Just after many of the the veterans of the Wehrmacht had completed their 5-year tours with the Légion étrangère, the French Foreign Legion, begun in 1945 or 1946.
Legio Patria Nostra!
Posted on 09/06/2007 8:27:35 AM PDT by lduucckkyy
For example, those that insist we should have shot looters and restored order.
Those same contrarians would have complained that shooting the looters is what caused all the violence.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
http://www.meforum.org/article/1753
I thought you might like this, saw it today on NR.
Long article on counter-propaganda, but a good one.
So wierd. Many of the people damning Bush are praising the new biography of Ike as a paean to an authentic hero. Yet it was Eisenhower who badly managed the landings in North Africa, in which American soldiers drowned off the beaches because of the lack of stable landing craft, (much like the unarmored HumVee "scandal"), It was Eisenhower who lost men by the thousands in unneceesary attacks and even in training accidents. It was Eisenhower who targeted civilians in the cities where they died by the hundreds of thousands.
Meantime Bush has presided over a war notable for its lack of American loss of life, and concerning the Iraqis, has treated them with the highest ethical standards in the history of warfare.
War is chaos and ugly, and all wars are marked by errors which are glaring in hindsight but generally unpredicted in advance. So it was in WWII and so it is in Iraq and all future conflicts. If you can't accept it, go join the pacifists (whom I once followed).
----Father of an Iraq veteran.
I agree with ya..it is weird. And my question to all these folks is :
Ok ,so you think this war is not worth dying for ...name a war you would support...are you sure its gonna go as you planned?
Instead of arrogantly clinging to your feverish belief in your own infallibility, you might learn something from your grotesque failure of judgment and intellect. Instead of dogmatically clinging to your ignorance, try actually learning something about Iraq.
Counter Insurgency is not Total War. It is as much political as it is military.
Americanizing the War in 2002 would of been the same disaster in Iraq it was in Vietnam. Past time you learn how successful Counter Insurgency tactics work. Your dogma would of been to repeat the failure of every occupying power going all the way back to Napoleon in Spain.
well stated...I wonder just how many 911 style plots we have thwarted by going into Iraq ...Im sure we got a LOT of info
Firstly, Vietnam wouldn't have been a "disaster" had we had the fortitude to carry the fight to the NVA right to the doorsteps of Hanoi. Secondly, you need to review some history as there have been plenty of counterinsurgency rebellions put down (try the Indian Plains War for instance)...you might also want to review Cromwell's successes in Ireland, or, more recently the Israeli response to the Palestinian intifada.
Yeah, makes good points.
Again, using the old Nazi model, the idea was to not reward Saddam supporters. It takes time to vet people. In Germany, after about two years, we ended up letting a lot of Nazis back in and, of course, the libs howled about it. You can’t win this game. If you don’t “lock out” certain civilians, the Carl Levins and Harry Reids will say, “See, we’re back to the old politics of support any dictator or thug as long as he’s OUR dictator. So the Bush doctrine of democracy is dead.”
Spot on, and worth a repeat.
Add to that, that there *was* no Iraqi army left to disband. We all saw it. After a few weeks of pounding they abandoned their posts by the thousands and evaporated back into the population. Frankly, it was their only choice if they wanted to live. They were being obliterated on the battlefield.
Also: Who do we think it is that started joining up in the new army? Well... duh... it was a whole lot of former soldiers and officers. What's the difference?
In essence, your model is directly analogous to what happened in Iraq, save for the fact that the Bush administration acted much quicker that Truman and Eisenhower in the post war period.
Was, or was not, the Wehrmacht was disbanded in 1945?
Well, of course it was...and it remained so when there was believed to be no need for it. HOWEVER, just as soon as Premier Stalin touched off the Cold War with permanent occupation of eastern Europe circa late 1946-early 1947, the U.S. began laying immediate plans for its rebuilding. The political situation following the downfall of Sadaam and his Republican Guards was remarkedly different in that there was no insurgency threat from a totally defeated Germany. We did not need to dismatle the entire armed forces of Iraq as the bulk of the senior enlisted cadre and some junior officer grades was composed of Sadaam-hating Shiites. We did, however, need to dismantle the paramilitary police force which was and still is today extremely corrupt. Had we employed an ample surge (as Shinseki and other generals advised) of troops then, coupled by Iraqi soldiers who swore an oath to their country, possibly there would not have been the widespread looting, probable WMD movement, and beginnings of the insurgency by the tribal societies which really rule Iraq. Additionally, we could have kept the electricity on, the water and sewage plants working and the garbage picked up by the thousands of civil servants out of work.
Also, immediately following WWII, there were elements of the old Whermacht left in place to help guard certain border areas (supervised by U.S. military) as many of the U.S. GIs were being sent home and Gen. Bradely needed manpower. Incidentally, full implementation of the new Germany army would have taken place much sooner had it not been for objections from the French.
The situations were analogous. Both armies were dismantled and soldiers mustered out, except in Iraq a new military was started faster than in West Germany. The Federal Border Protection Force (Bundesgrenzschutz or BGS) was not even formed until 1951.
Just after many of the the veterans of the Wehrmacht had completed their 5-year tours with the Légion étrangère, the French Foreign Legion, begun in 1945 or 1946.
Legio Patria Nostra!
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