These are comments from Just One Minute. They make good sense to me:
Liberals think war planning can be perfectly scripted like Hollywood movies. Because of their ignorance about the military and combat, they fail to understand that almost all planning goes out the window as soon as you make first contact with the enemy. After that, it's a series of moves to adapt to the new realities on the ground and to counter the actions of your enemy, who's throwing all kinds of variables into the mix. Posted by: fdcol63 | April 07, 2009 at 10:00 AM <http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2009/04/the-gamble.html?cid=6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f04f8ba970c#comment-6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f04f8ba970c> I'm still trying to figure out which planet it was on which "Ricks was the nation's top expert" [on Iraq]. And I'd have a /lot/ more time for lefties expressing hope for the war effort if they hadn't done their level best to torpedo that same effort when the issue was in doubt. IMNSHO, the main failure of the Administration's planning effort was to underestimate the lengths to which the Democrats and their allies in our Fourth Estate would go to support the enemy's propaganda war on our own airwaves. I'm trying to imagine a world in which the defeatist press didn't turn every enemy war crime (whether senseless mass murder of civilians, torture-murder of abductees, or perfidious ambushes whilst sheltering amongst civilians) into a "coalition failure" . . . providing the propaganda victory which inspired the attack in the first place, and incentivizing even more lurid atrocities. I'd even settle for one in which the relentless negative stupidity didn't monopolize front pages for weeks at a time and head every evening telecast. I'm not sure what the result would've been, but it would certainly have been different. And at this late date, it appears to me both Ricks's change in tone and Joan Walsh's willingness to be persuaded boils down to one little point: "we won" (and we're not talking about some pesky little war, either). Because the relationship of either's prose with military realities is tenuous at best . . . nor do they appear to be trying all that hard. Posted by: Cecil Turner <http://justoneminute.typepad.com> | April 07, 2009 at 10:02 AM <http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2009/04/the-gamble.html?cid=6a00d83451b2aa69e201156ffbe604970b#comment-6a00d83451b2aa69e201156ffbe604970b> Cecil's right. The constant, defeatist, "Iraq is a quagmire like Vietnam" crap from the Dems encouraged the insurgency because it allowed the insurgents to believe that they could destroy American will and resolve enough to force a premature withdrawal, leaving them in possession of Iraq. It almost succeeded. One canonly wonder just how differently things would have gone if the Dems had been united behind the only "exit strategy" there is in a war: VICTORY. Posted by: fdcol63 | April 07, 2009 at 10:10 AM <http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2009/04/the-gamble.html?cid=6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f04fde8970c#comment-6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f04fde8970c> The bearded spock planet, in the multiverse Posted by: narciso | April 07, 2009 at 10:11 AM <http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2009/04/the-gamble.html?cid=6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f04fe4d970c#comment-6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f04fe4d970c> The liberal refrain that "we're creating even more terrorists" by confronting them begs this question: Why, then, did 20,000 - 30,000 Muslims go to Afghanistan to train in Al Qaeda jihadist training camps during the Pax Clintona "Holiday from History" in the 1990's? Posted by: fdcol63 | April 07, 2009 at 10:17 AM <http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2009/04/the-gamble.html?cid=6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f050236970c#comment-6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f050236970c> The answer? They were preparing to fight a jihad to force US troops from the Muslim Holy Lands of Mecca and Medina (Saudi Arabia). Posted by: fdcol63 | April 07, 2009 at 10:24 AM <http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2009/04/the-gamble.html?cid=6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f0506e8970c#comment-6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f0506e8970c> And why were US forces in Saudi Arabia? They were left there to contain Saddam Hussein after the Persian Gulf War. Posted by: fdcol63 | April 07, 2009 at 10:25 AM <http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2009/04/the-gamble.html?cid=6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f050759970c#comment-6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f050759970c> So .... what was the best way for the US to pull its troops out of Saudi Arabia? Get rid of Saddam. Posted by: fdcol63 | April 07, 2009 at 10:26 AM <http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2009/04/the-gamble.html?cid=6a00d83451b2aa69e201156ffbf3cb970b#comment-6a00d83451b2aa69e201156ffbf3cb970b> Cecil: /it appears to me both Ricks's change in tone and Joan Walsh's willingness to be persuaded boils down to one little point: "we won" (and we're not talking about some pesky little war, either)./ And I'll go back to Schumer showing Harry Reid "compelling and astounding numbers" in April 2007, that they could use the Iraq war to pick up seats in the Senate ... that is, promulgating the idea, if not the reality, of defeat there. The success of the surge made that strategy inoperative, and the meltdown of the economy made it unnecessary. But Schumer (leak of his letter to regulators saying IndyMac was about to fail) and Reid (statement that unnamed major insurance company that everyone knows is about to fail) were active participants in that electoral strategy as well. Whatever it takes...no matter who gets hurt. Posted by: hit and run <http://thevimh.blogspot.com> | April 07, 2009 at 10:27 AM <http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2009/04/the-gamble.html?cid=6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f05085d970c#comment-6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f05085d970c> So ... how do you eventually get rid of Saddam, after 12 years and umpteen worthless UN resolutions and sanctions in which Saddam prevented meaningful weapons inspections, corrupted UN officials in the "Oil For Food" payoff scheme, aid to Palestinian terrorists in Israel, assistance to other Islamic terror groups, and daily incursions into the No-Fly Zones? Invade Iraq and effect regime change. Done. Posted by: fdcol63 | April 07, 2009 at 10:31 AM <http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2009/04/the-gamble.html?cid=6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f050bef970c#comment-6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f050bef970c> " ... 12 years and umpteen worthless UN resolutions and sanctions ..." Some "rush to war", huh? Posted by: fdcol63 | April 07, 2009 at 10:35 AM <http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2009/04/the-gamble.html?cid=6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f050de2970c#comment-6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f050de2970c> At the end of his second term when he'd clearly lost control of so much of the govt and Congress I was getting tired of Bush, I admit it, but I still loved him and, boy, do I ever miss that man now. On the one big, hard decision that faced him he did the right thing and stuck with it. Posted by: clarice | April 07, 2009 at 10:45 AM <http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2009/04/the-gamble.html?cid=6a00d83451b2aa69e201156ffc005e970b#comment-6a00d83451b2aa69e201156ffc005e970b> What is amazing about Rumsfeld is that he had some of the deepest support of the troops, not the Lords of the Rings in the Pentagon but the boots on the ground folks. One of the primary problems faced by all those touting early COIN ops, is that the US had no modern COIN training regime in place. Taking Gen. Petraeus from the field (where he had demonstrated hands-on COIN) and putting him into TRADOC where the entire US military system could re-orient itself is a stroke of genius. TRADOC is Training and Doctrine, the place where you formulate the necessary underpinnings of warfighting and then incorporate necessary training to get it done. America was not ready for a COIN fight in 2003, and we nearly botched the first change-over of troops that year, so doing COIN was not something that was going to happen... especially since al Qaeda had announced it presence before the war with multiple bombings across Iraq. OIF from 2003-05 was one of the hardest on-the-fly operations ever staged, starting out with Turkey not allowing one entire infantry division to attack out from the North to the change of Saddam's posture to COIN (thinking the Coalition had been thwarted by Turkey) and then the mad dash in to take advantage of that shifted posture. No one had ever expected the high overhead US military system to turn on a dime like that with insufficient resources to seal off the north. We would pay for that, but it was a gamble that was judged worth taking. No one wants to talk about the logistics and manpower necessary in Iraq, nor that there were never enough troops to 'police it' afterwards, unless you wanted to extend tours to two years *and* pull out half the ready reserve in PACOM, and nearly everyone from EUCOM... and in two years you have NO ONE to shift in to replace them. Germany and Japan did not right themselves that fast after WWII and we had lots of spare manpower to do that job, plus two peoples that were used to carrying on the bureaucratic civil system. If you think a Fascist system is bad, throw in traditional Arab graft and corruption and you begin to get an idea of why that civil system collapsed in Iraq. To set the stage for 2007 you had to go through 2006 which was the first major transition through three different concepts of warfighting: the last of the highly kinetic fights, the sit at your bases concept and then the sit at big bases concept. The transition to COIN was already starting in Anbar due to Special Forces and the slow coalescing of local COIN that would then be backed, and hard, early in 2007. The major operation, pre-surge, was pulling up the smuggling networks that allowed a cross-Iraq support system to keep insurgencies going that went into Iran and Syria. That was the logistics system of the insurgency, and it was being torn up. Without that the surge would have had major problems... yet it goes unrecognized. When I see Iraq I see Americans used to chaos and coping then adapting to it. Well was it that the German Commanders of WWII saw the battlefield as the natural home of Americans: they had seen our culture. Our troops and command system changed immensely in those years, 2003-2006, and fought one of the lowest casualty wars by any statistic you care to use and then adjust for scale of the conflict. For all that we have collapsed the timeline from kinetic war to COIN to handover that was done in the Philippine-American war (1899-1915) and have had many problems that remain, eerily, the same. And with good grace we are not in the failure loop of Haiti 1915-34... that has been avoided. To put it bluntly, the average 9 years to half-life of COIN was shattered by the US in Iraq - no one expected that to be bettered, and even hitting the low end of that average, those are unusual to say the least. Afghanistan is another place, entirely, and I can only recommend examining the success of the last Western military force to be successful in the region... the outlook of the peoples, there, haven't changed much over the past couple thousand years. But then modern analysts outside the military realm don't much take to doing that... Posted by: ajacksonian <http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/> | April 07, 2009 at 10:56 AM <http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2009/04/the-gamble.html?cid=6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f051b05970c#comment-6a00d83451b2aa69e201156f051b05970c> --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
