Posted on 05/29/2006 12:22:23 PM PDT by gwb43_2004
Washington: A senior American general who served as a combat commander in Iraq has accused the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, of squandering the lives of United States soldiers by ignoring military advice on how to conduct the campaign.
In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Major General John Batiste, who resigned last year after 12 months stationed in Iraq's Sunni Triangle, said the Pentagon chief had caused "unnecessary deaths" by committing "strategic blunders of enormous magnitude".
(Excerpt) Read more at gulf-news.com ...
Is this guy yet another Clintonista perfumed prince?
Something smells...and I don't mean Donald Rumsfeld.
We need to find out, even if he is not, what he is saying is pure lies and undermining of the war effort. Shame on him.
Exactly! The only way anyone would follow this a-hole is out of sheer curiosity.
Why is this crap being posted on this Memorial day.
What hidden agenda does the poster have.
Ex military Generals are all the time running their mouths.
What unit were you in?
He damn well better have some pretty good evidence that will convince us that his way would have had no needless casualties and that Rumsfeld was directly negligent in not responding to his chain of command in the theatre.
These guys are setting the damn bar so damn high that pretty damn soon any conflict without zero casualties will be considered a failure.
And I say that having just returned from honoring our brothers and sisters who never made it back alive.
North-Central Iraq Ready for Election, General Says
By Jim Garamone American Forces Press Service
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2005/n01132005_2005011302.html
CHECK THIS OUT:
right-wingydingy
http://www.freerepublic.com/~rightwingydingy/index?U=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.freerepublic.com%2Fperl%2Fprofile
Also, please note the jumping from conclusion to conclusion in his post, with absolutely no reasoning or substantiation to connect
ANYTHING to ANYTHING ELSE.
There is not one whit of substance there to buttress the charge against Secretary Rumsfeld. Every bit of it -even if true and who knows if it is- is tripe and twaddle when it comes to supporting Batiste's attacks on the Secretary.
Who by the way has one heck of a resume himself.
"Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste and other U.S. and Iraqi leaders briefed Rumsfeld on the situation in Kirkuk, which the general characterized as becoming more stable each day. Batiste described the successful joint U.S.-Iraqi military campaign launched Oct. 1 that defeated anti-coalition insurgents in Samarra, located south between Kirkuk and Baghdad"
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Oct2004/n10112004_2004101101.html
Not what my Army buddy (LTC) tells me as he sat in on pre-war video conferences in Kuwait: The Generals got almost everything they wanted and they told Rummy they had what they needed to win.
Damn right!
Batiste Needs a New Mirror
May 15, 2006
Commanding the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq may have been the first endeavor that Major General John Batiste (U.S. Army, Retired) ever undertook in which he was not, in his mind, wildly successful. It seems that he does not know how to cope with this. Rather than looking in the mirror in search of someone to blame, General Batiste continues to make headlines by publicly calling for the resignation of Secretary Rumsfeld.
Most recently his face graced the front page of The Wall Street Journal in an article titled TheTwo-Star Rebel. The article recounts the moral soul searching that he did while wrestling with ideals of professionalism as he considered his potential effect upon the state of civil-military relations. It is tough to doubt his sincerity. His sincerity, however, is a result of the good General fooling himself into thinking that his frustrations in Iraq were due to a lack of support from superiors, rather than his failure to put a thick-soled desert boot into the rear ends of his staff officers and subordinate commanders.
General Batiste’s most frequent criticisms of Secretary Rumsfeld have been in regard to insufficient funds for infrastructure repair and inadequate troop strength. He takes particular issue with Rumsfeld for his insistence to keep troop strength low, in spite of pleas from subordinates. Neither of these criticisms hold any water, but General Batiste has probably grown to believe these claims because they are trumpeted almost daily by the establishment media as the root of what many want to characterize as a quagmire in Iraq. Let us address these issues one at a time.
First, let us tackle the funding issue. The Wall Street Journal writes that when Paul Wolfowitz visited Iraq in June 2004, “Gen. Batiste said that his division had spent $41 million in three months on rebuilding. It had $23 million left for the remaining six months of the year. That wasn’t enough, he says…” Fast forward only two months later, to August 27, 2004. General Batiste held a press conference in Tikrit, Iraq to announce that $2 Billion had been earmarked for the Salah ad Din Province. “This is a huge amount of money and a gift from the U.S. taxpayers,” Batiste said. Clearly that problem was solved. General Batiste presented a problem to his superiors and he got what he asked for. It is tough to see what General Batiste’s beef is in regard to funding.
Next, let us look at the troop strength issue. This was addressed very well in a TCS Daily article in October 2005, titled We Have Enough Troops: A Soldier Explains. But that article was about Iraq in general. Let us take a look at just the 1st Infantry Division while commanded by General Batiste in 2004. The Soldiers of the 1st infantry Division lived at several Forward Operating Bases throughout the Salah Ad Din province of Iraq.
Here is a snapshot of life at FOB Danger in Tikrit: “‘Thai boxing’ classes every Thursday night at 1900 and step aerobics and kickboxing classes Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 0600… a sports bar, an internet cafe and a movie theater. The sports bar features two big screen televisions, billiards tables, a bar stocked with snacks and beverages, and a ‘Music Night’ every Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 1930-0100. The movie theater shows three movies a day, the internet cafe has several video game systems and computers for soldiers to check their e-mail. The bazaar sells CDs, DVDs, clothes and other souvenirs…” and there was “an open microphone comedy competition for amateur comics.”
Here are a couple of photos of the overworked Soldiers at FOB Danger being so effectively used to combat the insurgency. That guy holding the unit colors and wearing two stars on his helmet? That is General Batiste.
FOB Dagger, also in Tikrit, had “two big-screen televisions with surround sound, six smaller televisions connected to Play Stations, board games, kitchen, fussball, books, and magazines.”
At LSA Anaconda, also known as Balad Air Base, Burger King and Pizza Hut opened on October 10, 2004. Those were in addition to the Subway and Baskin Robbins restaurants already at LSA Anaconda.
As of September 2004, FOB McKenzie, just outside of Samarra, had “a movie theater, performance stage, library, and Internet and phone room, among other amenities.”
For a man who was so concerned about inadequate troop strength, there was an awful lot of rest, recreation, relaxation, and other non-essential functions being performed by 1st Infantry Division Soldiers throughout 2004. The failure here was not Secretary Rumsfeld overtasking or undermanning the 1st Infantry Division. The failure was in General Batiste’s ineffective and inefficient use of the thousands of Soldiers under his command.
I think that the emotional weight of 150 Soldiers killed and the frustrating mission that General Batiste was tasked with has proven too much for the General to cope. I think that he is experiencing a cognitive dissonance where reality does not jibe with his self esteem and he has convinced himself that someone else is to blame for his unit not experiencing the wild success that he was accustomed to experiencing when in command positions throughout his otherwise stellar career.
To be fair, General Batiste is holding himself to an unreasonably high standard. He had a difficult mission in Iraq and he did a better job than he gives himself credit for. That is probably why he was on track to become a Deputy Corp Commander and would likely have found himself in command of over 100,000 troops in Iraq had he opted to remain in the Army. But General Batiste clearly holds himself to a higher standard and has become unnerved as a result of not meeting his high personal standards. Unfortunately, he has convinced himself that he and his men were the victims of an arrogant and negligent Defense Secretary who forced the military to spread itself too thin in Iraq. On this issue, all evidence points to failure to effectively use the troops available, rather than being shorted manpower.
I cannot stress enough that I do not doubt the sincerity of General Batiste. I think that he believes every word that he says. This is the case because he has convinced himself of something that is not true.
Posted at 9:00 PM Comments | Trackback Permalink
http://www.timothymathews.com/column/index.htm
Batiste knows that the reason why we had so many men in Iraq was not becao=use of the "Powell Doctrine" but because we still had our cold war force in Germany. That army was a use or lose asset, because the size of the force was due to be drawn down radically. Furthermore, we had Saudi Arabia as a base of operations. We couldn't do this in 2003. We had only Kuwait, and the force propose by these "Big Army" types could not be launched from Kuwait. Batiste ought to level. He didn't want the war in the first place, and when it came he really was out of his element. My guess is that from day one someone had his boot up Batiste's a__and Batiste was doing things he didn't want to do because he really didn't know how.
15+ minutes without an answer.
Troll.. and with his "well-oiled command staff" comment probably light in the loafers too!
Looks like the mods took care of him
There's something just WRONG about these people giving this kind of interview overseas. Bad enough when they do it on US soil.
(Uhmmmmm...the troll patrol?)
It speaks volumes about these men themselves - And shows an insight in to why they don't always "get along" shall we say with true leaders, people of true character, hard chargers and the such.
They go and cry and whine to the one entity (MSM) they know will listen to their attacks (and spin them for the public) because they have an agenda to run down our success, run down our fine CIC and run down our military as a whole.
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