Posted on 10/03/2004 9:41:09 AM PDT by billorites
Sorry, I've been away writing a book. I'm back, so let's get right down to business: We're in trouble in Iraq.
I don't know what is salvageable there anymore. I hope it is something decent and I am certain we have to try our best to bring about elections and rebuild the Iraqi Army to give every chance for decency to emerge there. But here is the cold, hard truth: This war has been hugely mismanaged by this administration, in the face of clear advice to the contrary at every stage, and as a result the range of decent outcomes in Iraq has been narrowed and the tools we have to bring even those about are more limited than ever.
What happened? The Bush team got its doctrines mixed up: it applied the Powell Doctrine to the campaign against John Kerry - "overwhelming force" without mercy, based on a strategy of shock and awe at the Republican convention, followed by a propaganda blitz that got its message across in every possible way, including through distortion. If only the Bush team had gone after the remnants of Saddam's army in the Sunni Triangle with the brutal efficiency it has gone after Senator Kerry in the Iowa-Ohio-Michigan triangle. If only the Bush team had spoken to Iraqis and Arabs with as clear a message as it did to the Republican base. No, alas, while the Bush people applied the Powell Doctrine in the Midwest, they applied the Rumsfeld Doctrine in the Middle East. And the Rumsfeld Doctrine is: "Just enough troops to lose." Donald Rumsfeld tried to prove that a small, mobile army was all that was needed to topple Saddam, without realizing that such a limited force could never stabilize Iraq. He never thought it would have to. He thought his Iraqi pals would do it. He was wrong.
For all of President Bush's vaunted talk about being consistent and resolute, the fact is he never established U.S. authority in Iraq. Never. This has been the source of all our troubles. We have never controlled all the borders, we have never even consistently controlled the road from Baghdad airport into town, because we never had enough troops to do it.
Being away has not changed my belief one iota in the importance of producing a decent outcome in Iraq, to help move the Arab-Muslim world off its steady slide toward increased authoritarianism, unemployment, overpopulation, suicidal terrorism and religious obscurantism. But my time off has clarified for me, even more, that this Bush team can't get us there, and may have so messed things up that no one can. Why? Because each time the Bush team had to choose between doing the right thing in the war on terrorism or siding with its political base and ideology, it chose its base and ideology. More troops or radically lower taxes? Lower taxes. Fire an evangelical Christian U.S. general who smears Islam in a speech while wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army or not fire him so as not to anger the Christian right? Don't fire him. Apologize to the U.N. for not finding the W.M.D., and then make the case for why our allies should still join us in Iraq to establish a decent government there? Don't apologize - for anything - because Karl Rove says the "base" won't like it. Impose a "Patriot Tax" of 50 cents a gallon on gasoline to help pay for the war, shrink the deficit and reduce the amount of oil we consume so we send less money to Saudi Arabia? Never. Just tell Americans to go on guzzling. Fire the secretary of defense for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, to show the world how seriously we take this outrage - or do nothing? Do nothing. Firing Mr. Rumsfeld might upset conservatives. Listen to the C.I.A.? Only when it can confirm your ideology. When it disagrees - impugn it or ignore it.
What I resent so much is that some of us actually put our personal politics aside in thinking about this war and about why it is so important to produce a different Iraq. This administration never did. Mr. Kerry's own views on Iraq have been intensely political and for a long time not well thought through. But Mr. Kerry is a politician running for office. Mr. Bush is president, charged with protecting the national interest, and yet from the beginning he has run Iraq policy as an extension of his political campaign.
Friends, I return to where I started: We're in trouble in Iraq. We have to immediately get the Democratic and Republican politics out of this policy and start honestly reassessing what is the maximum we can still achieve there and what every American is going to have to do to make it happen. If we do not, we'll end up not only with a fractured Iraq, but with a fractured America, at war with itself and isolated from the world.
"We're in trouble in Iraq. We have to immediately get the Democratic and Republican politics out of this policy and start honestly reassessing what is the maximum we can still achieve there and what every American is going to have to do to make it happen. If we do not, we'll end up not only with a fractured Iraq, but with a fractured America, at war with itself and isolated from the world."
Hey Friedman, take a pill, you're hysterical.
Bush's strategy is to hold the terrorists at bay while a legitimate Iraqi security apparatus is constructed. We will train Iraqi troops, and if they fail we will train another group and try again. When we do this we get more better trained and reliable Iraqi units each time the cycle is repeated. It may have to be repeated several times over the course of 2 - 3 years.
The alternative would be to flood Iraq with more US troops, who would be a target everywhere and who would undoubtedly respond by killing a good number of Iraqis.
And how, exactly, would more US troops prevent suicide car bombings that require an infrastructure of no more than a few hundred to keep running indefinitely?
In April, the terrorists in Falluja had the support of a plurality of Iraqis who saw them as nationalists. Now they have revealed themselves to be simply murderers of children who are hated by almost everyone in Iraq, even in Falluja.
What was the best strategy? Looks to me like it's the one we have chosen, because it is the only one that is likely to produce a government that is seen as legitimate by the Iraqi people and that is also strong enough to fight off the terrorists and radical Arab fascists.
We are killing potential terrorists by the hundreds in Iraq.
They will never threaten America.
They are dead.
Sadr's militia has been decimated.
The ragtag remnants of the insurgents and terrorists left after getting chewed up by America's military grinder will limp back to their homes, destroyed, demoralized and defeated.
Bush knows this and so do I.
If Kerry and Friedman are ignorant, it says lots about their courage or lack of it!
This is an interesting charge which he offers only as a bald assertion. By supporting the war initially, Friedman more than earned the right in my view to criticize the execution of it. There are pros and cons to different strategies. But Friedman doesn't produce much of substance here.
Or rather he does back up that assertion with a bunch of silly liberal crap.
Perhaps you could do a dialog which depicts with clarity one war the United States went into that showed a clear picture of how to "win the peace", once the struggles involved in war where over.
Iraqi's now see the Islamofascits are attacking themselves; Iraqi's and their children for God's sake.
The opposition is desparate to forestall the elections, but certain to lose. And we've drawn thousands of the maggets to the battle field for proper elimination.
Bush's decision to go to war in light of a relection campaign requires more cajones than a guy like Friedman can imagine. To run would be politics. To stay in fight and risk your job for what is right and must be done is courageous.
Just curious if Friedman was in Iraq writing his book, or holed up in his NY office. He offered nothing more than opinions. No facts, interviews from the front lines.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day...
your arguments sound kerry weird.
Nice job on taking the politics out of your diatribe.
Kerry on! NOT...
Friedman is spineless
All other things being equal a big police force does a better job of policing than a small one...and, as Guiliani conclusively proved, if you do a good job at stopping crime the populace really likes it and responds with generally civil behavior.
Had we had 450,000 troops on the ground instead of 150,000 there's little doubt we could have stopped most of the theft and destruction which so damaged the infrastructure (and our credibility) just after the conquest of Bagdad.
We could not have afforded to maintain such a force in the field for any length of time - and maybe we couldn't have fielded such a force at all - but Bush's insistance on maintaining tax cuts and his refusal to raise revenues in other ways certainly didn't help.
All other things being equal a big police force does a better job of policing than a small one...and, as Guiliani conclusively proved, if you do a good job at stopping crime the populace really likes it and responds with generally civil behavior
Giuliani did not respond by doubling the size of the NYPD. He simply enforced existing statutes for pettty crimes and civil disorder, which, lo and behold, had a disproportionate impact on the most criminally inclined portion of the population, who were arrested repeatedly and finally convicted of a felony or who were arrested on a petty charge and found to be wanted for a felony or parole violation, etc.
Now, think about trying to do that in Iraq. How, when our troops cannot even speak to anyone without a translator? When houses do not even have a numbered street address? When there is no place for securing prisoners, no judicial system (courts, lawyers, prosectors)? We were counting on decaptitating the Iraqi state and maintaining the body on life support until a new regime was in place. What we discovered is that there was no Iraqi state, just a criminal gang looting a country after having failed to loot its neighbors, all of whom buggered off (most to al_Anbar province) as soon as possible after the fighting ended in April 2003. That meant virtually every government and security office from the local dog-catcher and meter reader to the President (all of whom were associated with the Baath directly or indirectly) were not there.
Had we had 450,000 troops on the ground instead of 150,000 there's little doubt we could have stopped most of the theft and destruction which so damaged the infrastructure (and our credibility) just after the conquest of Bagdad.We could not have prevented the destruction of infrastructure because:
a) we destroyed most of it in 1991, and what remained was held together with baling wire and dried camel rectums;
b)most of the infrastructure (electrical, gas and oil, roads and bridges) was built in the 70's and early 80's before the Iran-Iraq war and falling oil prices sucked Iraq's treasury dry, and had little or no maintenance since.
c)Saddam used the sanctions regime as an excuse not to repair the infrastructure because the lack thereof made it easier for the Baath to reward their followers, punish their enemies, and blame everything on the US;
d)the liberation made things worse because it allowed the free import of hundreds of thousands of air conditioners, washing machines, automobiles and trucks, all of which exacerbated existing shortages;
In short, Saddam (like east Germany) made Iraq look much stronger from the outside than it really was, so instead of repairing a few power stations and water plants we found a whole country with the infrastructure of Botswana and the expectations of Western European standards among the population.
450,000 troops would have simply provided more targets and more opportunity for friction without, I believe, improving the situation much.
You are forgetting the complete strangeness and difficulty of working in a country where we have almost no one who speaks the language fluently, where there are no fixed addresses or lists of addresses (no phone books, no id databases, no drivers license databases, etc., etc.), where the culture is very different, etc., etc. How many times, for example, have you heard someone say we should have "secured the borders"? Really? How? Do you think that the border checkpoints are not manned? OK, good-- so a car pulls up with a bunch of Arabs. They all have ids and seem reputable. How do you know the ids are real? Even if they are real, who are these guys? Mechanics? Businessmen? Jihadis? Who the hell knows? The only way to secure theborders would be to close them entirely as they were under Saddam. Is that what we want to do? What impact will that have on economic life? etc. etc.
You are assuming, judging by US conditions, that mistakes were made. Given my very brief outline of the difficulties our forces (and decent Iraqis) are encountering every day, the fact that we are still on-track for reasonably well-ordered national elections in january is an effin' miracle.
No wonder Pres. Bush looks flummoxed by Kerry-- the basis of Kerry's questions is so far removed from reality that criticizing him is almost impossible.
We had no chance at all of securing Iraq's borders.
The difficulties arising when trying to deal with a very different culture and language can hardly be exagerated.
Saddam's "state" WAS largely a sham.
Much of the infrastructure WAS old, dilapidated, or non-existant.
Massive importation of consumer goods may have worsened the situation (I don't know the real extent of such importations).
But
There were many, many descriptions of massive looting and destruction just after the conquest, much of it witnessed by American troops who did nothing to stop it.
Many experts - and by that I mean people with lots of experience in similar situations - said, and continue to say, that additional troops would have made the occupation much easier (As an aside, going back to Guiliani, it's true that enlarging a police force is not always necessary, but sometimes it is, and enlarging it usually makes the job easier for the men on the beat).
Had we been able to build or repair infrastructure and establish the rule of law much sooner we certainly would be better off.
Am I to believe this is all a crock? All politically motivated by anti-Bush people?
No, not at all. I think that not stopping the looting did not affect the infrastructure that much, but it did contribute greatly to the outbreak of general lawlessness, and I think it should have been stopped. That was a mistake, but it mainly affected Bagdhad (there was not much else worth looting elsewhere in Iraq).
But the major point concerns the troop levels, and I have not seen any convincing argument that doubling or tripling the number of troops if they were to stay for a short time would have helped.
Continuing with the hypothetical, they could not have stayed very long because it would have stretched our military enormously in terms of cost, maintenance, and casualties.
The real issue is that we do not wish to stay, because we want an Iraqi government up on its feet as soon as possible, and that means getting an Iraqi security apparatus in place, which cannot be done if US soldiers are everywhere doing the Iraqi's job for them.
In this war (as in any other serious conflict) we have to trust that the President and the military brass know what they are doing (they know far more than we do about the situation on the ground). If the approach was largely regarded as mistaken by the armed forces, we would be hearing an awful lot more complaining from them.
So far, the only ones complaining are i) perfumed princes like Clark and Shinseki; ii) dem moles or other malcontents in the Pentagon; iii) the whole herd of invertebrates bred solely to be professional appeasers and paid Saudi poodles at State and in the CIA, whose "sophisticated" approach to the Middle East consists mainly in supporting Arab nationalist dictators and blaming Israel, a policy that mirrors that of the European powers.
This last category and the lemmings in the press and industry who continue to parrot the "consensus" viewpoint are mad because Bush ignored their advice and embarassed them before their euroweenie pals.
What's Bush's fault is not cleaning house at State, CIA, and FBI when he had a chance to after 9/11.
When will this country wake up and realize that GW Bush's plan to eliminate the terrorists in Iraq is a good thing for America? Think about it. We went after the Taliban in Afghanistan and did in a couple of months what the old Soviet Union couldn't do in over ten years? We may, or we may not, have caused Osama bin Laden's early demise. Since he hasn't been around for over 4 years, I suspect he his flirting with his 72 virgins right about now.
Then we went into Iraq to enforce wartime sanctions that Saddam agreed to over 10 years ago. It appeared evident to, not only the US intelligence agencies, but also to the so-called leaders of this country (Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, Al Gore, and many, many others) that Saddam was a danger to the world since he was not complying to the Gulf War sanctions and could be gathering (a word that has been overused) weapons of mass destruction. And so, GW Bush asked that Saddam be taken to task, knowing full well that Iraq is in the heart of the middle east, and requested that the world community demand that Saddam comply or face serious consequences. This effort occurred shortly after the attack on the World Trade center in this country by Islamic extremists that caused over 3000 deaths in the US.
Fast forward to the 2004 presidential elections....
GW Bush's opponent suggests that the Iraq war is the wrong war, at the wrong time, and is plain wrong (even though it needs to be won now that we are in it)?
Does this goof-ball not realize that we are fighting and killing terrorists in Iraq who would otherwise be killing US citizens on the streets of the cities of the United States?
IMHO, the citizens of the USA need to wake up and sort out the political BS from this presidential race and realize that the president is absolutely correct in taking this fight to where the terrorists are, in Iraq. And keeping them away from the streets of America........
They would have made it easier to stop the looting and prevent general lawlessness initially but, practically speaking, the costs would have been enormous for what most likely would have been a marginal and temporary improvement.
The real issue is that we do not wish to stay...because it (will stretch) our military enormously in terms of cost, maintenance, and casualties
I have glued together fragments of two separate sentences but I think the truth remains. This is the heart of it, the big gamble. Is it realistic? Can we, with this small occupation force, successfully erect an independent Iraqi government which is not inimical to our interests in the short time period we've allowed? I've not seen any convincing historical arguments which support it.
So far, the only ones complaining are i) perfumed princes like Clark and Shinseki...(etc.)...
Unless you can show that these, and the others you mention, were uncredible defeatists before they criticized the Administration, you are engaging in ad-hominem attacks; focusing on the men instead of the arguments.
I recently read, for example, the testimony of James Dobbins who argues that recent historical examples indicate that we must plan on staying a long time with a large force if we are to have any real hope of success.
Further, long-term strategic considerations - which I believe were the main reason for the conquest of Iraq - dictate a large military presence in Iraq for the forseeable future. Hopefully, it will be inactive in isolated bases. But, realistically, it will be used throughout the region as our conflict with the larger Islamic world plays out.
If any or all the above is true we're going to have to find a way to implement it...and pay for it.
The President needs to explain his plans better.
Somebody is doing a poor job advising him.
Or he takes it for granted that everybody is as smart as you and I!
A relevant thread.
Bremer, who definitely was in command on the ground, thought that more troops on a for a short time would definitely have been helpful - contradicting both you and I.
It's also interesting to see how many on FR are partisan hacks, people who refuse to accept any criticism of their guy's position and will say anything to denigrate such criticisms and critics.
A relevant thread.
Bremer, who definitely was in command on the ground, thought that more troops on a for a short time would definitely have been helpful - contradicting both you and I.
It's also interesting to see how many on FR are partisan hacks, people who refuse to accept any criticism of their guy's position and will say anything to denigrate such criticisms and critics.
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