Panetta: U.S. In Syria Too Late, Left Iraq Too Soon [American Blood Sacrificed In Vain: Impeach!]

partygoer?

+1

You would think the military would get tired of asshole politicians in DC getting them killed for no reason and do something about it.

I’ve been predicting that panetta will make a run for the Presidency.

These comments may be another indication of that.

Obama has done more damage to this country than the previous 20 combined.

Actually Panetta was a big part of the Clinton Administration. Looks like the night of the long knifes is starting.

When rats jump a burning ship, it usually starts as a trickle. Wait another year.

Looks like Russian troops are there to stay in Ukraine, no “Stay Behind” agreement necessary.

Funny thing, the Russians not giving a rats ass about what the President of Ukraine says or wants.

...of course it does not tell us what the Iraqis were thinking.

In the spirit of your and Mazda77's previous posts, do you not think it incumbent on the former VP to give a more substantive reasoning than petulance and vanity on the part of Maliki for his accusation of malfeasance against the sitting President?

Don't get me wrong, I have no love for Obama and his machinations, and I do hold Dick Cheney in high regard, but in this instance I believe his explanation does not satisfy the question.

Yes I quite agree that it is incumbent upon Dick Cheney to make a full explanation and, where possible, document his allegations.

Of course it is no less incumbent on the president on whose watch all of this transpired and who bears the responsibility for the failure to make an agreement. So far Obama has failed to show a good faith effort, quite the contrary, he is on record beginning in 2008 and continuing past the pullout by Americans that it was his full intention to exit. As I recall, he proclaimed, or had his vice president proclaim, that it was a signal achievement of his administration to get the troops out of Iraq.

There is so much evidence of Obama's fixed intention to skedaddle that they would be very difficult for him now, short of producing documents, to convince a fair jury that he was frustrated in an honest attempt to negotiate a status of forces agreement.

On balance, I would argue that the burden of proof is on Obama the come forward with evidence of the administration for a number of reasons including the very practical one that he is in possession of the facts and the documents while Cheney is at best in possession of hearsay or secondhand information.

Even if Obama can somehow convince us that he was actually frustrated in an honest attempt to negotiate such an agreement, there remains the question whether a scant 3000 troops would have made the difference when Isis came over the Syrian border and were steadfastly ignored by Obama ignored despite repeated intelligence briefings. Obama's in the anomalous position of having declared that the war in Iraq was won go to sleep him him him him him him him him him him him him him him as he pulled the troops out and his subsequent history of ignoring not only the incursions by Isis but the suppression of the Shiite by Malaki

All of this is publicly known but not generally known as we face the same friction in the media we face in opposing any Democrat regime.

Sorry for mistaking your name. Although party animal wouldn't be bad either.

You are framing the "who lost Iraq" argument around the SOFA, and whether or not the shia maliki had the authority to negotiate an "executive SOFA", cutting the parliament out of the process. That is disputable, subject to opinions

You can also say that Iraq was lost when the Iraq military and police were dissolved. Those forces were primarily Sunni who left with their weapons and munitions. These Sunni boycotted the election of Maliki and started a civil war and Bush entered the civil war on the side of the Shia, which he called the surge.

Those Sunni who fled from Petraeus' surge went to Syria to revolt against the Shia leader there, and have now returned to Iraq. So it was war on one front(Iraq) that switched to the other front(Syria), and is now being fought on bought fronts(Syria and Iraq). Sunni vs Shia.

Let's listen to Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, and Paul Bremmer. Lets send 20,000-30,000 troops back in and spend 2 more trillion dollars so we can participate in the Sunni-Shia civil war.

Of course it is no less incumbent on the president on whose watch all of this transpired and who bears the responsibility for the failure to make an agreement.

This is a point on which I can not agree. Despite Status of Forces agreements with other nations around the world, we can not lose sight of what such agreements entail. That is, the legal standing of armed foreign troops on the soil of a sovereign nation. As such, I see no further explanation beyond "he didn't want us there" required for why a head of state would not make such an agreement.

Cheney is free to "guild the lily" on "why" Maliki would refuse such an agreement, but I think it strains credulity for Cheney to claim Maliki refused to let us get our foot in the door because we wouldn't agree to "move in, and rearrange the furniture."

Wait a minute boys and girls before you pin the neocon label on me let me point out that I posted a vanity on 12 September arguing that the real enemy is Iran with its potential of getting the bomb and not Isis: Will bombing Isis, like the Iraq war, prove to be the wrong "war" against the wrong enemy?. Further, we should not take our eye off of stopping Iran getting the bomb because we are obsessed this week by Isis. By no means do I advocate reigniting the Iraq war.

As to the allegation that the failure to get a status of forces agreement was entirely the failure of the Bush administration, I stand by the Bush administration's ability to get other such agreements and the public remarks of Barack Obama and his vice president.

As to the wisdom of reigniting the Iraq war beginning with the following vanity and in many subsequent posts I have made my position clear. Years ago ago on November 4, 2006 I posted a vanity which I call my mea culpa which declares that I was wrong in favoring the initiation of the Iraq war and I have greatly repented of it since. I cannot find the citation for it so I reproduce it here:

"Before the invasion I wrote that "God help me" I wanted the invasion to begin as soon as possible before the inspection regime or the French could so undermine the administration that the war could not be started.

Unlike these treacherous neocons, I will admit that I was wrong. In my own defense I can say, for what it's worth, that I was never seduced by the idea of imposing Wilsonian democracy on Iraq, although I of course would not have spurned it, but I saw the war in what I arrogantly believed were grown up and real world considerations of geopolitics. I wanted forward bases in the Mideast from which to strike at Syria and Iran if intimidation alone did not work. I wanted us to get all our hands on the oil fields to deprive Muslim terrorists of petrodollars with which to buy weapons of mass destruction. I wanted us to demonstrate to the Muslim world that no leader could sleep safe if he played a double game with America. I wanted to so intimidate the Muslim world with our military prowess that they themselves would turn against the terrorists in their midst because I believed, and still believe, that the only way we ultimately can win this war is to turn the sane Muslims against the crazies. And, of course, I wanted a regime change as the only effective defense against WMD's in Iraq. My mistake, and I believe Bush's, was to underestimate the tenacity of the Muslim belief system and to see the war in a two dimensional geographical box, like a game of checkers, where squares were to be taken and held.

Not only was I wrong but the result has been calamitous and every one of the "strategic" reasons for waging war in Iraq have been stood on its head. I suspect that the main reason there has been no terrorist attack on the heartland is because Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, as well as Iran, are quite content to see America founder in Iraq. Iran, likewise, is the big winner from all of this as it moves closer to upsetting the entire balance of power in the Middle East when it acquires the bomb and perhaps fashions a Shi'ite Crescent running to the Mediterranean Sea. I believe my error came out of the false understanding of the nature of the global intergenerational war against terrorism: that somehow it was a war which could be conceived of in geographical terms. It is not-- although if it is lost the ultimate impact will be geographical. This is a war for the soul of Islam and we must not lose our own souls before we can save theirs.

Perhaps the very worst legacy of this whole Irak tragedy is that we are a daily demonstrating to the world that we are presently incapable of winning asymmetrical wars of terrorism. The Israelis just proved that in Lebanon. The people in Afghanistan are beginning to understand it. The tide in the Muslim world is rising against us as their fear drains away. So the goal of saving the soul of Islam has been made more elusive.

To compound the catastrophe, the "socialist" world of Cuba and Venezuela, Russia and China can read the daily events in Iraq and are emboldened as they have not been since the first Iraq war and seem eager to make mischief 1960s style.

Meanwhile, we've increased the danger of losing our own soul as defined as the will to win. Western Europe already lacks it and half of America possesses an anemic red blood count. Another tragedy of the Iraq war might will be to cause the installation of a Democrat regime in America which will align itself with the appeasers in Europe and so fatally succumb to jihad. The danger is as near as next Tuesday when, if the Republicans suffer a stinging repudiation of the polls, Bush might be left in as feckless a state as Gerald Ford was during the final pathetic agony of Vietnam.

Our dilemma is that we cannot win in Iraq and we cannot abandon it. We cannot win until we learn how to fight asymmetrical insurgencies against our occupation. We show no evidence that we have any idea how to do this at a price America is willing to pay. The training up of Iraqi forces, especially the police, is clearly a failure. So we are mired in a situation that spills our blood and empties our treasury and turns our friends against us. Meanwhile, the existential threat against America, represented by Iran's possession of a nuclear weapon which it passes off to terrorists to explode in the heartland, grows daily closer to reality. Our efforts in Iraq have so attenuated our military force that we probably cannot mount an invasion and air power alone probably cannot interdict Iran's nuclear program. This is well known to the whole world and especially to Iran so our ability to intimidate the Iranians into good behavior has bled into the sands of Iraq along with the Bush Doctrine.

Soon it will be fashionable even in conservative circles to blame Bush just as the neocons now are doing so ignominiously. My belief is that the miscalculation was to presume that the Iraqis, read Muslims, would behave rationally when presented with the opportunity for self-determination and democracy. It is not really that we made fatal tactical military mistakes in Iraq which we can lay at the feet of Bush or Rumsfeld, rather it is the nature of the traditional Muslim society that caused all of this bloodshed to be inevitable. Iraq has revealed that America has no stomach for the pain which must be endured to see such a traditional Muslim society through to Western democratic values.

Asymmetrical warfare works against armies of occupation but these tactics do not work against 21st-century Blitzkrieg, American-style. I fear that the American military will engage in another Vietnam style soul-searching and draw the wrong conclusion, that military force does not work at all in the war against terrorism. I am tempted, therefore, to argue that it was the occupation and not the war itself which was the bridge too far. After Iraq, I am humble enough to admit and perhaps it is I who misses the lesson.

I am well aware that new military adventures will be virtually impossible to sell until the inevitable happens: a strike is made against the homeland. If Al Qaeda strikes with anything less than a mortal blow, ie. a series of nuclear explosions, America might yet be able to find its finest hour. But strike it must if Al Qaeda intends fulfill its ambitions. God grant that they settle for half a loaf with an intensity level not exceeding 911.

We must fashion a new policy, a new strategy for winning this intergenerational worldwide war against a portion of 1.4 billion Muslims who inhabit the earth. We must turn rational Islam against this jihad or we will perish because we will rot from the inside out or we will simply surrender after our cities are turned into glass. We cannot hope to prevail if we eschew all military operations as ultimately counterproductive. We must find what works. Above all, we must not lose our soul."

I do not favor anything more than a bombing campaign in Iraq not because I expected to prevail in the sense of eliminating Isis, but because it is a necessary emergency move.

Just because I believe that Barack Obama throw away whatever was gained by an ill-conceived war in Iraq, does not mean that I want to spend more lives, more limbs, or more treasure redeeming that mistake.

Panetta is only competent and pro-American in relation to Zero and his cadre.

Yeah, for sure. Makes me sick. Patreaus too. NO one stands up to this SOB...no one. The truth will come out but before then this guy will not get to vote present much longer. SH*t is going to be hitting the fan from all sides in the coming weeks. Watch what happens when Assad shoots down one of our planes or worse yet one of ours gets captured