Posted on 02/24/2008 4:53:30 PM PST by Kaslin
No one can return from the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, as I recently did, without believing that these are wars that can still be won. They are also clearly wars that can still be lost, but visits to the battlefield show that these conflicts are very different from the wars being described in American political campaigns and most of the debates outside the United States.
These conflicts involve far more than combat between the United States and its allies against insurgent movements such as al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Taliban. Meaningful victory can come only if tactical military victories end in ideological and political victories and in successful governance and development. Dollars are as important as bullets, and so are political accommodation, effective government services and clear demonstrations that there is a future that does not need to be built on Islamist extremism.
The military situations in Iraq and Afghanistan are very different. The United States and its allies are winning virtually every tactical clash in both countries. In Iraq, however, al-Qaeda is clearly losing in every province. It is being reduced to a losing struggle for control of Nineveh and Mosul. There is a very real prospect of coalition forces bringing a reasonable degree of security if decisions such as Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's announcement Friday to extend his militia's cease-fire six months continue over a period of years.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I am surprised this is in the WP
Anthony H.Cordesman was an authority on the Iran/Iraq war. He has been around a long time.
Anyone here have the actual source to the
Years of false promises about the speed with which we can create effective army, police and criminal justice capabilities in Iraq and Afghanistan...”
and who made the false promises? I mean as promises, not as SWAGs pulled out of a hat by someone stuck behind a podium and having to deal with prodding journos using the repetitive question technique of interrogation.
I’m not saying promises weren’t made, but I don’t recall anything other than people guessing. And most of those guessing were doing so with zero professional training in anything other than backstabbing competition for byline positioning and measuring self worth by production of column inches.
Cordesman is a leftist but unlike most of the Demagogues such as Reid, Pelosi, Murtha, et al he actually does care about success in both Iraq and Afghanistan. This column is a crushing refutation of the fantasies of both Obama Hussein and Shrillary to withdraw as rapidly as possible from Iraq, consequences be damned. Reid, Pelosi, Obama, Hillary, and their ilk are truly working to produce a catastrophe for America and the world. They really prefer American defeat and retreat as long as they think it benefits them politically. That may not meet the legal definition of TREASON but it certainly does meet a political definition of unfit to lead American government.
Attempting to gain political power in the US in order to force a military defeat by the US could not fail to meet anyone’s standard for treasonable actions.
The mere attempt to gain such power on such a platform should be a hanging offense if we weren’t a nation saturated with castratos and window lickers.
Well they are most certainly traitors in my eyes, but what I meant was that our legal process for charging, never mind convicting, anyone of treason has been constricted so narrowly over the years that there is no chance they will actually be charged legally. However, let there be no doubt that politicians who seek to bring about America’s military defeat for any reason, and especially for their own partisan political advantage, are TRAITORS.
The good news is spreading. In spite of the Nancy and Harry show.
God Bless the troops, ours and our Allies.
Well you should cause they weren't.
What was done was the process of how things in Iraq were suppose to unfold were explained to the ass clowns in the Media by the Pentagon. They then got a bunch of Leftist political types and "Military Experts" to tell them how long it should take US to train up Iraqi security forces.
Well the Leftists looked at how long it would take US to train a MP or a newbie Special Ops type and said "2 years".
What they Leftist Think Tank clowns at places like Brooking did not bother to consider is we can train someone that fast because the new solider goes into a military with 2 centuries of corporate experience, who is command from day one by officers and NCOs with decades of combined experience and is supported by the worlds finest logistics chain.
The Iraqis had none of that. They had to start from scratch and build all of it in a society that had been virtually destroyed by 40 years of Stalin style rule.
Where the Bush Administration screwed up was NOT going out and aggressively slapping the snot out of the Leftist media types who were spinning the fables about Iraq. Instead they figured if they just stonewalled on Iraq awhile the Iraqis would get their crap organized an all would be well. Basically the Bushies are either lazy or just don't understand how to manage the media machine.
That was a mistake. It let the opposition set the media template on Iraq and they were not even trying to be even remotely accurate on Iraq.
That’s pretty much how I remember it. The “promises made” came from round table type discussions in “news” talk shows of morons blathering with morons and inventing reality as they went along.
I’ve had this fight (never actually evolves much toward discussion, unfortunately) with many career military in forums and blogs. It is sickeningly surprising how many just are unable to comprehend that training up a military from scratch isn’t just as simple as pushing a few classes through a boot camp.
A military is built on generations of tried and tested SOP and buttressed with long term SNCO and Officer rank personnel.
If there are no functional SOP, no dedicated and experience SNCO and Officer corps in which to place the new boots, then what you got is a mob until it grows its framework.
Where I was asking was... did someone officially make a promise in how long the process would take. I did not recall any such promise, only the blatherings of morons who’ve no real professional training except backstabbing for byline and valuing their lives by face time minutes or column inches.
Where I will disagree with you is in who’s responsible for getting such word out.
That is the MEDIAS!!!! ****ing JOB!! and they fail. They fail on purpose. IF the POTUS was to actually attempt to fill the job failed by the intellectual inbreeds of the media, the POTUS’ job would be full time, day in, day out, all day, every day, in front of a microphone doing the medias’ job. That’s not his job.
AND!! If folk who keep playing the “buck stops here” so he’s guilty card would pay the **** attention... It does NOT accomplish squat when he does address the problems because the same failures in the media spend all day, every day, day in day out in picking everything he says apart and mutating it into saying whatever it is they wish it to say.
The fault in this process lies squarely upon US. When the media started playing this shit, they should have been dragged out by the scruff of their necks and hoisted up until they quit kicking.
We do not punish betrayers to the enemy’s cause so that betrayal spreads like cancer. That’s how cultures die.
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