Build up the military numbers after 9/11 when everyone wanted to join, have plenty of troops for all the places they had a hard on to attack and or threaten afterwards.
More could have been trained in Arabic.
More could have been trained to instruct the new armies in Afghanistan and Iraq, like the ISG is pretending we can do next week.
Only a short while ago, dubya said "we are winning, absolutely" but now :
=======================
"U.S. Not Winning War in Iraq, Bush Says for 1st Time
President Plans to Expand Army, Marine Corps to Cope With Strain of Multiple Deployments
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 20, 2006; 6:52 AM
President Bush acknowledged for the first time yesterday that the United States is not winning the war in Iraq and said he plans to expand the overall size of the "stressed" U.S. armed forces to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists.As he searches for a new strategy for Iraq, Bush has now adopted the formula advanced by his top military adviser to describe the situation. "We're not winning, we're not losing," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. The assessment was a striking reversal for a president who, days before the November elections, declared, "Absolutely, we're winning."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...122000268.html
====================
Which is it dubya?
which is the lie this time?
do we every get ANY truth from you, you lying, ignorant, incompetent mother er?
Last edited by boutons_; 12-20-2006 at 09:42 AM.
Iraq War: What a ing mistrake!
The US forced the war under weak premisses and will have to leave Iraq with its tail in between its legs.
I guess 40 years and a war in South East Asia taught you guys nothing.
It really ing annoys me when you say things like this. I don't agree witht the Iraq war, but when someone who is a guest in this country says an idiotic blanket statement in that way it really does piss me off. I guess one day I'll have the nerve to go to Argentina and enquire about the lessons of the Falklands War. Perhaps there are things we can learn from your country.Iraq War: What a ing mistrake!
The US forced the war under weak premisses and will have to leave Iraq with its tail in between its legs.
I guess 40 years and a war in South East Asia taught you guys nothing.
Smeagol, if you ever visit any of our Vietnam Memorials around the country, perhaps you would be so kind as to share your words with those visiting those monuments. I'm sure they'd be very receptive of your position.
MIG, it doesn't matter who the speaker is.
The truth is the truth.
Is there some requirement that legal resident non-American have to shut their mouths?
If the Repugs listened to the world, or just their friends in the world (eg, Germany and France), the Repugs wouldn't be in this horrible Iraq mess, and we'd have many more 1000s of US military alive and whole.
I'm sorry, but there is no way in that the mistake in Iraq means:
Thats a foolish and ridiculous thing to say.I guess 40 years and a war in South East Asia taught you guys nothing.
Anyone is free to speak their minds in regards to the criticism on the Iraq situation but saying we learned nothing from Vietnam is not a criticism of the Iraq situation.
The parallels with VN are much more instructive and useful and true than the non-parallels.
If VN/war vets like Powell had prevailed pre-Iraq, we wouldn't be quaqmired in Iraq by VN-war-evaders like dubya and head, and by neo-con desk jockey idelogues like Perle, Feith, Wolfowitz.
Its like talking to a wall.
Nevermind.
Bush said, to him, we're winning in the spirit of winning.
The guy needs to up his medication. He honors Rumsfeld for making our military lean and lethal, then says we need to fatten up our military. wishy washy. He's already laid the foundation of blame squarely on the shoulders of Iraqis. He just can't hammer down it's validity. He will always refuse to accept responsibility.
MIG, the 50K lives and 250K injured (plus how many more US minds ed up?) in VN were at TOTAL ING WASTE. (not counting 1000s of VN babies still being ed up by Agent Orange )
No matter that the "US military never lost a battle in VN", the US accomplished absolutely nothing in VN.
The Repugs have accomplished absolutely nothing (positive) in Iraq, and it sure looks like the Repugs have accomplished a of a lot negative in Iraq, while Aghanistan, Horn of Africa, Pakistan FATA slide more under terrorist influence and control.
VN was a war of choice on a non-threatening country based on a bull theory by non-warriors (domino theory).
Iraq war is a war of choice on a non-threatening country based on a bull theory by non-warriors. Now, apparently, bring democracy to the M/E, hidden behind lies (WMD, WTC=Saddam, Saddam = war on terror, etc)
The current Repugs, alive during the VN war, didn't learn that:
1) military battle superiority doesn't mean war victory
2) the US public has limits to its capacity in accepting US and civilian bodies and lives lost for no apparent, demonstrable gain, with no end in sight.
The Repugs ups in Iraq have now lost the US public, just like Johnson and Nixon were incapable of producing anything in VN that would keep the US public behind the war.
The nightmarish "unparallel" is the that the US pulling out of VN had no negative consequences for the US, while the Repugs de-stabilizing and losing Iraq will have major, long-term dangers for the Western world.
(The Repugs also failed to learn from the Russian disaster in Afghanistan, which was also a hugely unpopular war with the Russian people, and accomplished absolutely nothing positive for the USSR, and helped bankrupt the USSR when the 80s oil prices collapsed. The US helped defeat the Russians there as proxy war by supporting the Afghanis, which in turn gave us the Taleban and al-Quaida )
So, MIG, just what is it you claim that the current Repugs learned from the VN war that they applied to the Iraq war?
Last edited by boutons_; 12-20-2006 at 12:38 PM.
December 20, 2006
Military Analysis
New Iraq Strategy Emerges: Security, Then Politics
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 — The debate over whether to increase the American military presence in Baghdad is much more than a dispute over troop levels. It reflects a more fundamental dispute over the American mission.
In proposing to send tens of thousands of additional troops, proponents of reinforcing the American military effort argue that the violence in Iraq is increasing at such an alarming rate that Washington can no longer wait for the newly minted Iraqi security forces to take on the main burden of securing the Iraqi capital.
The United States, they assert, needs to expand its mission by making the protection of the Iraqi population its primary objective.
The calculation is that by sending additional troops and taking up positions in mixed Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods, the American military can finally break the escalating cycle of sectarian killings. Only after restoring some semblance of security, the proponents of a troop increase maintain, can the Bush administration reasonably expect Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to rein in the Shiite militias.
As President Bush mulls his Iraq strategy, the idea of deploying 20,000 additional American troops or more, at least temporarily, has emerged as a leading option. Mr. Bush intends to unveil his plan in early January, and the realization that the White House is approaching a fateful decision on the level of American involvement in Iraq has set off a spirited debate among retired officers, lawmakers and policy experts.
( I figure the WH told McCain some time ago about increasing the troops, so McCain could publicly get on that band wagon. Then if dubya "wins" in Irag, McCain will be able to campaign in 2008 as "presidentially" supporting the winning strategy of more troops. Of course, if dubya loses, the McCain loses, too )
By most accounts, a decision to substantially increase the American military presence in Baghdad would signal an important strategic shift. For years, the generals have argued that their military strategy could not work unless the Iraqis simultaneously made progress toward political reconciliation, a development that American commanders calculated would reduce the support among Sunnis for the insurgency and ease sectarian tensions.
In effect, the advocates of sending more troops have turned that logic on its head by arguing that the Iraqis cannot make political headway toward overcoming their sectarian differences until military action is taken to blunt the Sunni-led insurgency, and security is improved. That could lessen the increasing dependence on militias by Iraqis who feel the need for protection against sectarian violence.
( mother ers! The in/security problem has been to to have pre-empted success in Iraq from summer of 2003. Insecurity has greatly increased the cost of reconstruction, aborted most reconstruction, and led the Iraqis to lose all confidence in the US ability to help them).
The idea of sending reinforcements to Baghdad is not a new one. The United States dispatched a Stryker brigade and several Army battalions to the capital in August as part of a joint American and Iraqi operation to improve security there. Those additions brought the number of American troops involved in the Baghdad operation to 15,000.
Sectarian killings initially declined, only to soar after death squads adapted to American tactics.
Some critics of the Bush administration’s approach in Iraq have argued that the effort begun in August shows that more American troops are not the answer. Expanding the American military presence in Baghdad, they say, will only increase American casualties, add to the strain on an overburdened military and put off the day when the Iraqis begin to take over their own security.
“The Iraqis need to understand that the responsibility for their future is theirs,” said Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat and the incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. “We should at least begin to do some redeployment right away to show the American people that we are not there to stay forever.”
Advocates of sending additional forces acknowledge that troops can be only part of the answer. To be effective, the strategy must include efforts to train the Iraqi Army and deal with political and economic issues. But they also say that too few reinforcements were sent this summer to decisively improve security.
“It was not done to the necessary scale and not to the point where the people felt they were secure and protected,” said Daniel Dwyer, a retired major who served with the Army’s Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Baghdad and Tal Afar.
( .... aka, just another Repug up)
“The people right now feel that there is no tactical design toward securing them, that we come in and conduct operations that are short-lived and leave, and their problems don’t go away.”
Another problem with the Baghdad security operation, critics say, is that it depended on Iraqi policies that were never adequately carried out. The Iraqi Army supplied only two of the six battalions that American commanders requested. Iraqi-funded reconstruction projects to generate jobs and win popular support have been too few or too late.
To address these shortfalls, some advocates of sending reinforcements have proposed that the United States substantially expand its military mission. There are a variety of possible options for adding troops.
Gen. Jack Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff, has argued for sending four or five additional brigades to Baghdad, effectively doubling the American military presence there. The United States would also change its concept of operations in Baghdad.
Instead of limiting themselves to conducting patrols from bases in the capital, American troops would take up new positions in 23 mixed Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods to better protect the population. Millions of dollars in new American reconstruction assistance would be provided. Iraqi forces would also be involved in the operation.
American forces would not initially confront the Mahdi Army, which is controlled by Moktada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric. Once security was improved, Prime Minister Maliki would be encouraged to negotiate with the Shiite militias to stop attacks against Sunnis.
There is a risk that an adversary could wait out the American forces, evading major combat until American troops levels began to subside. For that reason, General Keane has argued that the United States should be prepared to carry out the expanded mission for 18 months, or perhaps longer, a far cry from the increase of several months that some Democratic lawmakers support.
Whether the Bush administration will opt for such a demanding strategy is far from clear. It would be an approach with huge political risks and one that would dramatically escalate American involvement in Iraq. President Bush has, however, taken one step that is a prerequisite for any effort to sustain expanded military operations in Iraq: he has signaled his intention to increase the size of the American armed forces.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/wo...rtner=homepage
So let's see "securing only Bagdad" will save the Repugs bacon in Iraq?
hmm, what about this extra-Bagad little problem:
December 19, 2006
Iraq Insurgents Starve Capital of Electricity
By JAMES GLANZ
BAGHDAD, Dec. 18 — Over the past six months, Baghdad has been all but isolated electrically, Iraqi officials say, as insurgents have effectively won their battle to bring down critical high-voltage lines and cut off the capital from the major power plants to the north, south and west.
The battle has been waged in the remotest parts of the open desert, where the great towers that support thousands of miles of exposed lines are frequently felled with explosive charges in increasingly determined and sophisticated attacks, generally at night. Crews that arrive to repair the damage are often attacked and sometimes killed, ensuring that the government falls further and further behind as it attempts to repair the lines.
And in a measure of the deep disunity and dysfunction of this nation, when the repair crews and security forces are slow to respond, skilled looters often arrive with heavy trucks that pull down more of the towers to steal as much of the valuable aluminum conducting material in the lines as possible. The aluminum is melted into ingots and sold.
What amounts to an electrical siege of Baghdad is reflected in constant power failures and disastrously poor service in the capital, with severe consequences for security, governance, health care and the mood of an already weary and angry populace.
“Now Baghdad is almost isolated,” Karim Wahid, the Iraqi electricity minister, said in an interview last week. “We almost don’t have any power coming from outside.”
That leaves Baghdad increasingly dependent on a few aging power plants within or near the city’s borders.
Mr. Wahid views the situation as dire, while Western officials in Baghdad are generally more optimistic.
Mr. Wahid said that last week, seven of the nine lines supplying power directly to Baghdad were down, and that just a trickle of electricity was flowing through the two others. Western officials agreed that most of the lines were down, but gave somewhat higher estimates on the electricity that was still flowing.
“There’s quite a few that are down, and that does limit our ability to import power into Baghdad,” said a senior Western official with knowledge of the Iraqi grid. “The goal and the objective is to get them up as quickly as we can.”
Mr. Wahid said he has appealed both to American and Iraqi security forces for help in protecting the lines, but has had little response; Electricity Ministry officials said they could think of no case in which saboteurs had been caught. Payments made to local tribes in exchange for security have been ineffective, electricity officials said.
Neither the Defense Ministry nor the American military responded to requests for comment on the security of the lines.
In response to the crisis, Mr. Wahid has formulated a national emergency master plan that in its first stage involves bringing some 100 diesel-powered generators directly into Baghdad neighborhoods by next summer. That would be followed by the construction of a spate of new power plants in Baghdad and major work on existing ones.
All together, Mr. Wahid estimates, the program would cost $27 billion over 10 years, although some electricity experts knowledgeable about the plan say that even under optimistic assumptions, those enormous expenditures would not bring electrical supplies in line with demand before 2009.
“I don’t know how the people in Iraq are going to accept that reality,” said Ghazwan al-Mukhtar, an Iraqi electrical engineer who recently left the country because of the security situation, “that after five years, six years, they are still suffering from a lack of electricity.”
The reason that the attacks on the high-voltage electrical lines, known as 400-kilovolt lines, have been especially devastating is that they serve as the arterial roads of the national grid, the gargantuan electrical circuit that was designed to carry power from the energy-rich north and south to the great population center in Baghdad.
Throughout the country, there are perhaps 15 particularly critical 400-kilovolt lines, carried by their unmistakable 150-foot towers. The entire network runs for 2,500 miles, often passing through uninhabited desert, said Fouad Monsour Abbo, the assistant director for transmission in the Electricity Ministry.
Statistics maintained by the ministry over this year chronicle the dissolution of sections of the grid and the gradual isolation of Baghdad.
In March, at most one or two of the lines were severed at any one time, but by the summer the typical number had risen to six or seven and had soared to a peak of 12 by early fall. Electricity officials say the decisive moment came July 6, when saboteurs mounted coordinated attacks across the country, gaining a lead in the battle that the government has not been able to reverse.
“They targeted all the lines at the same time, and they all came down,” Mr. Abbo said.
Mr. Abbo said a typical strategy was to set off explosives at the four support points of a single tower, which would then pull down two or three more towers as it toppled. As repair crews moved in hours or days later, another tower farther up the line might be struck, and then another, in a race the government had little chance of winning.
On Sunday, Mr. Abbo recited the most recent measures of the devastation. That day, 40 towers were down on a line running to Baghdad from one of the nation’s largest power plants in Baiji, in the insurgent-ridden north, and 42 more towers were down on a line connecting Baiji to a huge power plant in Kirkuk.
Towers were also down on two lines that pass through the “triangle of death” to connect Baghdad with a power plant to the south in Musayyib, and on four other lines in the Baghdad area or its environs. And the city was entirely cut off from the huge hydroelectric dam at Haditha, to the west in Anbar Province, the homeland of the Sunni insurgency.
Even the destruction of one tower generally shuts down a line.
“All the transfer lines are in hot spots and are targeted by terrorist attacks,” said Saadi Mehdi Ali, who as the Electricity Ministry’s inspector general follows the issue closely.
The attacks have an immediate impact on the lives of ordinary Iraqis. Last week even the official United States State Department figures, which many Iraqis contend lean toward the optimistic side, said there was an average of 6.6 hours of electricity per day in Baghdad and 8.9 hours nationwide.
Before the war, Baghdad had 16 to 24 hours of power and the rest of Iraq 4 to 8 hours, according to the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent United States federal office. While the redistribution has always been cast by American officials as a deliberate reversal of Saddam Hussein-era inequities, the statistics revealing the isolation of Baghdad show that the government no longer has much choice about the amount of power to direct to the city.
Also included in Mr. Wahid’s master plan is a centralized, automated control system to move that electricity around what is now an antiquated grid run by engineers who manually throw switches at power stations and substations scattered around the country. The control system would also help stabilize a grid that is increasingly unstable and prone to large-scale blackouts — and make deliberate manipulation of the electricity supply harder.
Iraqi and American officials say another reason that the amount of electricity in Baghdad is down is that power-rich areas like southern Iraq are finding ways to work their switches to keep more of the electricity they generate for themselves.
“That’s a fact of life,” said a senior Western official who would not be quoted by name. But with the plans for a control system, the official said, “it is becoming less and less of an issue.”
The combination of factors draining the city of electricity is reflected in a separate set of figures that gauge the electricity on the so-called “Baghdad ring” of power lines. Those figures reached a peak of 1300 megawatts in early June and had dropped to 800 megawatts by November. It rebounded slightly to 890 megawatts this month. In contrast, current demand within the Baghdad ring is estimated at 2000 megawatts and growing.
As Baghdad relies increasingly on aging local plants to satisfy the bulk of its demand, Iraqi officials say that poor decisions in the American-financed reconstruction program have made those plants much less effective than they could be.
For example, the Qudis plant, just north of Baghdad, was outfitted with turbine generators modeled on 747 airplane engines that work efficiently only when using fuel of higher quality than the Iraqis can provide with any regularity, a fact that has led to damaging breakdowns.
But there have also been important successes, including the installation of two enormous new turbines by the American contractor Bechtel at the Baghdad South power plant on the banks of the Tigris River. Without the approximately 200 megawatts generated by the turbines, which were transported under heavy security across the perilous Anbar desert to Baghdad in 2004, basic services in the city could be verging on desperate by now.
“It is a battle,” said Mr. Abbo of the Electricity Ministry. “But we still have hope.”
Unreal. First the president ignores Generals Powell and Shinseki in favor of draft deferrments Cheney and Wolfowitz, and now they are ignoring the current joint chiefs in favor of a history professor and the editorial board of a magazine.
This is the Republicans' guy?
Really?
The new SecDef Gates already caught in a lie.
He comes in making a big deal about listening to the the military, who are dead set against increasing the troops, so he increases the troops.
As the French say: "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose"
("The more things change, the more they stay the same")
As the Americans say: "same ol' same ol' "
Last edited by boutons_; 12-20-2006 at 02:59 PM.
To be fair, Gates isn't the CINC. Bush has made his bed and now he's ting in it.
Gates is the WH's man with primary operational responsbility for conducting the war, just like Rummy was.
Are you saying the WH has already cut Gates out of the loop?
I'm saying that Gates doesn't have the final say in the execution or overall strategy of the war.
He's not the decider.
This surge business was adopted by the administration before Gates was sworn in, so how can he take the blame for it?
ok
I thought Gates was involved in the ISG?
Was his selection based on that?
Why? And what "other things" like this have I said that piss you off?
I'm as much a guest in this country as your parents or grand parents were. WTF has that have to do with anything?I don't agree witht the Iraq war, but when someone who is a guest in this country says an idiotic blanket statement in that way it really does piss me off.
And you think no parallels can be drawn between Vietnam and Iraq? Think again, dude.
Come to Argentina and say whatever the you want. You want me to feed you some lines about the Falklands war? It was a ing stupid war, ran by bunch of drunk military generals who saw Argentine population discontent and came up with a phony war.I guess one day I'll have the nerve to go to Argentina and enquire about the lessons of the Falklands War. Perhaps there are things we can learn from your country.
Huh?
Care to explain further this statement.
Why is it a foolish thing to say?
Funny you would mention this given a couple of years ago you made a pretty stupid and derogatory comment about the Falklands war. I recall the thing escalating so much Kori had to shut the thread.
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