"I vood agree vit that."
Posted on 01/12/2008 6:10:52 AM PST by MNJohnnie
I thought for sure that this was a headline on the front page of the NYT. /s
Let's hear a rebuttal of this good news by Mr. Murtha!
Go ahead NYT make my day.
Me thinks they create cow pies so they have something to step in. ; )
Huge benchmark!
The Iraqi government is in the process of succeeding!
Heh...what will Ms Pelosi and Mr. Reid complain about now?
Something VERY profound no doubt. /s
Like "We have no business forcing a country to be a free country, they should have the freedom to make that choice on their own".
"I vood agree vit that."
Well I can’t argue with that over the last three years.
“If they would only pass an oil law the Dems would have to just shut the hell up. You can bet they will dismiss this with something along the lines of too little too late or some such nonsense.”
Iraq has already been sending oil funds to all sections of the country. They just have not formalized the agreement in writing.
It’s too late for the Rats to get off the train. They can only hope that the media will continue to ignore everything and continue the non-reporting.
One day, history will show Iraq Gulf War II to be the worst covered event in modern times.
We need a special Senate panel of has beens to investigate the use of cow pies to generate a government cash flow for political purposes. /s
Your fundamental mistake is you are looking back in hindsight and saying “If we had done this, that would of happened”.
Not necessarily. You are assuming that your decisions would of operated in a vacuum with no consequences. No they would not have. Every action has good and bad consequences. You are assuming nothing but good to come from doing things different in Iraq from the start. Several of the thing you indicate would probably have hugely negative impacts.
Take for example “We should of sent more troops in at the start”
More troops is not necessarily a automatic good thing in a Counter Insurgency.
An Insurgency is a race. A race between the efforts to rebuild a Govt’s authority and political support and the Insurgents efforts to destroy that authority and support and replace it with it’s own shadow Govt.. Thus Counter Insurgency is as much political as military.
Conventional Troops are trained to kill people and wreck things. They tend to find Counter Insurgency confusing and highly stressful. Thus they tend to generate more friction between them and the local population. Send in more troops, the higher the friction tends to be. So if you swamp a country with troops, you tend to generate more friction then security gain thus under cutting your primary mission of building political support for the Govt.
In addition, sending in a bunch of US troops would of squashed the development of Iraqi forces. The second the Iraqis went thru any teething pains the natural response would of been to throw a US force at the mission. Do that enough and the local forces the Counter Insurgency needs never get developed enough to operate on their own.
Too many troops would of also aided the enemies propaganda that we were their to take over their country. It would of undercut the legitimacy of the Iraqi Govt at the very time we were trying to build it up.
The idea that we can look back now and know all the right moves we should of made in Iraq is nonsense. We have no idea how those supposed “Right moves” would of caused the Iraqis and the Terrorists to react. For all we know what is being assumed as the “the right moves” would of be a disastrous failure because of the reactions of the Iraqis to them.
Take for example, De Bathification. What do you suppose the result would of been after all the drama of Liberation, the Iraqis had seen all of Saddam’s people maintaining their positions of power? Would they have been likely to support the new regime? Or might they have become cynical, assuming we were merely changing the thugs at the top, as we have before in other places, and been much more susceptible to the Jihadist propaganda? Again, decision made would of not operated in a vacuum and the Law of Unforeseen Circumstances would of been seriously in force.
After 35 years or so of oppression, the Iraqis needs to see a dramatic break from Saddam’s Govt. De-Bathification provided that obvious, need break.
>>Good. It would unfeasible and counterproductive to exclude all the low and medium rank technocrats and skilled professionals just because they were coerced to join the Baath Party.
A great step in the direction of reconciliation.<<
While that makes sense, I wonder why they call it a De-Baathification Law?
Almost seems like it.
Well, It’s a law concerning the issue of De-Baathification... or better, the degree of De-Baathification. In other words, go after the big fishs and murderers, while intergrating the low level technocrats into the new political establishment.
>>Well, It’s a law concerning the issue of De-Baathification... or better, the degree of De-Baathification. In other words, go after the big fishs and murderers, while intergrating the low level technocrats into the new political establishment.<<
That makes sense. Thank you.
You make a good point as usual.
BTTT
Umm...thank your support. Hillary rox.
but, but, but....there has been no political progress!! hitlery says so!
This is likely to leave a mark on leaders of the Democrat party.
Breaking News ping!
I love your graphic in #20! Hope to see it OFTEN in 2008... ;-)
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