Posted on 09/09/2008 2:55:42 AM PDT by The Raven
WSJ Book Review - "The War Within," by Bob Woodward
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During a videoconference with Baghdad, the president said, "George, we're not playing for a tie. I want to make sure we all understand this." Gen. Casey, Mr. Woodward writes, took this as "an affront to his dignity that he would long remember."
...
Gen. Casey, after all, was the commander who all along maintained that the solution in Iraq was for America to draw down its forces -- even after the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra. He was the commander who later that year was given his own chance to secure Baghdad with Operations Together Forward I and II, and failed. Most of all, he is the commander who was wrong when the president was right to insist that Baghdad could be secured and al Qaeda dealt a harsh blow with more troops.
Gen. Casey's continued adherence to a failed strategy does not make him a dishonorable man. It does make him an odd choice to serve as the foundation for the charge that the president was out of touch with the war. As evidence, both the general and the journalist point to questions about how many of the enemy we were killing as a sign that "the president did not get it."
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Bring on Bucky Turdgison..now there’s a real General!!
Woodward is a jerk.
Invective and Ad hominem attacks simply undermine your core argument that you are a far wiser person than is your target.
>>You mean like Charlie Wilson’s War?
No
Dems are too stupid for that
These latest relevations primarily serve to show just how screwed up bureaucratic Washington and the Pentagon is these days.
It's absolutely appalling that the President and Vice President had to do a virtual complete end-around on the five rings in order to be able to achieve victory in Iraq. Never in my living memory has so much of the general staff been so openly disloyal to the civilians in charge.
Long term, my guess is the Iraq war will be seen as being fought year-by-year as extraordinarily well. There were no really super bad judgments, and non-productive tactics and strategy were redone just about as soon as could have been. The situation in Iraq was unpredictable, and not even the best of long-term strategic thinkers familiar with Iraq would have been able to predict what would happen in Iraq after Baghdad was taken.
“Did you see yesterday, where Joe Biden is now taking credit for pushing the surge.”
The surge that Biden said in 2007 wasn’t working and wouldnt work? Biden is a gasbag Senator who, like Kerry, has managed to take EVERY position on everything, just to be ‘safe’. ...
When the political winds were blowing for getting out of Iraq, Biden was a cut-n-run con artist:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2007/04/biden_slams_bus.html
Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., said Thursday that the troop surge plan in Iraq has failed.
“The surge is not succeeding, and the president refuses to see that,” Biden declared to reporters on a conference call.
“It’s like squeezing a water balloon, you squeeze it in one place, it bulges somewhere else,” said Biden, who has advocated a decentralized federal system in Iraq.
Here is another great Biden quote - bashing General Patreaus:
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/biden-petraeus-dead-flat-wrong-on-iraq
SEN. JOSEPH BIDEN (D-DE): Well, what I saw, heard, learned is a little bit what you heard from a general just a moment ago. There was a big disconnect between the truth of the matter and the reality. I mean, the truth of the matter is that, that the—America’s—this administration’s policy and the surge are a failure, and that the surge, which was supposed to stop sectarian violence and—long enough to give political reconciliation, there’s been no political reconciliation. The reality is that we’re supposed to, as you said, stand up American—or stand up the Iraqis so the Americans could stand down. We’ve been hearing that for five years. We’re nowhere near being able to do that.
Your 'noted historian' isn't much noted. I'm not sure who other than himself would even describe him as such. There isn't much info to be had on him and what little there is doesn't make him look authoritative.
Advertised as a "hard core libertarian," he's really just an antisemitic kook.
He has his panties in a wad like the BRussells Tribunal folks- the folks who want to try virtually every American who isn't a bright red surrender junky in a kangaroo court of their own making- against the big bad group PNAC. Instead of polite disagreements and debate on PNAC they resort to chucking tinfoil covered snowballs ("it's the jooooos! It's the Zionists!") at it in an effort to make it look ominous, which it isn't. It's an interest group of people as ominous and secretive as FreeRepublic or the Boy Scouts.
Judging by the company Sniewgoski keeps he has about as much weight on foreign policy issues as Justin Raimondo, or my dog, which, while laid back, is at least slightly more inclined to defend US territory than these guys.
I bet this was a hoot:
Stephen Sniegoski was on Karen Kwiatkowski's radio broadcast (for the Republic Broadcasting Network) yesterday discussing the JINSA/PNAC Neocon 'war for Israel' agenda as such can be listened to via... Source: www.huffingtonpost.com... [www.huffingtonpost.com]Well, he at least managed to get the attention of Karen Kwiatkowski, whose name's been heard around here before. Nice of her to share her 15 minutes of fame with him.Stephen Sniegoski is voice being interviewed on Karen Kwiatkowski's radio program... Source: oldamericancentury.org... [oldamericancentury.org]
He's got something in common with Ted Kennedy then because Karen is Ted Kennedy's double-super-secret-covert informant - the one who couldn't keep her facts straight on her insider info on the Pentagon Office of Special Plans, mainly because she wasn't an insider- she was an Africa specialist and her duties were limited to Morocco issues- and she didn't know diddly about the OSP but she was in cahoots with Pat Lang. She went running to Lyndon LaRouche after retirement to get more attention. [Pat Lang we know of too... he's involved in the xtremely kooky group of airheads known as VIPS along with Ray McGovern... of former ambassador Joe Wilson & CIA analyst Valerie Plame fame.]
* Newsweek : [Lt. Col. ] Karen Kwiatkowski, a former Pentagon official, is another anonymous source who has used a cloak of anonymity to peddle falsehoods. Her writing betrays her bias and fringe ideology. She has claimed, for example, that there was a "neo-conservative coup" within the Pentagon and that officials strove to build a "greater Zion." Kwiatkowski has bragged that she was the anonymous source for exposes by The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, and for Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau. She claimed insight into events and offices in which she has no first-hand knowledge. Much of what Kwiatkowski told these publications was innuendo or outright fabrication. 11 posted on 05/23/2004 5:31:47 AM PDT by Remember_Salamis
Maybe in time Mr. Sniegoski can become as well-known a ditz as she.
I wonder if Mr. Sniegowski has similar affiliations?
Overall agree, but ... “There were no really super bad judgments” ... there was one: The decision to disband the Army by Paul Bremer in May 2003 was in retrospect a fatal blunder.
The phrase, keep your friends close and your enemies closer, comes to mind. The disbanded army was unemployed and looking for a way to restore pride. Had we instead kept and reformulated it, we would have been 2-3 years sooner with Iraqi security forces, and the core of the insurgency would not have the expertise they had. Many of those former insurgent Sunni baathists are now back on ‘our’ side, fighting Al Qaeda. Had they been with us the whole time, we’d have cut years off the fighting.
Long term, yes, the key strategic victory is being won, and the US was flexible enough in strategy to get there.
Paul Findley is cofounder of the "Council for the National Interest"(CNI)
Paul Findley is a board member of "If Americans Knew"
His panties are in a wad against Jews because he thinks if but for them, Dick Durbin wouldn't have booted him from his congressional seat. It apparently never occured to him that he himself played a role in his own loss. Where he would be different than Durbin is unclear.
Findley has supported CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations
Findley was a supporter of the Dubai ports deal and accuses those who were against it of islamophobia.
Findley has received awards from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
Findley also received an award in 2000: the Malcolm X National Human Rights award, American Muslim Alliance.
Just makes ya feel warm & fuzzy all over.
What we have now with them is not perfect by far, but I suspect that relationships man to man at every level are stronger for having been tested and proven. That's a foundation for building.
A bought army is no foundation for anything but trouble.
Your 'noted historian' isn't much noted. I'm not sure who other than himself would even describe him as such. There isn't much info to be had on him and what little there is doesn't make him look authoritative.
This is why I love FreeRepublic. Folks who dig down and expose this stuff for what it is. Awesome post.
Mmmm.......should provide some compelling TV coverage. Man the competition's gonna be fierce. I hope Feith is up to it (snicker).
To round out the event, Perle, Lieberman and Giuliani will act as judges.
I told my mother that if Mortuary Bob is accurate-- it means that Bush is smarter than the generals, right? If they wanted to do an "Murtha-style redeploy" or a "Baker-esque" ugly draw, then they were wrong--and Bush was right.
My aunt needs to get over her BDS....
Keeping the army would have had issues, and would have required strong debaathification, but they would have paled compared with 3+ years of sunni insurgent activity is my point. Hindsight is 20/20, but ... History will have to judge.
I do not share your opinion of bob. i think he put just enough of a bad light on President Bush to sell his book. That our politicians for the most part are not supportiv of this nation or the defense of it does not surprise me. Bush has sacrificed a lot of himself.
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