hit the nail on the head, especially in illustrating the parallel to the Vietnam war.

Well done.

carlitos · Dec 4, 2005

WOW!!!truth hurts..can't wait to read 'the usual gwb toads' replies..

Greed · Dec 4, 2005

Troops in Iraq

Troops in Iraq

Even some long-time supporters of the Bush Administration are discussing a pull-out from Iraq. But so-called "liberal hawks" say hold on. The World's Matthew Bell reports on the liberal argument for staying the course in Iraq. 5 min 30 sec

http://www.theworld.org/latesteditions/11/20051129.shtml

dyhawk · Dec 4, 2005

Re: Troops in Iraq

I have always been against the War but now that the damage is done there should be no pull out................stay the course no matter what, any pull out will result in something nobody wants to imagin

muckraker10021 · May 11, 2006

<img src="http://www.theatlantic.com/images/issues/200606/cover360x480.jpg">

Hunkering Down

A guide to the U.S. military’s future in Iraq 



The Atlantic Monthly | June 2006

by Fred Kaplan

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200606/kaplan-iraq

Late in February, U.S. Army generals in Iraq started asking military historians and archivists to dig up official records from the 1970s involving the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. The generals were especially interested in the nitty-gritty of pulling out—procedures for disposing and transferring military property, for example, and the precise sequence of demobilization. The message was explicit: we’re going to be staging another withdrawal soon, from Iraq; once it begins, it could spin easily out of control; so we need a plan for an orderly exit now.

And yet, in three years of occupation, the U.S. military has taken steps that suggest a total pullout is unlikely for years to come. The most tangible sign of these measures is the far-flung network of Forward Operating Bases, or FOBs. There are more than seventy FOBs scattered across Iraq, many of them elaborate renovations of Saddam Hussein’s former network of military bases and presidential palaces. Some FOBs consist of just a handful of barracks, but more than a dozen of them are vast complexes reminiscent of the West German garrisons from Cold War days.

The larger bases are fortified chunks of Middle America, surreally plunked down in the desert, replete with Burger Kings, Pizza Huts, Internet cafés, first-run movie theaters, gyms, and swimming pools. Camp Anaconda, built around two 11,000-foot runways and spread out over fifteen square miles, is home and workplace to 20,000 U.S. troops and 2,500 private contractors. Camp Cooke, which boasts 29,000 square feet of retail shopping, is so huge that a shuttle bus runs back and forth from one end to the other. At Camp Falcon, Army engineers had to bring in 100,000 tons of gravel just to build the reinforced roads.

There’s nothing provisional about these places. They’re often referred to as “enduring bases,” and there are plans to keep them operating, in American hands, even if all our combat regiments go home. The Pentagon is requesting $348 million in emergency funds this year for further base construction, beyond the billions already spent.

And so we are operating in an odd state of limbo. It’s clear that we’re getting out of Iraq, and soon, yet it’s equally clear that we’re staying, in a fairly big way. We are simultaneously engaged yet disengaging, hunkered down yet packing up.

Here’s the little secret that explains the contradiction, understood by all involved: whatever factions end up running the Iraqi government, they’ll need—and want—the U.S. military to stick around for many years. This is true no matter what the political mood is stateside.

Over the past year or so—ever since competent American officers were finally put in charge of training local soldiers—the Iraqi army has been growing and improving. Yet the Pentagon estimates that while nearly half of the Iraqi units are able to lead a combat operation, not one can fight by itself. The reasons are plain: the Iraqi military has no air force, no centralized intelligence corps, scant logistics apparatus, and only one armored battalion. As a result, it is—and, for the foreseeable future, will be—unable to coordinate a battle plan, defend the country’s borders, provide air support, or protect supply lines. To perform any of these basic tasks, it will need an outside power with professional armed forces. And unless some other country gets involved soon, that outside power will have to be the United States.

Strategy is an art, logistics a science; and the U.S. military has always been extremely adept at science. To supply an army with bullets, bombs, bandages, spare parts, repair kits, fuel, food, water—and to keep all these things moving through the system so nobody runs short—requires extensive planning. For each American soldier capable of going out on patrol or fighting insurgents, there are five support troops supplying his needs, according to an Army spokesman. In other words, of the roughly 130,000 American troops in Iraq today, only about 25,000 are combat troops. Categories overlap, of course; a truck driver in a convoy can find himself in a firefight or be hit by a roadside bomb. Still, when the generals plan how many troops they need, this is the combat-to-support—or “tooth-to-tail”—ratio that shapes their calculations.

Once the Iraqi army stands up and our combat troops stand down—as President Bush puts it—U.S. military planners estimate that the Iraqis will still need 20,000 to 30,000 Americans for logistics, air support, intelligence, and so forth.

But then there’s the nightmare scenario: What if there is no Iraqi government to defend? What if the political stalemate between Shiite and Sunni Muslims persists and the “low-grade civil war”—which has been rumbling since Saddam Hussein left Baghdad—erupts into anarchy, an unbridled sectarian war of all against all? If America’s mission is to hold Iraq together, what happens if the country falls apart? What do the American troops there do?

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked this question at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing in March. His answer was a parody of obfuscation. “The plan,” he replied, “is to prevent a civil war and, to the extent one were to occur, to have the Iraqi security forces deal with it, to the extent they are able to.” No senator asked the logical follow-up question: To what extent are they able to? Nor did anyone pose a more worrisome question: Even if the Iraqis could deal with a civil war themselves, would they want to? If Sunnis and Shiites can’t form a national government, if they devolve into implacable sectarian foes, what’s to keep the nascent Iraqi army from devolving into sectarian militias?

This is already happening, to a disturbing degree. Southern Iraq is pretty much controlled by Shia militias, northern Iraq by the Kurdish peshmerga. In the turbulent middle territories, nearly all the Iraqi battalions consist entirely of either Sunnis or Shiites, and most of them are more loyal to their religious faction or tribe than to an Iraqi nation.

If Iraq shatters, the Bush administration will be faced with four choices: (1) Try to stop the civil war. (That would involve sending a lot more troops, which seems politically out of the question.) (2) Pick one side and fight alongside it. (Several senior U.S. officers, including two generals, told me they can’t imagine a president going this route.) (3) Get out quickly. (4) Hunker down, and stay neutral, till the smoke clears.

Unlike the first two choices, options three and four are at least feasible, because of the FOBs. Almost all these bases are, among other things, air bases. If we decided to get out, personnel could be flown out by helicopters and cargo planes. Missiles, munitions, and ammo stockpiles would probably be blown up on the spot. The heavy equipment would pose a problem. The U.S. Army has about 450 M-1 tanks, 700 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, 300 Stryker vehicles, and 700 M-113 armored personnel carriers in Iraq, all of which could be moved by air, but not quickly. (The C-5, the largest U.S. military cargo plane, can carry just two M-1s; the next largest, the C-17, can carry only one.) Most of these vehicles would probably leave in much the same manner as they had entered—a thunder run south to Kuwait (or north through Kurdistan to Turkey), perhaps while protecting convoys carrying supplies that weren’t airlifted out. Insurgents could attack the convoys and do some damage, though they’d also be answered by lots of firepower. (Then again, maybe the insurgents wouldn’t want to impede our exit, or maybe they’d be too busy killing rival Iraqis.) Another option would be to leave behind the heavy armor. Building replacement models would cost more than $5 billion, which is hardly trivial, but not much more than the monthly cost of continuing to fight the war.

The easier option, though, would be to hunker down—especially since we’re doing that already. Thousands of troops still go out on dangerous combat patrols or take part in raids and offensives, but the number and scope of these operations have gone down dramatically in the past year. “Most troops are engaged in support functions,” one U.S. officer in Iraq told me. “They stay on the big FOBs and never leave.” (The combat soldiers have a name for these support troops: “fobbits.”)

As the U.S. presence on the ground has diminished, strikes from the air have intensified; they’ve gone up 50 percent since a year ago, and the number of Iraqi cities hit by these strikes has doubled, from eleven to twenty-two. But when they’re on the ground, the pilots and crews—as well as their target planners and traffic controllers—rarely, if ever, step foot off the FOBs.

The FOBs are quite secure. Most of them are situated several miles outside cities—far enough to be invisible to most Iraqis, and close enough so U.S. troops can intervene on short notice. They’re surrounded by fortified defense perimeters extending well beyond the base buildings. In this sense, Iraq is not Vietnam or Somalia or Lebanon. By the time the helicopters fled from the Saigon embassy rooftop, all the U.S. troops had been out of Vietnam for more than a year. The eighteen soldiers gunned down in the streets of Mogadishu had inadequate armor and air support. The 241 military personnel killed in Lebanon when a truck bomb crashed through their gate were on a base that was barely defended. Iraq’s insurgents have never been able to mount a sustained assault on an American position. In a full lockdown, the operational trick would be to keep the supply routes open and safe. (Two-thirds of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq, and three-quarters of injuries, have been caused by roadside bombs—a testament both to the vulnerability of convoys and to the security of the FOBs.)

But if things fall apart, the political trick will be to make a case that the mission still makes sense. It would be hard to justify a massive force that just sits there, but an argument could be made for a stripped-down core of 30,000 troops. If all-out civil war erupts, Iraq’s neighbors may feel compelled to step in, for reasons of security or aggrandizement—Iran on the side of Shiites, Saudi Arabia backing Sunnis, Turkey quashing the Kurds. The United States would be foolish to get militarily involved in an ethno-regional conflict, but it could help deter or mediate one—and having some troops on the ground, and planes in the air, creates diplomatic leverage. But if this becomes a new rationale for military presence, it can work only as one piece of a larger diplomatic initiative. And it would be best to make contact and establish routines with all the bordering nations now, while we are still merely concerned about the dangers and not yet ravaged in the storm.

QueEx · Oct 24, 2006

IS THERE A MIDDLE GROUND APPROACH DEVELOPING,
BETWEEN CUT AND RUN AND STAYING THE COURSE ?



<center>Baker Sees Iraq Panel Departing From Bush Strategy </center>

New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: October 8, 2006

WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 — James A. Baker III , the Republican co-chairman of a bipartisan commission assessing Iraq strategy for President Bush, said today that he expected the group to depart from Mr. Bush’s call to “stay the course.”

In an interview on the ABC News program “This Week,” Mr. Baker said, “I think it’s fair to say our commission believes that there are alternatives between the stated alternatives, the ones that are out there in the political debate, of ‘stay the course’ and ‘cut and run.’ ”

Mr. Baker, who served Mr. Bush’s father as secretary of state and White House chief of staff, did explicitly reject a rapid withdrawal from Iraq, which he said would only invite Iran, Syria and “even our friends in the gulf” to fill the power vacuum.

While heading the commission, Mr. Baker has been talking to President Bush regularly and is unlikely to issue suggestions that the president has not tacitly approved. The independent panel was requested by Congress. Today, he was asked about statements last week by the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, who said Iraq was “drifting sideways” and urged consideration of a “change of course” if the Iraqi government cannot restore order in two or three months.

Asked if he agreed with that timetable, Mr. Baker said: “Yes, absolutely. And we’re taking a look at other alternatives.”

In interviews over the past two weeks, other members of the Iraq Study Group, an independent organization that came together with the reluctant blessing of the White House, have expressed concern that within months whatever course the group recommends will be overtaken by violence and other developments in Iraq.

“I think the big question is whether we can come up with something before it’s too late,” one member of the commission said late last month, after the group met in Washington. “There’s a real sense that the clock is ticking, that Bush is desperate for a change, but no one in the White House can bring themselves to say so with this election coming. It’s a race between our political calendar and the Iraqis.”

The commission member would not speak for attribution, saying public comments should only come from Mr. Baker and his Democratic co-chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, the former congressman.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/w...tml?ex=1161748800&en=d1aaeb9817c4cb60&ei=5070

QueEx · Oct 24, 2006

<center>Active Appeasement
Our Iran policy</center>

The National Review
By Michael Ledeen
October 9, 2006

It may come as a surprise to Sy Hersh — who is hard at work on yet another fantasy claiming we are preparing to wage war on Iran — but the latest evidence points in the direction of active appeasement, masked by some kind of deal.

The New York Times reported Sunday:

James A. Baker III, the Republican co-chairman of a bipartisan commission assessing Iraq strategy for President Bush, said today that he expected the group to depart from Mr. Bush’s call to “stay the course.”

In an interview on the ABC News program “This Week,” Mr. Baker said, “I think it’s fair to say our commission believes that there are alternatives between the stated alternatives, the ones that are out there in the political debate, of ‘stay the course’ and ‘cut and run.’ “

Baker, who served Mr. Bush’s father as secretary of state and White House chief of staff, did explicitly reject a rapid withdrawal from Iraq, which he said would only invite Iran, Syria and “even our friends in the gulf” to fill the power vacuum.

The key word there is “rapid.” Withdrawal is obviously very much alive in the mind of the legendary deal-maker who achieved immortality by brushing off suggestions he was not qualified to be secretary of State with the happy thought that politics is politics, whether at home or internationally. He is also a man who loves stability, and who famously sent his friend George H. W. Bush to deliver a stern warning to the Ukraine to abandon any thought of independence from the Soviet Union. I mean, if you don’t have a Soviet Union, with whom are you going to make a deal?

It looks more and more to me that David Frum’s sensitive political nose was right, that the Bush administration is looking for an exit strategy, and that the strategy requires only a bit of verbal cooperation from the friendly mullahs in Tehran. If they will promise to behave, and “work with us to guarantee security” in Iraq, we will get out of their way, abandon the Iraqis to their doom, and leave the life-and-death question of how to deal with Iran to the next administration.

There does not seem to be any forceful effective opposition to this course within the administration. Baker is no fool; he would not be making such statements to the Times unless he were confident of consensus. And indeed, in the London Telegraph we see that our brave democracy advocates in the State Department have been trying to set up the mechanism for our surrender:

The Bush administration made secret overtures to former Iran president Mohammed Khatami during his visit to the United States last month in an attempt to establish a back channel via the ex-leader.

American officials made the approach as part of a strategy to isolate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr Khatami's hard-line successor, by using the former president as a conduit to the Iranian people.

They also hoped that Mr Khatami would report his conversations to senior members of Iran's theocratic regime who are wary of the current president. Diplomatic sources said that “third parties” were authorised by Nicholas Burns, the US under-secretary of state responsible for relations with Iran, to talk to Mr Khatami in a step towards “engagement” with senior Iranians.

This needs a bit of deconstruction. The most important sentence is the last. It tells us that the secretary of State (Burns, like Baker, is no fool; he would not authorize talks with the mullahs without Condoleezza Rice’s say-so) has approved (still more) talks with the mullahs. Notice also that there is no reference to the celebrated nuclear question. This is all about “engagement,” which is a baby step this side of “normalization.”

Finally, there is the disinformation that consists of the astonishing (even for a journalist) second paragraph. No adult can possibly believe that secret talks (of which there have been many, throughout this administration) could isolate President Ahmadinejad. For us to ask for such talks will be seen in Tehran, and throughout the region, for what is is: retreat. And a great part of the credit for bringing us to our knees will go to Ahmadinejad, who has been guaranteeing this outcome in very forceful terms.

So it seems we are hell-bent on making a deal that will put some sort of honorable patina on our delivery of Iraq into the hands of the Islamic Republic. It will be interesting to see if the deal can be made. Even close friends of Baker, such as Brent Scowcroft, are on the record saying (after an encounter with Ahmadinejad) there is no hope of reaching a reasonable modus vivendi with Tehran. And on the Iranian side, it is dangerous to be seen dealing with Washington. Those who have tried it in the past have come to grief, because the Islamic Republic is based in large part on hatred of America. That is why Iran has been waging war against us for 27 years. So while the Iranians may recognize that this is a delicious victory, it is poisoned by the risk of fracturing their own ranks, and even encouraging their restless people to view the whole charade as an Iranian surrender to an American diktat.

None of this is likely to dampen the enthusiasm of the Rices and the Bakers, who, let it be recalled, fought as hard as they could to preserve the territorial and political integrity of our ancient Soviet enemy. And once the Soviet empire imploded, Secretary of State Baker and President Bush warned against any American celebration of its downfall. Baker is not the sort of man who welcomes world-historical events, or, for that matter, world-historical figures who prefer victory to a good deal. In his (very lengthy) memoir of his years at State, Baker did not deign to mention the role of Pope John Paul II.

It may be that the mullahs, now more convinced than ever that history is running in their favor, will not be interested in providing us with a fig leaf to cover our feckless nakedness, and will press on to humiliate us. They might well reason that only a clear-cut victory would give them the boost they need in their quest for regional hegemony, itself a way station on Ahmadinejad’s announced intention to rule the world in the name of the 12th Imam.

One might ask the Brits what they think about the likelihood of Iranian cooperation in providing the long-suffering Iraqis with decent security. I see in the Telegraph that the Queen’s Royal Hussars in Iraq have found a way “to double the time spent watching the porous border with Iran for smugglers carrying bombs, funs and cash to fuel the insurgency...”

What a pity! We first failed to see that we would inevitably have to fight a regional war if we were to win in Iraq. Then, insisting on our myopia, we designed tactics to play defense in Iraq alone. And now we seem to have turned to the diplomats to “solve” the problem. They can’t do it. They can only guarantee the war will expand, the Iranians will become stronger and more aggressive, and many more people will die even as the diplomats celebrate their own surrender.

On the other hand, the template of American foreign policy seems to dictate that we be saved by our enemies, and rarely through our own brilliance. It may seem paradoxical that our best hope lies with the fanatics in Tehran, but there you have it.

— Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. He is resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjI4ZTE2YzU2ZDVhMTk2NTY1NzA4MjI2YzNiYjgyMTU=

GET YOU HOT · Oct 24, 2006

Re: Troops in Iraq

dyhawk said:
I have always been against the War but now that the damage is done there should be no pull out................stay the course no matter what, any pull out will result in something nobody wants to imagin

QueEx · Oct 25, 2006

Re: Troops in Iraq

<center>

White House is cutting and running from "stay the course." ???

</center>

<IFRAME SRC="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/23/AR2006102301053.html?referrer=email" WIDTH=780 HEIGHT=1500>
<A HREF="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/23/AR2006102301053.html?referrer=email">link</A>

</IFRAME>

GET YOU HOT · Oct 26, 2006

fire this dude... :hmm:

Ambassador Says 2006 to Be 'Year of Police' for Iraq
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service

BAGHDAD, Dec. 20, 2005 – 2006 will be the 'Year of the Police' in Iraq, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq said here today.

At a news conference, Zalmay Khalilzhad charted Iraqi political progress over the past year, and talked about the road ahead for the country.

The ambassador, who arrived in Iraq in July after serving as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said the United States is making progress on the "Iraqization" of the security effort.

In 2005, the number of Iraqi police and army battalions skyrocketed from a handful to 123. Some 81 of these battalions are fighting side by side with coalition forces and 42 are taking the lead role, he said.

"We will work with Iraqis to increase the size, capability and credibility of Iraqi forces," Khalilzhad said.

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Dec2005/20051220_3707.html

muckraker10021 · Oct 30, 2006

What's Wrong With The Iraq Occupation?? - In Eight Minutes!! - A Video Presentation

<hr noshade color="#0000ff" size="6"></hr>

http://www.zshare.net/video/whats_wrong_with_the_iraq_occupation_in_eight_minutes-avi.html

<hr noshade color="#0000ff" size="6"></hr>

GET YOU HOT · Nov 2, 2006

muckraker10021 · Nov 4, 2006

Some of the mother-fucking rats are now trying to get of the quickly sinking bush ship. What Chutzpah!!; The reality based history books will not treat them kindly.

<hr noshade color="#666666" size="4"></hr>

<table border="3" width="520" id="table1" cellspacing="3" cellpadding="3" bordercolorlight="#000000" bordercolordark="#000000" height="93" bgcolor="#C63031">
<tr><td><img src="http://www.vanityfair.com/css/i/hed/logo.gif"></td></tr></table>


Neo Culpa
As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself.
Vanity Fair Exclusive: Now They Tell Us


by David Rose VF.COM November 3, 2006 

I remember sitting with Richard Perle in his suite at London's Grosvenor House hotel and receiving a private lecture on the importance of securing victory in Iraq. "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform," he said. "It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding." Perle seemed to exude the scent of liberation, as well as a whiff of gunpowder. It was February 2003, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the culmination of his long campaign on behalf of regime change in Iraq, was less than a month away.
<div align="left"><table border="4" width="221" id="table1" bordercolorlight="#0000FF" cellspacing="3" cellpadding="3" bordercolordark="#0000FF" height="340" align="left"><tr><td>
<img src="http://www.vanityfair.com/images/politics/2006/12/poar10_neocons0612.jpg"> Richard Perle</td></tr></table></div> Three years later, Perle and I meet again at his home outside Washington, D.C. It is October, the worst month for U.S. casualties in Iraq in almost two years, and Republicans are bracing for losses in the upcoming midterm elections. As he looks into my eyes, speaking slowly and with obvious deliberation, Perle is unrecognizable as the confident hawk who, as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had invited the exiled Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi to its first meeting after 9/11. "The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity," Perle says now, adding that total defeat—an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic "failed state"—is not yet inevitable but is becoming more likely. "And then," says Perle, "you'll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating."
 According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.… At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty." 
Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."
 Having spoken with Perle, I wonder: What do the rest of the pro-war neoconservatives think? If the much caricatured "Prince of Darkness" is now plagued with doubt, how do his comrades-in-arms feel? I am particularly interested in finding out because I interviewed many neocons before the invasion and, like many people, found much to admire in their vision of spreading democracy in the Middle East.
<div align="left">
<img src="http://www.vanityfair.com/images/politics/2006/12/poar11_neocons0612.jpg" align="left"></div> I expect to encounter disappointment. What I find instead is despair, and fury at the incompetence of the Bush administration the neoconservatives once saw as their brightest hope.
 To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush's 2002 State of the Union address that accused Iraq of being part of an "axis of evil," it now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them." This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center"—starting with President Bush.
 Kenneth Adelman, a lifelong neocon activist and Pentagon insider who served on the Defense Policy Board until 2005, wrote a famous op-ed article in The Washington Post in February 2002, arguing: "I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Now he says, "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional." 
<div align="left"><img src="http://www.vanityfair.com/images/politics/2006/12/poar12_neocons0612.jpg" align="left"></div>
Fearing that worse is still to come, Adelman believes that neoconservatism itself—what he defines as "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world"—is dead, at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, "it's not going to sell." And if he, too, had his time over, Adelman says, "I would write an article that would be skeptical over whether there would be a performance that would be good enough to implement our policy. The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless. I guess that's what I would have said: that Bush's arguments are absolutely right, but you know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked can't do. And that's very different from let's go."
 I spend the better part of two weeks in conversations with some of the most respected voices among the neoconservative elite. What I discover is that none of them is optimistic. All of them have regrets, not only about what has happened but also, in many cases, about the roles they played. Their dismay extends beyond the tactical issues of whether America did right or wrong, to the underlying question of whether exporting democracy is something America knows how to do.
 I will present my findings in full in the January issue of Vanity Fair, which will reach newsstands in New York and L.A. on December 6 and nationally by December 12. In the meantime, here is a brief survey of some of what I heard from the war's remorseful proponents.
 Richard Perle: "In the administration that I served [Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan], there was a one-sentence description of the decision-making process when consensus could not be reached among disputatious departments: 'The president makes the decision.' [Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him. The National Security Council was not serving [Bush] properly. He regarded [then National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice] as part of the family." 
<div align="left"><img src="http://www.vanityfair.com/images/politics/2006/12/poar13_neocons0612.jpg" align="left"></div>
 Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar: "Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes."
 Frank Gaffney, an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan and founder of the Center for Security Policy: "[Bush] doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course. He talks about it, but the policy doesn't track with the rhetoric, and that's what creates the incoherence that causes us problems around the world and at home. It also creates the sense that you can take him on with impunity."
 Kenneth Adelman: "The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former C.I.A. director] George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and [Coalition Provisional Authority chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer—three of the most incompetent people who've ever served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration. It was then I thought, There's no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq."
 David Frum: "I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."
<div align="left"><img src="http://www.vanityfair.com/images/politics/2006/12/poar14_neocons0612.jpg" align="left"></div>
Michael Rubin, former Pentagon Office of Special Plans and Coalition Provisional Authority staffer: "Where I most blame George Bush is that through his rhetoric people trusted him, people believed him. Reformists came out of the woodwork and exposed themselves." By failing to match his rhetoric with action, Rubin adds, Bush has betrayed Iraqi reformers in a way that is "not much different from what his father did on February 15, 1991, when he called the Iraqi people to rise up, and then had second thoughts and didn't do anything once they did."
 Richard Perle: "Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that."
 Kenneth Adelman: "The problem here is not a selling job. The problem is a performance job.… Rumsfeld has said that the war could never be lost in Iraq, it could only be lost in Washington. I don't think that's true at all. We're losing in Iraq.… I've worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I've been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I'm very, very fond of him, but I'm crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don't know. He certainly fooled me."
 Eliot Cohen, director of the strategic-studies program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and member of the Defense Policy Board: "I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up drifting toward is some sort of withdrawal on some sort of timetable and leaving the place in a pretty ghastly mess.… I do think it's going to end up encouraging various strands of Islamism, both Shia and Sunni, and probably will bring de-stabilization of some regimes of a more traditional kind, which already have their problems.… The best news is that the United States remains a healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch, we can still pull ourselves together. Unfortunately, it will probably take another big hit. And a very different quality of leadership. Maybe we'll get it."
 David Rose is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.



<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="12"></hr>

UltimateLurker · Nov 4, 2006

Historians will REALLY look down on this administration and its policies in American and world politics.

GET YOU HOT · Nov 6, 2006

Cynthia McKinney speaks...

http://www.guerrillafunk.com/video/mckinney_play.html

muckraker10021 · Nov 7, 2006

Re: Neocons Now Say Bush: INCOMPETENT


Q, I posted the article above on November 4th 2006 at http://198.65.131.81/board/showthread.php?t=74632
I'm sure you just overlooked it. 

<hr noshade color="#333333" size="3"></hr>


Murdoch: US Death Toll In Iraq "MINUTE"

<img src="http://photos1.blogger.com/img/181/1013/640/rupertmurdoch.jpg" width="350" height="221"><img src="http://www.middle-east-online.com/pictures/big/_18162_murdoch-6-11-2006.jpg" width="320" height="212">


Media tycoon says he has no regret about supporting
US-led invasion of Iraq despite many mistakes made there

TOKYO - Media mogul Rupert Murdoch said Monday he had no regrets about supporting the US-led invasion of Iraq and argued that the US death toll in the conflict was "minute" from a historical perspective.

The conservative News Corp. chief spoke on the eve of US elections where President George W. Bush's Republican Party was expected to lose seats in part due to a backlash over the war.

"The death toll, certainly of Americans there, by the terms of any previous war are quite minute," Murdoch told reporters at a conference in Tokyo.

"Of course no one likes any death toll, but the war now, at the moment, it's certainly trying to prevent a civil war and to prevent Iraqis killing each other."

A total of 2,832 US troops have been killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion, according to Pentagon figures. Thousands more Iraqis have died.

Murdoch - whose News Corp. empire includes the New York Post and Britain's most widely read newspaper, The Sun tabloid - said while the United States made mistakes in the war its intentions were good.

"I believe it was right to go in there. I believe that certainly the execution that has followed that has included many mistakes," Murdoch said.

"But that's easy to say after the event. It's much easier to criticize the conduct of the war today in the media than it was in previous wars. I'm sure there were great mistakes made in the past, too."

"I think that one forgets that American foreign policy for the whole of the (20th) century saved the world from terrible things three times," he said, "for which they certainly got no thanks and for which they never had imperial ambitions at all."

"America has been a remarkable country in that way," he said.

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=18162

QueEx · Nov 7, 2006

I did in fact miss the Vanity Fair article. Thanks.

QueEx

GET YOU HOT · Nov 12, 2006

After every ''victory'' you have more enemies.

~Jeanette Winterson

The great error of nearly all studies of war... has been to consider war as an episode in foreign policies, when it is an act of interior politics...

~Simone Weil

GeorgeWBush-QuestionMeAndYou'reUnpatriotic.jpg

Before the war is ended, the war party assumes the divine right to denounce and silence all opposition to war as unpatriotic and cowardly.

~Senator Robert M. La Follette

QueEx · Nov 19, 2006

<center>Embittered Insiders Turn Against Bush
Bush Left With Few Supporters</center>

Washington Post
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 19, 2006; Page A01

The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney's residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the "cakewalk" Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. "It was a euphoric moment," Adelman recalled.

Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that "the president is ultimately responsible" for what Adelman now calls "the debacle that was Iraq."

Adelman, a former Reagan administration official and onetime member of the Iraq war brain trust, is only the latest voice from inside the Bush circle to speak out against the president or his policies. Heading into the final chapter of his presidency, fresh from the sting of a midterm election defeat, Bush finds himself with fewer and fewer friends. Some of the strongest supporters of the war have grown disenchanted, former insiders are registering public dissent and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame him for losing Congress.

A certain weary crankiness sets in with any administration after six years. By this point in Bill Clinton's tenure, bitter Democrats were competing to denounce his behavior with an intern even as they were trying to fight off his impeachment. Ronald Reagan was deep in the throes of the Iran-contra scandal. But Bush's strained relations with erstwhile friends and allies take on an extra edge of bitterness amid the dashed hopes of the Iraq venture.

"There are a lot of lives that are lost," Adelman said in an interview last week. "A country's at stake. A region's at stake. This is a gigantic situation. . . . This didn't have to be managed this bad. It's just awful."

The sense of Bush abandonment accelerated during the final weeks of the campaign with the publication of a former aide's book accusing the White House of moral hypocrisy and with Vanity Fair quoting Adelman, Richard N. Perle and other neoconservatives assailing White House leadership of the war.

Since the Nov. 7 elections, Republicans have pinned their woes on the president.

"People expect a level of performance they are not getting," former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in a speech. Many were livid that Bush waited until after the elections to oust Rumsfeld.

"If Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference," Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said on television. "I'd still be chairman of the Judiciary Committee."

And so, in what some saw as a rebuke, Senate Republicans restored Trent Lott (Miss.) to their leadership four years after the White House helped orchestrate his ouster, with some saying they could no longer place their faith entirely in Bush.

Some insiders said the White House invited the backlash. "Anytime anyone holds themselves up as holy, they're judged by a different standard," said David Kuo, a former deputy director of the Bush White House's faith-based initiatives who wrote "Tempting Faith," a book that accused the White House of pandering to Christian conservatives. "And at the end of the day, this was a White House that held itself up as holy."

Richard N. Haass, a former top Bush State Department official and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said a radically different approach to world affairs naturally generates criticism. "The emphasis on promotion of democracy, the emphasis on regime change, the war of choice in Iraq -- all of these are departures from the traditional approach," he said, "so it's not surprising to me that it generates more reaction."

The willingness to break with Bush also underscores the fact that the president spent little time courting many natural allies in Washington, according to some Republicans. GOP leaders in Congress often bristled at what they perceived to be a do-what-we-say approach by the White House. Some of those who did have more personal relationships with Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld came to feel the sense of disappointment more acutely because they believed so strongly in the goals the president laid out for his administration.

The arc of Bush's second term has shown that the most powerful criticism originates from the inside. The pragmatist crowd around Colin L. Powell began speaking out nearly two years ago after he was eased out as secretary of state. Powell lieutenants such as Haass, Richard L. Armitage, Carl W. Ford Jr. and Lawrence B. Wilkerson took public the policy debates they lost on the inside. Many who worked in Iraq returned deeply upset and wrote books such as "Squandered Victory" (Larry Diamond) and "Losing Iraq" (David L. Phillips). Military and CIA officials unloaded after leaving government, culminating in the "generals' revolt" last spring when retired flag officers called for Rumsfeld's dismissal.

On the domestic side, Bush allies in Congress, interest groups and the conservative media broke their solidarity with the White House out of irritation over a number of issues, including federal spending, illegal immigration, the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, the response to Hurricane Katrina and the Dubai Ports World deal.

Most striking lately, though, has been the criticism from neoconservatives who provided the intellectual framework for Bush's presidency. Perle, Adelman and others advocated a robust use of U.S. power to advance the ideals of democracy and freedom, targeting Hussein's Iraq as a threat that could be turned into an opportunity.

In an interview last week, Perle said the administration's big mistake was occupying the country rather than creating an interim Iraqi government led by a coalition of exile groups to take over after Hussein was toppled. "If I had known that the U.S. was going to essentially establish an occupation, then I'd say, 'Let's not do it,' " and instead find another way to target Hussein, Perle said. "It was a foolish thing to do."

Perle, head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board at the time of the 2003 invasion, said he still believes the invasion was justified. But he resents being called "the architect of the Iraq war," because "my view was different from the administration's view from the very beginning" about how to conduct it. "I am not critical now of anything about which I was not critical before," he said. "I've said it more publicly."

White House officials tend to brush off each criticism by claiming it was over-interpreted or misguided. "I just fundamentally disagree," Cheney said of the comments by Perle, Adelman and other neoconservatives before the midterm elections. Others close to the White House said the neoconservatives are dealing with their own sense of guilt over how events have turned out and are eager to blame Bush to avoid their own culpability.

Joshua Muravchik, a neoconservative at the American Enterprise Institute, said he is distressed "to see neocons turning on Bush" but said he believes they should admit mistakes and openly discuss what went wrong. "All of us who supported the war have to share some of the blame for that," he said. "There's a question to be sorted out: whether the war was a sound idea but very badly executed. And if that's the case, it appears to me the person most responsible for the bad execution was Rumsfeld, and it means neocons should not get too angry at Bush about that."

It may also be, he said, that the mistake was the idea itself -- that Iraq could serve as a democratic beacon for the Middle East. "That part of our plan is down the drain," Muravchik said, "and we have to think about what we can do about keeping alive the idea of democracy."

Few of the original promoters of the war have grown as disenchanted as Adelman. The chief of Reagan's arms control agency, Adelman has been close to Cheney and Rumsfeld for decades and even worked for Rumsfeld at one point. As a member of the Defense Policy Board, he wrote in The Washington Post before the Iraq war that it would be "a cakewalk."

But in interviews with Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and The Post, Adelman said he became unhappy about the conduct of the war soon after his ebullient night at Cheney's residence in 2003. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction disturbed him. He said he was disgusted by the failure to stop the looting that followed Hussein's fall and by Rumsfeld's casual dismissal of it with the phrase "stuff happens." The breaking point, he said, was Bush's decision to award Medals of Freedom to occupation chief L. Paul Bremer, Gen. Tommy R. Franks and then-CIA Director George J. Tenet.

"The three individuals who got the highest civilian medals the president can give were responsible for a lot of the debacle that was Iraq," Adelman said. All told, he said, the Bush national security team has proved to be "the most incompetent" of the past half-century. But, he added, "Obviously, the president is ultimately responsible."

Adelman said he remained silent for so long out of loyalty. "I didn't want to bad-mouth the administration," he said. In private, though, he spoke out, resulting in a furious confrontation with Rumsfeld, who summoned him to the Pentagon in September and demanded his resignation from the defense board.

"It seemed like nobody was getting it," Adelman said. "It seemed like everything was locked in. It seemed like everything was stuck." He agrees he bears blame as well. "I think that's fair. When you advocate a policy that turns bad, you do have some responsibility."

Most troubling, he said, are his shattered ideals: "The whole philosophy of using American strength for good in the world, for a foreign policy that is really value-based instead of balanced-power-based, I don't think is disproven by Iraq. But it's certainly discredited."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/18/AR2006111801076.html

muckraker10021 · Dec 22, 2006

Bush is "The Biggest Fool...." watch the video below as 4 white men clown his pitiful delusional mental condition.

<hr noshade color="#0000ff" size="4"></hr>

<table border="6" width="740" id="table1" cellspacing="3" cellpadding="3" bgcolor="#000000" bordercolorlight="#FF0000" bordercolordark="#FF0000">
<tr><td><img src="http://www.dudehisattva.com/dub.jpg" width="215" height="242"><img src="http://i61.photobucket.com/albums/h52/Tiktaalik/BushPretzel.jpg" width="178" height="242"> <img src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/39607000/jpg/_39607433_bush_203bodyap.jpg" width="323" height="242">
</td>
</tr>
</table>


Is President Bush Sane? 

<hr noshade color="#0000ff" size="4"></hr>

Watch Video

<table border="6" width="600" id="table1" cellspacing="3" cellpadding="3" bgcolor="#003366" bordercolorlight="#FF0000" bordercolordark="#FF0000">
<tr><td><center>

<div id="kadoo_video_container_23920301-ae7"><object height="288" width="384" id="video_detector_23920301-ae7"><param value="http://divshare.com/flash/video_flash_detector.php?data=YTo2OntzOjU6ImFwaUlkIjtzOjE6IjQiO3M6NjoiZmlsZUlkIjtpOjIzOTIwMzAxO3M6NDoiY29kZSI7czoxMjoiMjM5MjAzMDEtYWU3IjtzOjY6InVzZXJJZCI7czo3OiIxMzE0NjMzIjtzOjQ6InRpbWUiO2k6MTM2NDI0ODU5NTtzOjEyOiJleHRlcm5hbENhbGwiO2k6MTt9&autoplay=default&id=23920301-ae7" name="movie"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><param name="wmode" value="opaque"></param><embed wmode="opaque" height="288" width="384" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" src="http://divshare.com/flash/video_flash_detector.php?data=YTo2OntzOjU6ImFwaUlkIjtzOjE6IjQiO3M6NjoiZmlsZUlkIjtpOjIzOTIwMzAxO3M6NDoiY29kZSI7czoxMjoiMjM5MjAzMDEtYWU3IjtzOjY6InVzZXJJZCI7czo3OiIxMzE0NjMzIjtzOjQ6InRpbWUiO2k6MTM2NDI0ODU5NTtzOjEyOiJleHRlcm5hbENhbGwiO2k6MTt9&autoplay=default&autoplay=default&id=23920301-ae7"></embed></object></div>


</center></td>
</tr>
</table>

<hr noshade color="#0000ff" size="4"></hr>

muckraker10021 · Dec 22, 2006

No Military Hope, So Send More Troops


By W. Patrick Lang and Ray McGovern

December 20, 2006

Editor's Note: Rather than admit responsibility for one of the worst political/military blunders in U.S. history, George W. Bush is on the verge of committing more American soldiers to the quagmire in Iraq, a course that faces unanimous opposition from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to a Washington Post article on Dec. 19.

In this guest essay, two former U.S. intelligence analysts -- W. Patrick Lang and Ray McGovern -- warn that the so-called "surge" could put the U.S. military in an untenable position of waging a bloody battle to reclaim Iraq while deepening the prospect of strategic defeat:

As Robert Gates takes the helm at the Pentagon, he can be in no doubt that Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush remain determined to stay the course in Iraq (without using those words) for the next two years. What Gates probably does not realize is that the U.S. military is about to commit hara-kiri.

The media are abuzz with trial balloons leaking word that President George W. Bush is about to approve a “surge” in US troop strength in Iraq by tens of thousands.

At the same time, surge advocate Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-South Carolina, just back from a brief visit to the Green Zone with fellow surgers John McCain, R-Arizona, and Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut, has warned that “the amount of troops will make no difference” if Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki avoids taking “bold” moves.

The three pretend to be unaware that the most important move for which they pressed—breaking with radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr—would amount to political suicide for Maliki.

Incoming Senate majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, who owes his position to the popular revolt in November against the war, has said he can “go along” with a surge, but only for two to three months and only as part of a broader strategy to bring combat forces home by early 2008. Meanwhile, says Reid, Democrats will “give the military anything they want.”

Is it conceivable that Reid doesn’t know that this is about the next two years—not months?

Former Army vice chief of staff Gen. Jack Keane, one of the anointed retired generals who have Bush’s ear, is urging him to send 30,000 to 40,000 more troops and has already dismissed the possibility of a time-frame shorter than one and a half years.

Egged on by “full-speed-ahead” Cheney, Bush is determined that the war not be lost while he is President. But events are fast overtaking White House preferences and moving toward denouement well before two more years are up.

Perhaps it was not quite the way he meant it, but Bush has gotten one thing right; there will indeed be no “graceful exit.” And that goes in spades, if he sends still more troops to the quagmire.

Oxymoron

Let’s send more troops to Iraq so we can pull our troops out of Iraq. A generation from now, our grandchildren will have difficulty writing history papers on this oxymoronic debate on how to surge/withdraw our troops into/from the quagmire in Iraq.

Historians will have just as much trouble, especially those given to Tolstoy’s theory that history is ruled by an inexorable determinism in which the free choice of major historical figures plays a minimal role. Tolstoy died before events put into perspective the legacy of Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat [Decider] Of All The Russias, and his Vice President/éminence grise, Rasputin.

Judging from President Bush’s behavior in recent weeks, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that he may be no more stable than Nicholas II.

And if retired Col. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s top aide at the State Department, is right in saying that Bush still has the “Vice President whispering in his ear every moment,” we have an unhappy but apt historical analogy.

But, you protest, the generals most intimately involved in Iraq, John Abizaid and George Casey, and Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker have made no secret of their strong reservations about sending large numbers of additional troops. And, if the Washington Post is to be believed, so have the Joint Chiefs.

That may be correct; it is also irrelevant. As was the case in the Vietnam War, our top generals have long since morphed into careerists and politicians. Sadly, they have become accustomed to looking up for the next reward—and not down at the troops who bear the brunt of their acquiescence in political/military decisions that make no sense.

But what about Senators Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy—and Colin Powell, and even Donald Rumsfeld, all of whom have spoken out in recent days against a sizable surge in troop strength in Iraq? Not a problem. The Cheney/Bush team is the sole “decider.”

This does not mean that Defense Secretary Robert Gates should renege on his promise to visit the troops in Iraq and hear the generals out. It does mean that by the time he gets there, the generals probably will already be “with the program,” as they say.

Just as they “never asked for more troops” at earlier stages of the war, they are likely to be instant devotees of a surge, once they smell the breezes coming from the White House. As for Gates, whatever input he has will almost certainly be dwarfed by Cheney’s. And taking issue with “deciders” has never been Gates’ strong suit.

Stalingrad on the Tigris

Whether Robert Gates realizes it or not (but the generals should), once an “all or nothing” offensive like the “surge” contemplated has begun, there is no turning back. It will be “victory” over the insurgents and the Shia militias or palpable defeat, recognizable by all in Iraq and across the world.

Any conceivable surge would not turn the tide—would not even slow it. We should have learned that last summer when the dispatch of seven thousand U.S. troops to reinforce Baghdad brought a fierce “counter-surge”—and the highest number of casualties since the Pentagon began issuing quarterly reports in 2005.

Those who believe still more troops will bring “victory” are living in a dangerous dream world and need to wake up.

A major buildup would commit the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to decisive combat in which there would be no more strategic reserves to be sent to the front. As Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway pointed out on Monday, “If you commit your reserve for something other than a decisive win, or to stave off defeat, then you have essentially shot your bolt.”

It would be a matter of win, or die in the attempt. In that situation, everyone in uniform on the ground would commit every ounce of their being to achieving “victory,” and few measures would be shrunk from.

Analogies come to mind: Stalingrad, the Bulge, Dien Bien Phu, the Battle of Algiers. It would be total war with the likelihood of all the excesses and mass casualties that come with total war.

To take up such a strategy and force our armed forces into it would be nothing short of immoral, in view of predictable troop losses and the huge number of Iraqis who would meet violent injury and death.

And for what? If adopted, the surge strategy will turn out to be something we will spend a generation living down.

Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Oregon, spoke for many of us last Thursday on the Senate floor:

“I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore.”

On Sunday, when George Stephanopoulos asked Smith what he meant by “criminal,” he replied:

“I said it. You can use any adjective you want, George. But I have long believed in a military context, when you do the same thing over and over again, without a clear strategy for victory, at the expense of your young people in arms, that is dereliction. That is deeply immoral.”

W. Patrick Lang is a retired Army colonel who served with Special Forces in Vietnam, as a professor at West Point, and as Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East. Ray McGovern was also an Army infantry/intelligence officer before his 27-year career as a CIA analyst. Both are with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
.

muckraker10021 · Jan 11, 2007

Important article to read peeps, after Bush’s lying “troop surge” speech tonight that you won't read or hear or see on ~~CBS, CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times~~ the "Media of Mass Distraction".

OIL, OIL, OIL & no-bid contracts is what Iraq was always all about. All the other lies are just "Pavlovian Conditioning" force feed to the largely willfully ignorant American people. This Independent of UK article How the West Will Make a Killing on Iraqi Oil Riches spells out the reality that Bush’s lies tonight left out. The article below adds additional context & perspective.

Claiming the Prize: Bush Surge Aimed at Securing Iraqi Oil
by Chris Floyd
Tuesday, 09 January 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/46602/claiming_the_prize:_war_escalation_aimed_at_securing_iraqi_oil
I.
1.The Twin Engines of Bush's War
The reason that George W. Bush insists that "victory" is achievable in Iraq is not because he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised.

No, it's that his definition of "victory" is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and on-line. For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned "surge" of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand.

At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the Bush Administration and its U.K. lackey, the Independent on Sunday reports.

The new bill will "radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world," say the paper, whose reporters have seen a draft of the new law. "It would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972." If the government's parliamentary majority prevails, the law should take effect in March.

As the paper notes, the law will give Exxon, BP, Shell and other carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq's nominally state-owned oilfields for decades to come.

This law has been in the works since the very beginning of the invasion -- indeed, since months before the invasion, when the Bush Administration brought in Phillip Carroll, former CEO of both Shell and Fluor, the politically-wired oil servicing firm, to devise "contingency plans" for divvying up Iraq's oil after the attack.

Once the deed was done, Carroll was made head of the American "advisory committee" overseeing the oil industry of the conquered land, as Joshua Hollandof Alternet.org has chronicled in two remarkable reports on the backroom maneuvering over Iraq's oil: Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil and The U.S. Takeover of Iraqi Oil.

According to senior Bush minions talking up the plan for what is not a surge but a long-term escalation of urban warfare that the U.S. ground commander in Iraq says will likely last for years, Bush's new "stratergery" includes "benchmarks" that the natives must meet to keep in favor with their colonial master. One of the most prominent of these is the demand that Iraq "finalize a long-delayed measure on the distribution of oil revenue." As we can see by the Independent stories quoted here, that benchmark should be done and dusted within weeks.

From those earliest days until now, throughout all the twists and turns, the blood and chaos of the occupation, the Bush Administration has kept its eye on this prize. The new law offers the barrelling buccaneers of the West a juicy set of production-sharing agreements (PSAs) that will maintain a fig leaf of Iraqi ownership of the nation's oil industry -- while letting Bush's Big Oil buddies rake off up to 75 percent of all oil profits for an indefinite period up front, until they decide that their "infrastructure investments" have been repaid. Even then, the agreements will give the Western oil majors an unheard-of 20 percent of Iraq's oil profits -- more than twice the average of standard PSAs, the Independent notes.

Of course, at the moment, the "security situation" -- i.e., the living hell of death and suffering that Bush's "war of choice" has wrought in Iraq -- prevents the Oil Barons from setting up shop in the looted fields. Hence Bush's overwhelming urge to "surge" despite the fierce opposition to his plans from Congress, the Pentagon and some members of his own party.

Bush and his inner circle, including his chief adviser, old oilman Dick Cheney, believe that a bigger dose of blood and iron in Iraq will produce a sufficient level of stability to allow the oil majors to cash in the PSA chips that more than 3,000 American soldiers have purchased for them with their lives.

The American "surge" will be blended into the new draconian effort announced over the weekend by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki: an all-out war by the government's Shiite militia-riddled "security forces" on Sunni enclaves in Baghdad, as the Washington Post reports.

American troops will "support" the "pacification effort" with what Maliki says calls "house-to-house" sweeps of Sunni areas. There is of course another phrase for this kind of operation: "ethnic cleansing."

The "surged" troops -- mostly long-serving, overstrained units dragooned into extended duty -- are to be thrown into this maelstrom of urban warfare and ethnic murder, temporarily taking sides with one faction in Iraq's hydra-headed, multi-sided civil war.

As the conflict goes on -- and it will go on and on -- the Bush Administration will continue to side with whatever faction promises uphold the "hydrocarbon law" and those profitable PSAs. If "Al Qaeda in Iraq" vowed to open the nation's oil spigots for Exxon, Fluor and Halliburton, they would suddenly find themselves transformed from "terrorists" into "moderates" -- as indeed has Maliki and his violent, sectarian Dawa Party, which once killed Americans in terrorist actions but are now hailed as freedom's champions.

So Bush will surge with Maliki and his ethnic cleansing for now. If the effort flames out in a disastrous crash that makes the situation worse -- as it almost certainly will -- Bush will simply back another horse. What he seeks in Iraq is not freedom or democracy but "stability" -- a government of any shape or form that will deliver the goods.

As the Independent wryly noted in its Sunday story, Dick Cheney himself revealed the true goal of the war back in 1999, in a speech he gave when he was still CEO of Halliburton. "Where is the oil going to come from" to slake the world's ever-growing thirst, asked Cheney, then answered his own question. "The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."

And therein lies another hidden layer of the war. For Iraq not only has the world's second largest oil reserves; it also has the world's most easily retrievable oil. As the Independent succinctly notes: "The cost-per-barrel of extracting oil in Iraq is among the lowest in the world because the reserves are relatively close to the surface. This contrasts starkly with the expensive and risky lengths to which the oil industry must go to find new reserves elsewhere -- witness the super-deep offshore drilling and cost-intensive techniques needed to extract oil form Canada's tar sands."

This is precisely what Cheney was getting at in his 1999 talk to the Institute of Petroleum. In a world of dwindling petroleum resources, those who control large reserves of cheaply-produced oil will reap unimaginable profits -- and command the heights of the global economy.

It's not just about profit, of course; control of such resources would offer tremendous strategic advantages to anyone who was interested in "full spectrum domination" of world affairs, which the Bush-Cheney faction and their outriders among the neocons and the "national greatness" fanatics have openly sought for years. With its twin engines of corporate greed and military empire, the war in Iraq is a marriage made in Valhalla.

II. The Win-Win Scenario
And this unholy union is what Bush is really talking about when he talks about "victory." This is the reason for so much of the drift and dithering and chaos and incompetence of the occupation: Bush and his cohorts don't really care what happens on the ground in Iraq -- they care about what comes out of the ground.

The end -- profit and dominion -- justifies any means. What happens to the human beings caught up in the war is of no ultimate importance; the game is worth any number of broken candles.

And in plain point of fact, the Bush-Cheney faction -- and the elite interests they represent -- has already won the war in Iraq. I've touched on this theme before elsewhere, but it is a reality of the war that is very often overlooked, and is worth examining again. This ultimate victory was clear as long ago as June 2004, when I first set down the original version of some of the updated observations below.

Put simply, the Bush Family and their allies and cronies represent the confluence of three long-established power factions in the American elite: oil, arms and investments. These groups equate their own interests, their own wealth and privilege, with the interests of the nation -- indeed, the world -- as a whole. And they pursue these interests with every weapon at their command, including war, torture, deceit and corruption.

Democracy means nothing to them -- not even in their own country, as we saw in the 2000 election. Laws are just whips to keep the common herd in line; they don't apply to the elite, as Bush's own lawyers and minions have openly asserted in the memos, signing statements, court cases and presidential decrees asserting the "inherent power" of the "unitary executive" to override any law he pleases.

The Iraq war has been immensely profitable for these Bush-linked power factions (and their tributary industries, such as construction); billions of dollars in public money have already poured into their coffers. Halliburton has been catapulted from the edge of bankruptcy to the heights of no-bid, open-ended, guaranteed profit.

The Carlyle Group is gorging on war contracts. Individual Bush family members are making out like bandits from war-related investments, while dozens of Bush minions -- like Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and Joe Allbaugh -- have cashed in their insider chips for blood money.

The aftermath of the war promises equal if not greater riches. Even if the new Iraqi government maintains nominal state control of its oil industry, there are still untold billions to be made in PSAs for drilling, refining, distributing, servicing and securing oilfields and pipelines.

Likewise, the new Iraqi military and police forces will require billions more in weapons, equipment and training, bought from the U.S. arms industry -- and from the fast-expanding "private security" industry, the politically hard-wired mercenary forces that are the power elite's latest lucrative spin-off. And as with Saudi Arabia, oil money from the new Iraq will pump untold billions into American banks and investment houses.

But that's not all. For even in the worst-case scenario, if the Americans had to pull out tomorrow, abandoning everything -- their bases, their contracts, their collaborators -- the Bush power factions would still come out ahead. For not only has their already-incalculable wealth been vastly augmented (with any potential losses indemnified by U.S. taxpayers), but their deeply-entrenched sway over American society has also increased by several magnitudes.

No matter which party controls the government, the militarization of America is so far gone now it's impossible to imagine any major rollback in the gargantuan U.S. war machine -- 725 bases in 132 countries, annual military budgets topping $500 billion, a planned $1 trillion in new weapons systems already moving through the pipeline. Indeed, the Democratic "opposition" has promised to expand the military.

Nor will either party conceivably challenge the dominance of the energy behemoths -- or stand against the American public's demand for cheap gas, big vehicles and unlimited consumption of a vast disproportion of the world's oil.

As for Wall Street -- both parties have long been the eager courtesans of the investment elite, dispatching armies all over the world to protect their financial interests. The power factions whose influence has been so magnified by Bush's war will maintain their supremacy regardless of the electoral outcome.

[By the way, to think that all of this has happened because a small band of extremist ideologues -- the neocons -- somehow "hijacked" U.S. foreign policy to push their radical dreams of "liberating" the Middle East by force and destroying Israel's enemies is absurd. The Bush power factions were already determined on an aggressive foreign policy; they used the neocons and their bag of tricks -- their inflated rhetoric, their conspiratorial zeal, their murky Middle East contacts, their ideology of brute force in the name of "higher" causes -- as tools (and PR cover) to help bring about a long-planned war that had nothing to do with democracy or security or any coherent ideology whatsoever beyond the remorseless pursuit of wealth and power, the blind urge to be top dog.]

As I noted earlier this year:Bush and his cohorts have won even if the surge fails and Iraq lapses into perpetual anarchy, or becomes an extremist religious state; they've won even if the whole region goes up in flames, and terrorism flares to unprecedented heights - because this will just mean more war-profiteering, more fear-profiteering.And yes, they've won even though they've lost their Congressional majority and could well lose the presidency in 2008, because war and fear will continue to fill their coffers, buying them continuing influence and power as they bide their time through another interregnum of a Democratic "centrist" -- who will, at best, only nibble at the edges of the militarist state -- until they are back in the saddle again. The only way they can lose the Iraq War is if they are actually arrested and imprisoned for their war crimes. And we all know that's not going to happen.So Bush's confident strut, his incessant upbeat pronouncements about the war, his complacent smirks, his callous indifference to the unspeakable horror he has unleashed in Iraq -- these are not the hallmarks of self-delusion, or willful ignorance, or a disassociation from reality. He and his accomplices know full well what the reality is -- and they like it.

muckraker10021 · Jan 14, 2007

<img src="http://www.independent.co.uk/template/ver/gfx//new_indy_logo3.gif">


Bush's New Strategy -
The March Of Folly
So into the graveyard of Iraq, George Bush, commander-in-chief, is to send another 21,000 of his soldiers. The march of folly is to continue...

January 11, 2007

<img src="http://www.independent.co.uk/template/ver/gfx/mugs/robert_fisk.gif">

by Robert Fisk

There will be timetables, deadlines, benchmarks, goals for both America and its Iraqi satraps. But the war against terror can still be won. We shall prevail. Victory or death. And it shall be death.

President Bush's announcement early this morning tolled every bell. A billion dollars of extra aid for Iraq, a diary of future success as the Shia powers of Iraq * still to be referred to as the "democratically elected government" * march in lockstep with America's best men and women to restore order and strike fear into the hearts of al-Qa'ida. It will take time * oh, yes, it will take years, at least three in the words of Washington's top commander in the field, General Raymond Odierno this week * but the mission will be accomplished.

Mission accomplished. Wasn't that the refrain almost four years ago, on that lonely aircraft carrier off California, Bush striding the deck in his flying suit? And only a few months later, the President had a message for Osama bin Laden and the insurgents of Iraq. "Bring 'em on!" he shouted. And on they came. Few paid attention late last year when the Islamist leadership of this most ferocious of Arab rebellions proclaimed Bush a war criminal but asked him not to withdraw his troops. "We haven't yet killed enough of them," their videotaped statement announced.

Well, they will have their chance now. How ironic that it was the ghastly Saddam, dignified amid his lynch mob, who dared on the scaffold to tell the truth which Bush and Blair would not utter: that Iraq has become "hell" .

It is de rigueur, these days, to recall Vietnam, the false victories, the body counts, the torture and the murders * but history is littered with powerful men who thought they could batter their way to victory against the odds. Napoleon comes to mind; not the emperor who retreated from Moscow, but the man who believed the wild guerrilleros of French-occupied Spain could be liquidated. He tortured them, he executed them, he propped up a local Spanish administration of what we would now call Quislings, al-Malikis to a man. He rightly accused his enemies * Moore and Wellington * of supporting the insurgents. And when faced with defeat, Napoleon took the personal decision "to relaunch the machine" and advanced to recapture Madrid, just as Bush intends to recapture Baghdad. Of course, it ended in disaster. And George Bush is no Napoleon Bonaparte.

No, I would turn to another, less flamboyant, far more modern politician for prophecy, an American who understood, just before the 2003 launch of Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq, what would happen to the arrogance of power. For their relevance this morning, the words of the conservative politician Pat Buchanan deserve to be written in marble:

"We will soon launch an imperial war on Iraq with all the 'On to Berlin' bravado with which French poilus and British tommies marched in August 1914. But this invasion will not be the cakewalk neoconservatives predict ... For a militant Islam that holds in thrall scores of millions of true believers will never accept George Bush dictating the destiny of the Islamic world ...

"The one endeavour at which Islamic peoples excel is expelling imperial powers by terror and guerrilla war. They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon... We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before."

But George Bush dare not see these armies of the past, their ghosts as palpable as the phantoms of the 3,000 Americans * let us forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis * already done to death in this obscene war, and those future spirits of the dead still living amid the 20,000 men and women whom Bush is now sending to Iraq. In Baghdad, they will move into both Sunni and Shia "insurgent strongholds" * as opposed to just the Sunni variety which they vainly invested in the autumn * because this time, and again I quote General Odierno, it is crucial the security plan be " evenhanded". This time, he said, "we have to have a believable approach, of going after Sunni and Shia extremists".

But a "believable approach" is what Bush does not have. The days of even-handed oppression disappeared in the aftermath of invasion.

"Democracy" should have been introduced at the start * not delayed until the Shias threatened to join the insurgency if Paul Bremer, America's second proconsul, did not hold elections * just as the American military should have prevented the anarchy of April 2003. The killing of 14 Sunni civilians by US paratroopers at Fallujah that spring set the seal on the insurgency. Yes, Syria and Iran could help George Bush. But Tehran was part of his toytown "Axis of Evil", Damascus a mere satellite. They were to be future prey, once Project Iraq proved successful. Then there came the shame of our torture, our murders, the mass ethnic cleansing in the land we said we had liberated.

And so more US troops must die, sacrificed for those who have already died. We cannot betray those who have been killed. It is a lie, of course. Every desperate man keeps gambling, preferably with other men's lives.

But the Bushes and Blairs have experienced war through television and Hollywood; this is both their illusion and their shield.

Historians will one day ask if the West did not plunge into its Middle East catastrophe so blithely because not one member of any Western government * except Colin Powell, and he has shuffled off stage * ever fought in a war. The Churchills have gone, used as a wardrobe for a prime minister who lied to his people and a president who, given the chance to fight for his country, felt his Vietnam mission was to defend the skies over Texas.

But still he talks of victory, as ignorant of the past as he is of the future.

Pat Buchanan ended his prophecy with imperishable words: "The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/

<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="12"></hr>

ronmch20 · Jan 14, 2007

Quinctilius Varus, "WHERE ARE MY EAGLES" ???!!!!!!!! :angry:

muckraker10021 · Jul 9, 2007

Beyond Recklessness

 July 3, 2007

by Paul Craig Roberts


Paul Craig Roberts is the former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under President Reagan.Roberts is a former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, the Scripps Howard News Service, and a columnist for Investor’s Business Daily. Dr. Roberts is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence.

<hr noshade color="#333333" size="2"></hr>

John Lukacs in his monograph June 1941: Hitler and Stalin reports that "the best military experts throughout the world predicted the defeat of the Soviet Union within a few weeks, or within two months at the most" following Hitler's invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941.

While the superb German military machine made an excellent showing, by the beginning of 1943 its offensive capability was exhausted and the Germans were defeated at Stalingrad. Germany lost the war one and one-half years before the U.S. could manage the invasion of Normandy. If Hitler had not depleted the German army in Russia, a U.S. invasion of Normandy could not have been contemplated.

Lukacs concerns himself with unintended consequences of June 22, 1941. It is not too early, or too late, to concern ourselves with the unintended consequences of March 20, 2003.

Four and one-quarter years ago the Pentagon and its neoconservative advisers and media propagandists promised Americans a "cakewalk" war of three to six weeks duration. Six weeks later on May 2, 2003, in history's most ill-advised propaganda stunt, President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, whose tower was adorned with a banner declaring "Mission Accomplished," and announced the end to major combat operations in Iraq.
<div align="left"> 
<img src="http://www.insanereagan.com/images/mission_accomplished02.jpg" align="left"></div>
In fact, the war had hardly begun. Four years later with the failure in June 2007 of President Bush's desperate last measure – "the surge" – U.S. offensive capability is exhausted. The U.S. military can do no more and has less control of the situation than ever.

Perhaps the clearest indication that the war in Iraq is no longer under American control is Turkey's announcement of plans to invade northern Iraq, the home of the Iraqi Kurds. As June 2007 came to an end, Turkey's Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul announced that if U.S. or Iraqi forces did not eliminate the Kurdish guerrillas that were attacking Turkey, the Turkish army would move into northern Iraq to deal with the situation.

Foreign Minister Gul was unequivocal: "The military plans have been worked out in the finest detail. The government knows these plans and agrees with them. If neither the Iraqi government nor the U.S. occupying forces can do this [crush the guerrillas], we will take our own decision and implement it."

This ultimatum puts President Bush in an impossible situation. Neither the Iraqi government nor the U.S. military have the means to deal with Kurdish guerrillas in their mountain strongholds. The U.S. military cannot even occupy Baghdad. The Iraqi government exists in name only and can be found only in its offices located inside the fortified and U.S.-protected Green Zone in Baghdad. Moreover, to the extent that the in-name-only Iraqi government has any support, it comes from the Kurds in northern Iraq.

The rest of Iraq is controlled by Sunni insurgents and Shi'ite militias. Even Basra in the south has been abandoned to the Shi'ite militias by Bush's British ally.

The over-stretched American Empire hasn't any troops to send to northern Iraq. NATO, whose charter was to defend Western Europe from Soviet invasion, should have been disbanded two decades ago. Today NATO functions as an auxiliary U.S. force and has been sent to Afghanistan, where it is being defeated like the British and Russians before it.

In the midst of this unmanageable chaos, Vice President Cheney, Bush's former UN ambassador John Bolton, and the rest of the War Party are demanding that the U.S. attack Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah.

The unintended consequences of the "cakewalk war" are already far outside the Bush administration's ability to manage and will plague future governments for many years. For the administration to initiate new acts of aggression in the Middle East would go beyond recklessness to insanity.

www.antiwar.com


 <hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="10"></hr>

actinanass · Jul 9, 2007

muckraker10021 said:
<img src="http://www.asg-bildungsforum.de/asg/meinung/270_1_crefeld.jpg" width="231" height="320">
Professor Martin van Creveld

For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.

<hr noshade color="#333333" size="14"></hr>


Costly Withdrawal Is The Price
To Be Paid For A Foolish War

'Bush has launched the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C'


<h3>By Martin van Creveld
November 25, 2005</h3>

The number of American casualties in Iraq is now well more than 2,000, and there is no end in sight. Some two-thirds of Americans, according to the polls, believe the war to have been a mistake. And congressional elections are just around the corner.

What had to come, has come. The question is no longer if American forces will be withdrawn, but how soon — and at what cost. In this respect, as in so many others, the obvious parallel to Iraq is Vietnam.

Confronted by a demoralized army on the battlefield and by growing opposition at home, in 1969 the Nixon administration started withdrawing most of its troops in order to facilitate what it called the "Vietnamization" of the country. The rest of America's forces were pulled out after Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated a "peace settlement" with Hanoi. As the troops withdrew, they left most of their equipment to the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam — which just two years later, after the fall of Saigon, lost all of it to the communists.

Clearly this is not a pleasant model to follow, but no other alternative appears in sight.

Whereas North Vietnam at least had a government with which it was possible to arrange a cease-fire, in Iraq the opponent consists of shadowy groups of terrorists with no central organization or command authority. And whereas in the early 1970s equipment was still relatively plentiful, today's armed forces are the products of a technology-driven revolution in military affairs. Whether that revolution has contributed to anything besides America's national debt is open to debate. What is beyond question, though, is that the new weapons are so few and so expensive that even the world's largest and richest power can afford only to field a relative handful of them.

Therefore, simply abandoning equipment or handing it over to the Iraqis, as was done in Vietnam, is simply not an option. And even if it were, the new Iraqi army is by all accounts much weaker, less skilled, less cohesive and less loyal to its government than even the South Vietnamese army was. For all intents and purposes, Washington might just as well hand over its weapons directly to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Clearly, then, the thing to do is to forget about face-saving and conduct a classic withdrawal.

Handing over their bases or demolishing them if necessary, American forces will have to fall back on Baghdad. From Baghdad they will have to make their way to the southern port city of Basra, and from there back to Kuwait, where the whole misguided adventure began. When Prime Minister Ehud Barak pulled Israel out of Lebanon in 2000, the military was able to carry out the operation in a single night without incurring any casualties. That, however, is not how things will happen in Iraq.

Not only are American forces perhaps 30 times larger, but so is the country they have to traverse. A withdrawal probably will require several months and incur a sizable number of casualties. As the pullout proceeds, Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge — if, indeed, it can do so at all. All this is inevitable and will take place whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice like it or not.

Having been thoroughly devastated by two wars with the United States and a decade of economic sanctions, decades will pass before Iraq can endanger its neighbors again. Yet a complete American withdrawal is not an option; the region, with its vast oil reserves, is simply too important for that. A continued military presence, made up of air, sea and a moderate number of ground forces, will be needed.

First and foremost, such a presence will be needed to counter Iran, which for two decades now has seen the United States as "the Great Satan." Tehran is certain to emerge as the biggest winner from the war — a winner that in the not too distant future is likely to add nuclear warheads to the missiles it already has. In the past, Tehran has often threatened the Gulf States. Now that Iraq is gone, it is hard to see how anybody except the United States can keep the Gulf States, and their oil, out of the mullahs' clutches.

A continued American military presence will be needed also, because a divided, chaotic, government-less Iraq is very likely to become a hornets' nest. From it, a hundred mini-Zarqawis will spread all over the Middle East, conducting acts of sabotage and seeking to overthrow governments in Allah's name.

The Gulf States apart, the most vulnerable country is Jordan, as evidenced by the recent attacks in Amman. However, Turkey, Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Israel are also likely to feel the impact. Some of these countries, Jordan in particular, are going to require American assistance.

Maintaining an American security presence in the region, not to mention withdrawing forces from Iraq, will involve many complicated problems, military as well as political. Such an endeavor, one would hope, will be handled by a team different from — and more competent than — the one presently in charge of the White House and Pentagon.

For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.


Martin van Creveld (1946- ) is an Israeli military historian and theorist. He is the only non-American author on the U.S. Army's required reading list for officers. He was born in the Netherlands but has lived in Israel since shortly after his birth. He holds degrees from the London School of Economics and The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he has been on the faculty since 1971. He is the author of fifteen books on military history and strategy, of which Command in War (1985), Supplying War (1977), and The Sword and the Olive (1998) are among the best known. van Creveld has lectured or taught at virtually every strategic institute, military or civilian, in the Western world, including the U.S. Naval War College, most recently in December, 1999 and January, 2000. Some people consider his 1991 book, The Transformation of War, among the most important treatises on military theory ever written.


http://www.forward.com/articles/6936



<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="14"></hr>

seems like al gore doesn't agree with him....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bogBwAby3so&mode=related&search=

blackIpod · Jul 12, 2007

Vanity Fair What part of it is fair?

President Bush

Did the smart thing invading Iraq.
No more Saddam justifies this war 25million times over.

I may disagree with him on rebuilding Iraq or supporting the new government.

"Bush misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C."

Comparing Iraq to Roman times only a socialist moron would go there.

John F. Kennedy got use involved in Vietnam.
That war cost almost 60,000 men and women their lives.
But Professor Martin van Creveld wants to compare President Bush to Augustus?

The Idea that war with Iraq is unjust and unavoidable is like believing that Big Foot [The monster] is real and alive.

Professor Martin van Creveld [who] and his socialist friends in Europe or where ever, they don't matter. What matters is if we as a nation run from Iraq.
Is 3000 plus deaths worth it OR should we run and hide from the Islamist.

I'm cool with the Idea that if it take forever to beat them than we fight forever. Even if that means I have to go.

"Costly Withdrawal Is The Price "To Be Paid For A Foolish War"

A Foolish War?
Let see Saddam is gone, his sons are gone, his army is gone.
Iraq could breakup in to 3 very different countries. And the Problem with this is????

The only foolish thing would be to have Saddam still ruling Iraq in 2007.
And to have to fight a better equipped Iraqi army in the near future.

It is the same reason Jimmy Carter needed to invade Iran back in the late 1970's.
Now Iran has the would holding it's breathe.
They want nukes or they don't want nukes now thats the Question.
Every1 in the west guessing now what will a nuclear powered Iran mean.

Ever war has a costly withdrawal or effect from lives and dreams distorted on both sides to equipment replacement, storage and shipment.

We can't replace lost lives No one can replace whats lost when a father or son does not return from war.
Humankind knows all the evils of warfare and we still engage in it.

GET THE FACTS OUT NOT THE BULL SHIT.

That this war is unjust is 100% bullshit.

That there was no WMD's found in Iraq 100% truth.

That Saddam used secret prisons and secret mass-grave sites to hide the killing of millions instead of IED, VIED or sectarian violence is 100% Truth.
In fact sectarian violence is the blow back of his reigns oppression.

That Iraq was not a threat to American interest is 100% bullshit.

That America or President Bush does not have the legal or moral right to launch primitive warfare 100% bullshit.

That this war is about Oil. I only which it was. We would not need 160,000 men and women on the ground if it was about Oil.

That the SERGE in Iraq is not working 100% bullshit.

That political process in Iraq is not working that is100% truth.

That we must leave Iraq for Iraq to better it's self is a lie, 100% bullshit.

Nothing good will come if we leave Iraq too soon.

I always ask this Questions to the Bush Hater.
Many like to Imply that the President is somehow half witted
The man does make fun of his handling of the English language.
But thats beside my point.
When your calling the President out his name ask your-self how much have you accomplished in life.

Vote take part in your government or shut the fuck up if you don't

nittie · Jul 12, 2007

It would be nice if 1, just 1 Democrat had the guts to admit we cannot afford to lose this war. The thought of 3600 American troops dying only to have Al Qaeda controlling Iraq and maybe Pakistan is sickening.

muckraker10021 · Nov 1, 2007

'Many in the US Military Think
Bush and Cheney Are Out of Control'

SPIEGEL ONLINE INTERVIEW WITH MILITARY HISTORIAN GABRIEL KOLKO

GABRIEL KOLKO

October 15, 2007

In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, the Amsterdam-based military historian Gabriel Kolko talks about the prospect of war with Iran and argues that many in the US military now view the White House as being "out of control."

Spiegel Online: Mr. Kolko, editorials in US papers like the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard and the National Review are pushing for military action against Iran. How does the leadership in the US military view such a conflict?

Gabriel Kolko: The American military is stretched to the limit. They are losing both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Everything is being sacrificed for these wars: money, equipment in Asia, American military power globally, etc. Where and how can they fight yet another? The Pentagon is short of money for procurement, and that is what so many people in the military bureaucracy live for. The situation will be far worse in the event of a war with Iran.

Many in the American military have learned the fundamental dilemma of modern warfare: More money and better weapons don't mean that you win. IEDs, which cost so little to make, are defeating a military which spends billions of dollars per month. IEDS are so adaptable that each new strategy developed by the United States to counter them is answered by the Iraqi insurgents. The Israelis were also never quite able to counter IEDs. One report quotes an Israeli military engineer who said the Israeli answer to IEDs was frequently the use of armored bulldozers to effectively rip away the top 18 inches of pavement and earth where explosive devices might be hidden. This is fantastic, as the cost of winning means destroying roads, which form the basis of a modern economy.

Spiegel Online: Are people in the Pentagon getting nervous about how influential voices in the White House continue to push for conflict with Iran?

Kolko: Many in the US military think Bush and Cheney are out of control. They are rebelling against Bush and Cheney. Washington Post reporter Dana Priest recently said in an interview that she believed the US military would revolt and refuse to fly missions against Iran if the White House issued such orders.

CENTCOM [US Central Command, the military grouping whose responsibilities include the Middle East] commander Admiral William Fallon reportedly thwarted Cheney's wish to sent a third additional aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf. One paper wrote that he "vowed privately there would be no war against Iran as long as he was chief of CENTCOM."

click link below

U.S.-IRAQ: Fallon Derided Petraeus, Opposed the Surge
WASHINGTON, Sep 12 (IPS) - In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus's superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.

Lt. Gen. Bruce Wright, in charge of US forces in Japan, told the Associated Press last week that the Iraq war had weakened American forces in the face of any potential conflict with China. He was quoted as saying, "Are we in trouble? It depends on the scenario. But you have to be concerned about the small number of our forces and the age of our forces."

Spiegel Online: Do you think that conflict with Iran is likely?

Kolko: All the significant economic journals (Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.) recognize that the American and European economies are now in a crisis, and it may be protracted. The dollar is falling; Gulf States and others may abandon it (as an investment currency). A war with Iran would produce economic chaos because oil would be scarce. There are states which the United States wishes to isolate, like Russia and Venezuela, who can develop great influence through their ability to sell oil in such a crisis. The balance of world economic power is involved, and that is a great issue.

Spiegel Online: But aren't the Gulf States interested in seeing Iran weakened through a conflict with the United States?

Kolko: The Gulf States do not like Shia Iran, but they export oil, which makes them rich. They are dependent on peace, not war.

Spiegel Online: How would Iran react to a provocation by the United States, say, on the border? Could the Iranian military in any way be a match for the United States?

Kolko: Iran fought Iraq for about a decade and lost hundreds of thousands of men. Perhaps they will roll over, but it is not likely. There are a number of tiny islands in the gulf they have had years to fortify. Can 90 percent of their weapons be knocked out? Even if this United States could achieve this, the remainder would be sufficient to sink many boats and tankers. The amount of oil exported through the gulf would thereby be reduced, perhaps cease altogether. This would only strengthen American rivals like Russia and Venezuela.

Spiegel Online: But what about the bunker-buster bombs? Wouldn't that be a technology which Iran could not match?

Kolko: Bunker busters are only able to knock out so many bunkers, but alas, not all. If bunker-buster bombs are nuclear they are very useful, but they are also radioactive. In addition to killing Iranians, they may also kill friends and nearby US soldiers.

Spiegel Online: What about the so-called 'Cheney plan' to let Israel attack Iran? What role would Israel play in a conflict with Iran? Isn't Israel also interested in seeing that the United States weakens its greatest threat in the region?

Kolko: Israel may be a factor. They must cross Syrian and Jordanian airspace, and the Iranians will be prepared if they are not shot down over Syria. Their countermeasures may be effective, but perhaps not ... War with Iran will lead to a rain of rockets and Israel would be left with an inability to deal with local priorities. Iran is likely to get nuclear bombs sooner or later. So will other nations. Israel has hundreds already. Israeli strategists believe deterrence will then exist. Why risk war?

Israel dislikes Iran and the prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons, but they believe they can handle it with a deterrent relationship. Israel needs its army, which is not large enough for potential nearby problems - for Palestinians and its Arab neighbors, who it rightfully fears and hates. That means Israel can be belligerent, but it is not capable of playing the US role, except of course with nuclear weapons.

So I regard the Israelis as opponents of a war with Iran which would involve them. They certainly noticed how during the war with Lebanon the Palestinians in Gaza used the opportunity to increase pressure on Israel from the south. Israelis opposed the Iraq war because it would lead to Iranian domination of the region, which it has.

Hence, the report that Cheney is trying to use Israel, if it is true, shows that he's confused and quite mad - but also unusually isolated.

Spiegel Online: But what about the Democratic Party? Isn't it in the interest of the Democratic Party to do everything they can to end the war?

Kolko: All three leading Democratic Party presidential hopefuls - Clinton, Obama and Edwards - refused at a debate recently in New Hampshire to promise to pull the US military out of Iraq by the beginning of 2013. The American public is a small factor, as elections have repeatedly shown, but may play some role also. As the last election proved, anyone who thinks Democrats will stop wars is fooling him- or herself. But war with Iran would require new authorizations. Then the Congress would, potentially, be very important.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,511492,00.html

thoughtone · Mar 6, 2013

source: Yahoo News

Too much money spent in Iraq for too few results

Associated Press/ Khalid Mohammed, File - FILE - In this file photo taken on Dec. 21, 2003, Iraqi workers end their shift at a reconstruction site in downtown Baghdad, Iraq. Ten years and $60 billion in taxpayer money.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ten years and $60 billion in American taxpayer funds later, Iraq is still so unstable and broken that even its leaders question whether U.S. efforts to rebuild the war-torn nation were worth the cost.

In his final report to Congress, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen's conclusion was all too clear: Since the invasion a decade ago this month, the U.S. has spent too much money in Iraq for too few results.

The reconstruction effort "grew to a size much larger than was ever anticipated," Bowen told The Associated Press in a preview of his last audit of U.S. funds spent in Iraq, to be released Wednesday. "Not enough was accomplished for the size of the funds expended."

In interviews with Bowen, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said the U.S. funding "could have brought great change in Iraq" but fell short too often. "There was misspending of money," said al-Maliki, a Shiite Muslim whose sect makes up about 60 percent of Iraq's population.

Iraqi Parliament Speaker Osama al-Nujaifi, the country's top Sunni Muslim official, told auditors that the rebuilding efforts "had unfavorable outcomes in general."

"You think if you throw money at a problem, you can fix it," Kurdish government official Qubad Talabani, son of Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, told auditors. "It was just not strategic thinking."

The abysmal Iraq results forecast what could happen in Afghanistan, where U.S. taxpayers have so far spent $90 billion in reconstruction projects during a 12-year military campaign that, for the most part, ends in 2014.

Shortly after the March 2003 invasion, Congress set up a $2.4 billion fund to help ease the sting of war for Iraqis. It aimed to rebuild Iraq's water and electricity systems; provide food, health care and governance for its people; and take care of those who were forced from their homes in the fighting. Fewer than six months later, President George W. Bush asked for $20 billion more to further stabilize Iraq and help turn it into an ally that could gain economic independence and reap global investments.

To date, the U.S. has spent more than $60 billion in reconstruction grants to help Iraq get back on its feet after the country that has been broken by more than two decades of war, sanctions and dictatorship. That works out to about $15 million a day.

And yet Iraq's government is rife with corruption and infighting. Baghdad's streets are still cowed by near-daily deadly bombings. A quarter of the country's 31 million population lives in poverty, and few have reliable electricity and clean water.

Overall, including all military and diplomatic costs and other aid, the U.S. has spent at least $767 billion since the American-led invasion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. National Priorities Project, a U.S. research group that analyzes federal data, estimated the cost at $811 billion, noting that some funds are still being spent on ongoing projects.

Sen. Susan Collins, a member of the Senate committee that oversees U.S. funding, said the Bush administration should have agreed to give the reconstruction money to Iraq as a loan in 2003 instead as an outright gift.

"It's been an extraordinarily disappointing effort and, largely, a failed program," Collins, R-Maine, said in an interview Tuesday. "I believe, had the money been structured as a loan in the first place, that we would have seen a far more responsible approach to how the money was used, and lower levels of corruption in far fewer ways."

In numerous interviews with Iraqi and U.S. officials, and though multiple examples of thwarted or defrauded projects, Bowen's report laid bare a trail of waste, including:

—In Iraq's eastern Diyala province, a crossroads for Shiite militias, Sunni insurgents and Kurdish squatters, the U.S. began building a 3,600-bed prison in 2004 but abandoned the project after three years to flee a surge in violence. The half-completed Khan Bani Sa'ad Correctional Facility cost American taxpayers $40 million but sits in rubble, and Iraqi Justice Ministry officials say they have no plans to ever finish or use it.

—Subcontractors for Anham LLC, based in Vienna, Va., overcharged the U.S. government thousands of dollars for supplies, including $900 for a control switch valued at $7.05 and $80 for a piece of pipe that costs $1.41. Anham was hired to maintain and operate warehouses and supply centers near Baghdad's international airport and the Persian Gulf port at Umm Qasr.

— A $108 million wastewater treatment center in the city of Fallujah, a former al-Qaida stronghold in western Iraq, will have taken eight years longer to build than planned when it is completed in 2014 and will only service 9,000 homes. Iraqi officials must provide an additional $87 million to hook up most of the rest of the city, or 25,000 additional homes.

—After blowing up the al-Fatah bridge in north-central Iraq during the invasion and severing a crucial oil and gas pipeline, U.S. officials decided to try to rebuild the pipeline under the Tigris River at a cost of $75 million. A geological study predicted the project might fail, and it did: Eventually, the bridge and pipelines were repaired at an additional cost of $29 million.

—A widespread ring of fraud led by a former U.S. Army officer resulted in tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks and the criminal convictions of 22 people connected to government contracts for bottled water and other supplies at the Iraqi reconstruction program's headquarters at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait.

In too many cases, Bowen concluded, U.S. officials did not consult with Iraqis closely or deeply enough to determine what reconstruction projects were really needed or, in some cases, wanted. As a result, Iraqis took limited interest in the work, often walking away from half-finished programs, refusing to pay their share, or failing to maintain completed projects once they were handed over.

Deputy Prime Minister Hussain al-Shahristani, a Shiite, described the projects as well intentioned, but poorly prepared and inadequately supervised.

The missed opportunities were not lost on at least 15 senior State and Defense department officials interviewed in the report, including ambassadors and generals, who were directly involved in rebuilding Iraq.

One key lesson learned in Iraq, Deputy Secretary of State William Burns told auditors, is that the U.S. cannot expect to "do it all and do it our way. We must share the burden better multilaterally and engage the host country constantly on what is truly needed."

Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno, who was the top U.S. military commander in Iraq from 2008 to 2010, said "it would have been better to hold off spending large sums of money" until the country stabilized.

About a third of the $60 billion was spent to train and equip Iraqi security forces, which had to be rebuilt after the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded Saddam's army in 2003. Today, Iraqi forces have varying successes in safekeeping the public and only limited ability to secure their land, air and sea borders.

The report also cites Defense Secretary Leon Panetta as saying that the 2011 withdrawal of American troops from Iraq weakened U.S. influence in Baghdad. Panetta has since left office when former Sen. Chuck Hagel took over the defense job last week. Washington is eyeing a similar military drawdown next year in Afghanistan, where U.S. taxpayers have spent $90 billion so far on rebuilding projects.

The Afghanistan effort risks falling into the same problems that mired Iraq if oversight isn't coordinated better. In Iraq, officials were too eager to build in the middle of a civil war, and too often raced ahead without solid plans or back-up plans, the report concluded.

Most of the work was done in piecemeal fashion, as no single government agency had responsibility for all of the money spent. The State Department, for example, was supposed to oversee reconstruction strategy starting in 2004, but controlled only about 10 percent of the money at stake. The vast majority of the projects — 75 percent — were paid for by the Defense Department.

geckosticky1 · Mar 6, 2013

Treason!

Sent from my SGH-T999 using Tapatalk 2

Bush's IRAQ WAR -The Biggest Fool since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C

Superstar *****

Star

Support BGOL

Support BGOL

Support BGOL

Potential Star

Star

Potential Star

Superstar *****

Rising Star

Rising Star

Superfly Moderator

Rising Star

Superfly Moderator

Superstar *****

Superfly Moderator

Superstar *****

Star

Superfly Moderator

Superstar *****

Rising Star

Superfly Moderator

Rising Star

Superstar *****

Superstar *****

Superstar *****

Superstar *****

Rising Star

Superstar *****

Rising Star

Star

Star

Superstar *****

Rising Star

Rising Star

Similar threads