Posted on 10/18/2007 3:11:47 AM PDT by The Raven
Over the past weekend there were front-page accounts everywhere of Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez's description of the war in Iraq as a "nightmare." The New York Times led its story this way:
"In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration's handling of the war 'incompetent' and said the result was 'a nightmare with no end in sight.' " Gen. Sanchez said this last Friday to a gathering of reporters and editors in Washington who cover military affairs. It was a dramatic denunciation from the man who led U.S. forces in Iraq from 2003 to 2004.
On Monday my colleague John Fund wrote an item for the Journal editorial page's daily email newsletter, Political Diary, noting that most of the news reports of the speech had failed to note that Gen. Sanchez had also severely criticized the press's performance in Iraq. "For some of you," Gen. Sanchez said to the reporters, "the truth is of little to no value if it does not fit your own preconceived notions, biases and agendas."
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Try him for treason.
Try who for treason?
Did you read the article, or just the headline? General Sanchez says the same things that are said by 90% of the people on this board. Including, I’ll wager, you. Don’t try him for treason, give him a medal.
And he condemned the press for misrepresenting facts to the American public and proceeded to undercut their neo nazi misrepresentaion of facts. But the leftist dominated press did not tell the whole story, they took one sentence and used it to destroy Bush, who I am not happy with because he tried to work with the evil left of America, as Rudy or Mitt or McCain will also and therefore bring our nation to its end with neo nazi political correctness.
Please find out the facts of ALL HE SAID and then decide what he meant. Sanchez has been misrepresented by the neo nazi left of America.
The U.S. officer corps is aware of this. While no one is talking about a stab in the back, they may conclude that the home front and its institutions are unable to, or will not, protect their back.
• Congress and politics. “Since 2003, the politics of war have been characterized by partisanship as the Republican and Democratic parties struggled for power in Washington. . . . National efforts to date have been corrupted by partisan politics that have prevented us from devising effective, executable, supportable solutions. These partisan struggles have led to political decisions that endangered the lives of our sons and daughters on the battlefield. The unmistakable message was that political power had greater priority than our national security objectives.”
nothing treasonable about the truth.......this war should have been fought, starting with saturation bombing, not surgical strikes.....we didn't surgical strike Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.....That kind of terror WORKS
During WW II we were ALL ON THE SAME PAGE. the politics of both houses are despicable
I repeat, nothing treasonable there at least no more treasonable than MacArthur defying the wishes of Truman and saying his peace about attacking the chicoms and using Nukes if necessary.
I propose deportation and Turkish prison for those that post without reading the article.
What? That's not the subject of this thread? Oh...never mind.
Exactly !
You see how the press of all western cultures has degenerated into communist misrepresentives of facts by taking one statement and ignoring the rest of the context. A ploy used by the devil also, how can his minions not do the same.
Please. We did saturation bombing in WWII mainly because of the limitations in accuracy of our weapons. I agree that would should have gone all out in Iraq, though.
Sanchez was 'filtered'... by the DBM. It's part of their mission in 'managing-the-news'... along with outright scams such as the forged, Bush memo's and Valerie Plame's 'outing'.
America is getting spoon-fed a false reality by a compromised, socialist media... and most are too lazy... or too dumbed-down to question it.
Try whom? For what?
Since you don’t have a profile I don’t know your background. You might want to read mine.
“Taco” Sanchez (as he is known in the military) has done nothing but tell the unvarnished truth. Something that was NOT done during Vietnam and we know where that one ended up.
The difference that the military knows about Iraq is this is the main event not a side show like Vietnam. Yes, I call it a side show and I was there and lost friends. In Vietnam the real war was against the old Soviet Union and its allies. As such there was territory and people we could, and did, “hold at risk”.
Iraq is the opening battle against a religion that wants to destroy us. Unlike Vietnam there is no territory or population we can “hold at risk” to contain the war. We either win in Iraq NOW or the war will spread.
“Taco” is absolutely correct that State has never “played” in this war. The military breaks the enemy’s power base so State can go in a rebuild a more friendly state afterwards. See Germany, Europe, and Japan 60 odd years ago. State didn’t play in Vietnam and isn’t playing today.
Don’t start me about Congress.
And the Press should be using green ink and praying to Mecca 5 times a day. Sixty years ago I don’t know to whom they were praying but they did read Mao’s little red book a lot.
Does any one from State or the media want to debate this?
I hope you were being sarcastic. Because if not, you are one of the dumbest sonofabitches I’ve seen on FR in quite some time.
Did you read the article, or just the headline? General Sanchez says the same things that are said by 90% of the people on this board. Including, I’ll wager, you. Don’t try him for treason, give him a medal.
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yes but they were said 2003-2004, not now when the surge is working
>> Please. We did saturation bombing in WWII mainly because of the limitations in accuracy of our weapons.
Not true.
Where the targets were military in nature, that is partially true. Even then, we really didn’t do “saturation” bombing as much as “drop more bombs than needed”, because bombing technology was less sophisticated then.
But the firebombings of cities (Japan and Germany both) were BY DESIGN large-scale saturation bombings for the purpose of terrorizing civilians, with an indirect military goal: demoralize the enemy.
Note that the Germans did the same thing to England; and Japan engaged in large-scale terror operations against civilian populations (Nanking, Manila, many others). The “rules” were a bit different then: civilian casualties were strategic, not merely collateral.
Note also that the requirement for unconditional surrender imposed by the Allies had the potential side effect of turning entire populations of civilians into “soldiers” who were expected to fight to the death with whatever they had handy. So in a sense, under these conditions the civilian population WAS a target of military importance — especially in Japan. (Hitler also wanted the German civilians to fight to the death, but they had more sense than to obey him.)
We got a taste of “fight to the death” resistance on Okinawa, where 60,000 to 70,000 Japanese soldiers were killed — along with **150,000** Okinawan civilians, in many cases pressed to fight or be shot in the back by the Japanese.
After Okinawa, extrapolating the same sort of battle to the invasion of Japan, who could possibly blame Truman for ordering the dropping the atomic bombs? They actually saved lives.
bttt
The irony is the press does not even realize their reporting of what he said proved his point.
>> State didn’t play in Vietnam and isn’t playing today.
State is a nest of clintoon vipers. I had high hopes that Ms. Rice would straighten them out; on the contrary, it seems she has fallen under /their/ spell.
just my 2c
Sanchez bumbled this speech badly. He’s guilty of political correctness, as is Bush, and as a result his message got lost. He admits the military has made mistakes. The military always makes mistakes in war; it is the nature of war. But Sanchez screwed the pooch by criticizing Bush so much. Bush, too, has made mistakes, but commanders in chief usually do. But his focus on Bush allowed our anti-American media to completely ignore the important message—that the real problem is the ‘Rat Party and the anti-American left. Only a politically correct pussy wastes time making sure blame is allocated all around. A man identifies the problem and isn’t afraid to call a spade a fricking shovel.
obviously we have different takes. No sense going any further.
I think not.
That is of course not "the press"'s point. What they do in fact worship is themselves, and that means that since they don't concretely do anything they have to pull down anyone - be it military or private industry - who does."For some of you," Gen. Sanchez said to the reporters, "the truth is of little to no value if it does not fit your own preconceived notions, biases and agendas."And since journalists need help, they promote the politicians who do the same thing - and call them "progressives" or "liberals."
I disagree with that only in that I do not consider that journalists have multiple agendas. Their one agenda is their own self-promotion. They identify the public interest with their own interest.
You must admit, this is a classic example of the knee jerk response that the drive by gets from many of the uninformed American sheeple.
Read the headlines and jump to a conclusion.
And it works so well for them. Or, it used to.
I stand corrected...
DO NOT post the remainder of the article beyond the excerpt. There are legal reasons why FR requires excerpts for many sources, and the WSJ is one of them.
.-././.-/-.. // -/..../. // .../-/-—/.-./-.— !!!!
I’ve said it before - the most patriotic thing a President could do would be to put a cordon around State, not let anyone in or out and cut all communications between State and the outside world. Within a few weeks, America’s position in the world would start to dramatically improve.
And the collateral effect of the saturation bombing was to subject the civilian population of our enemy to the shear, unadulterated horror of war.
Thus, when German and Japan surrendered, their populations were happy to finally have peace, regardless of who did it.
Unlike Iraq, where the citizenry were never truly exposed to the horrors of war. They simply noted that their army melted away into the night. Thus, without them seeing the war, they believe the lies of the jihadists, that war is glorious and that the people can drive out the infidel. And why should they not think this?
All they know is that the war was in name only, as they didn’t see any of the battles, or the damage.
That’s the problem with precision bombing. It eliminates the enemy military, but nothing else.
And in today’s age, defeating your enemy’s military does not achieve victory.
Defeating your enemy’s population brings victory.
Vietnam was a poster child for that. We won our military battles and defeated the North Vietnamese army... but the North Vietnamese defeated our home population. And history records us the loser in that war.
Your assement of history is all wrong. Even the US Strategic Bombing survey after WW 2 admitted that strategic bombing did not win the war. Your problem is you are trying to impose Conventional War doctrine on an Asymmetrical Warfare problem. That is round hole/square peg time for you.
Napoleon in Spain, the Germans in Eastern Europe and the Russian in Afghanistan followed your dogma, they all failed miserably.
Counter Insurgency is not Total War. Learn the differences. The course you advocate is the strategy of certain defeat.
HERE is what we are up to in Iraq and it is succeeding brilliantly. That is why this is the last year the Coalition will be in Iraq.
Iraq: We Want American Security Partnership-last year of Coalition
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1904108/posts
Why Iraq
One of the really infuriating things in modern politics is the level of disinformation, misinformation, demagoguery and out right lying going on about the mission in Iraq. Democrats have spent the last 3+ years lying about Iraq out of a political calculation. The assumption is that the natural isolationist mindset of the average American voter, linked to the inherent Anti Americanism (what is misnamed the “Anti War movement”) of the more feverish Democrat activists (especially those running the US’s National “News” media) would restore them to national political dominance. The truth is the Democrat Party Leadership has simply lacked the courage to speak truth to whiners. The truth is that even if Al Gore won the 2000 election and 09-11 still happened we would be doing the EXACT same things in Iraq we are doing now.
Based on the political situation in the region left over from the 1991 Gulf War plus the domestic political consensus built up in BOTH parties since 1991 as well as fundamental military strategic laws, there was NO viable strategic choice for the US but to take out Iraq after finishing the initial operations in Afghanistan.
To start with Saddam’s Iraq was our most immediate threat. We could NOT commit significant military forces to another battle with Saddam hovering undefeated on our flank nor could we leave significant forces watching Saddam. The political containment of Iraq was breaking down. That what Oil for Food was all about. Oil for Food was an attempt by Iraq to break out of it’s diplomatic isolation and slip the shackles the UN Sanctions put on it’s military. There there was the US Strategic position to consider.
The War on Islamic Fascism is different sort of war. in facing this Asymmetrical threat, we have a hidden foe, spread out across a geographically diverse area, with covert sources of supply. Since we cannot go everywhere they hide out, in fact often cannot even locate them until the engage us, we need to draw them out of hiding into a kill zone.
Iraq is that kill zone. That is the true brilliance of the Iraq strategy. We draw the terrorists out of their world wide hiding places onto a battlefield they have to fight on for political reasons (The “Holy” soil of the Arabian peninsula) where they have to pit their weakest ability (Conventional Military combat power) against our greatest strength (ability to call down unbelievable amounts of firepower) where they will primarily have to fight other forces (the Iraqi Security forces) in a battlefield that is mostly neutral in terms of guerrilla warfare. (Iraqi-mostly open terrain as opposed to guerrilla friendly areas like the mountains of Afghanistan or the jungles of SE Asia).
Did any of the critics of liberating Iraq ever look at a map? Iraq, for which we had the political, legal and moral justifications to attack, is the strategic high ground of the Middle East. A Geographic barrier that severs ground communication between Iran and Syria apart as well as providing another front of attack in either state or into Saudi Arabia if needed.
There were other reasons to do Iraq but here is the strategic military reason we are in Iraq. We have taken, an maintain the initiative from the Terrorists. They are playing OUR game on ground of OUR choosing.
Problem is Counter Insurgency is SLOW and painful. Often a case of 3 steps forward, two steps back. One has to wonder if the American people have either the emotional maturity, nor the intellect” to understand. It’s so much easier to spew made for TV slogans like “No Blood for Oil” or “We support the Troops, bring them home” or dumbest of all “We are creating terrorists” then to actually THINK.
Westerners in general, and the US citizens in particular seem to have trouble grasping the fundamental fact of this foe. These Islamic Fascists have NO desire to co-exist with them. The extremists see all this PC posturing by the Hysteric Left as a sign that we are weak. Since they want us dead, weakness encourages them. There is simply no way to coexist with people who completely believe their “god” will reward them for killing us.
So we can covert to Islam, die or kill them. Iraq is about killing enough of them to make the rest of the Jihadists realize we are serious. They same way killing enough Germans, Italians and Japanese eliminated the ideologies of Nazism, Fascism and Bushido.
Americans need to understand how Bin Laden and his ilk view us. In the Arab world the USA is considered a big wimp. We have run away so many times. Lebanon, the Kurds, the Iraqis in 1991, the Iranians, Somalia, Clinton all thru the 1990s etc etc etc. The Jihadists think we will run again. In fact they are counting on it. That way they can run around screaming “We beat the American just like the Russians, come join us in Jihad” and recruit the next round of “holy warriors”. Iraq is also a show place where we show the Muslim world that there are a lines they cannot cross. On 9-11-01 they crossed that line and we can, and will, destroy them for it -
If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”
Winston Churchill
The Germans in Eastern Europe, the Russians in Afganistan, and Napolean in Spain never defeated the populations they conquered.
To defeat a populace, you must destroy their will to fight. That never happened in your examples.
Germany in Eastern Europe is much more an example of what WE’RE doing nowadays. Invading a country and destroying their military so quickly that the civilian population doesn’t even recognize the defeat.
Blitzkreig meant ‘lightning war’ after all...
Though, the Germans never bothered with any of the ‘hearts and minds’ stuff that we do. So the problems of governing a conquered, resentful populace were exacerbated.
If anything, what the Soviet Union did to Germany on the Eastern front is more applicable to fighting Islamofascism than your example.
IE - Total devastation. Reduce the survivors to being totally dependent on your largess. Parcel out reconstruction funds to the most loyal. Starve out the disloyal. Institute an ‘informant hotline’ with good rewards for reporting jihadists. ‘Re-education’ camps. Massive and total propaganda in television, radio, newspaper, and the school system. No access to internet. Cell phones only to those with proven loyalty.
That’ll end the problem... and end it quickly. But it’s brutal, draconian, and antithetical to everything we as Americans hold dear. However, it works. Case in point, Myanmar and North Korea. They may be hellholes, but they do have control over their populations. And after stability has been achieved, a gradual loosing of the societal straitjacket can commence. (a la South Korea, from a military dictatorship with harsh restrictions to freedoms to a modern functioning democracy)
...”I disagree with that only in that I do not consider that journalists have multiple agendas. Their one agenda is their own self-promotion. They identify the public interest with their own interest.”..
Agree. Moreover, the so-called MSM promotes the agenda of the democrat party, as the vast majority of them vote democrat. However, the real public interest is not what the media and democrats purport it to be. Instead, it is our national security in the face of a mortal threat from a 7th century death cult that masquerades as a “religion”. Unless we face that in a united front, I fear for our future, and that of our children and grandchildren.
Too much accuracy in your weaponry only maximzes the propaganda value of every civilian corpse the enemy can drag to the site before the world press get there.
UPDATE: Henninger's column inspired some lengthy thoughts from reader Scott Wallace, which to some degree parallel my own worries. Click "read more" to read them.
Wallace emails:
"The problem is that our political and journalistic classes lack sufficient patriotism to promote self-discipline, or perhaps sufficient self-discipline to allow them to act patriotically."
It's both, to a certain extent. The 'sufficient patriotism' comes from just flat-out different views of what the nation should be about--internationalist versus Americans, to be blunt.
That then leads into the second--the self-discipline to realize one has lost one's favored policy proscription and now must decide whether one is going to abide by the result and support the team or try to sabotage the effort in a backdoor attempt to get one's way.
This is why I keep on sounding the clarion call of future civil conflict. I have no problems with people carping about the war effort--something obviously wasn't going well (beyond the normal refusal of the enemy to roll over and play dead for us). And, frankly, only with public pressure was anything going to change, which is a poor statement on the chain of command. And if we weren't going to fight it to win, I had problems telling people to keep supporting the effort.
However, I have to believe that one reason the chain of command was reluctant to change course in Iraq was the belief that the opposition was not in good faith, but instead was a stealth attempt to finally achieve what they could not win outright in 2003--and therefore any change in policy or admission that things weren't progressing would be used as a hammer to just end the entire thing.
I think this year has validated that view--we can win, but the other side would still prefer to lose, for various reasons. It's almost like if, in WWII, the German-American Bund was still trying to figure out how to end Lend-Lease as Patton was getting ready to cross the Rhine (i.e., lot's of fighting left to go, but you'd rather be in your shoes than the Germans).
The problem, to me, goes beyond the war. It goes to the very heart of the democratic ideal--that the loser on any issue, to a certain extent, needs to shut up and get on board, as payment for being allowed to participate. Its like poker--you don't put your chips on the table, play some hands, and then take your money out of the pot if you should lose--because other people put their money down in good faith, and would have paid up if they had lost.
The left has made it perfectly clear that the only legitimate outcome of any debate is the one where they get their way. If they don't, they grumble, and protest, and tear apart, and sabotage, and try to delegitimatize the other side--what they never do is say "well, people have spoken, we disagree, we will continue to state our side, but within limits, and now lets go forward and make this work".
A marriage based on an arrangement like that is never going to work. And a nation based on a democracy won't either, because the other side decides two can play that game. And eventually it is going to occur to one side that if the power struggle became more of a, say, "historically traditional" model, there seems to be a enormous differential in the potential of each side to field strength on the physical plane. At that point, it becomes tempting, and less aggravating, for one side to just cut the Gordian knot.
Leftists, nutroots, and Dems are akin to the classic 16-year-old obnoxious adolescent, who goes around doing whatever he wishes and thinking the world can't touch him, because others will play by the rules while he doesn't.
That is--till the world touches him, because the world is a lot bigger than the 16-year-old.
I would prefer to avoid all of this. But to do so, we have got to start talking about the ground rules--the Code of Democracy (well, they're more like guidelines...)
ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader known only as Danny emails:
So, according to your reader--and by extension, you--the issue of abortion has been resolved, and all pro-lifers should shut up and get on board? Do we want to continue in this vein?
Actually, I think that's a good analogy. You don't have to shut up and get on board, but you have to realize you've lost the political battle at the moment, and not decide to throw out the rules and carry on the struggle by any means necessary. That's the distinction between outfits like Operation Rescue, or people like Eric Rudolph, and people who just think that abortion ought to be illegal. Likewise, there's a big difference between criticizing the war on the one hand, and on the other hoping that the enemy will win in order to secure political advantage here at home. And don't pretend that there aren't people who want us to lose.
But the bigger point is that people need to know how to lose, and lose gracefully. That doesn't mean shut up and get on board -- you can always try again -- but it does mean that "by any means necessary" is not a good model for a democratic civil society.
Bolding in above post added by me.
Bolding in above post added by me.
Yep, that is spot on.
On a related note, it drives me nuts when people, primarily Lefties, try to argue that we didn’t need to drop the A-bomb on Japan. To me, that only confirms their absolute ignorance of the battle for Okinawa.
>>These were some big mistakes though:
One of the big problems I have with punditry on this war, is the expectation that it could have been fought “perfectly”.
WARS AREN’T FOUGHT PERFECTLY!
To illustrate this, from American history, just look at Bull Run, Little Big Horn, Kasserine Pass, Anzio, a score of others.
While I don’t disagree with your assertion that we should have increased the numbers of our ground troops early on, this idea that wars can be fought perfectly has got to go. 20-20 hindsight is a wondrous thing.
I agree with all of that.
But Rumsfeld was going down the “transformation” road, and that’s not what we did. And at root, it’s 20-20 hindsight. He has been “McLellan’ed”, pushed aside, and we are where we are. Would’a-could’a-should’a.
With regard to your #2 I think part of the problem was not letting conquering warriors act like conquering warriors. Hell, our troops should have been allowed to take souvenirs and fly our flag.
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