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| 5/25 |
| 2006/10/18-21 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:44863 Activity:high |
10/18 Wow, watch the democratic party implode! Swami's political little
brother sure called that one right.
\_ Huh? -motd political ignorant
\_ ob ^democratic^republican
\_ You're right. The minority party imploded in 94 and never
recovered.
\_ http://www.csua.org/u/h9b
A whopping 16% of Americans approve of the job the Republican
Congress is doing. I think more than that believe that they
have been abducted by space aliens...
\_ and I bet there's a strong correlation between the two groups
\_ They'd have higher poll results if they polled for everything
they did. I'm certain Bush didn't do a poll before getting his
new dog. Pretty crazy of him, huh? Fortunately this is still
a republic and not a democracy.
\_ I don't want the President looking for input on what to name
his dog. I do want the President looking for input on whether
or not to cherry-pick information and invade a country with
no real plan for getting out.
\_ YOU want this and YOU want that but have you ever
considered what the average American wants? Hint:
what they want is different than what YOU want, you
stupid prick. The average American wants the president
to be confident, decisive, religious, faithful, and be
a good family man who keeps his penis in his pants
instead of fucking an intern at the White House. The
average American wanted all of the above in 2000 and
2004, and they got exactly what they asked for.
\_ The average American is a myth. We're a nation of 300
million Venn Diagrams.
\_ I am a man, not a Venn Dia-- er, animal!
\_ You are number six.
\_ And why Average Americans are not happy with Bush now?
\_ If you want to discuss the real world I'm here. If you
want to dailykos on me, then go to Dailykos where you'll
find a zillion people who will rah-rah that sort of noise
instead of quoting every agency in the Western hemisphere
and numerous leaders from your party who believed the same
intel all through the 90s. That dog don't hunt, son.
\_ I don't read dailykos or Mother Jones (or freep or
Fox News). This is the real world. The Pres. wanted to
invade Iraq, so he cherry-picked info to make his case.
Then he took the word of partisan hacks like Chalabi who
told him that the invasion would be over quickly because
we would be greeted as liberators. He ignored his
experienced generals like Powell, and our lack of
sufficient troops and a workable exit strategy led us
directly to the mess we're in now. If he'd taken a poll
of actually qualified people, they would have told him
this ahead of time. Believe me, I'm happy to see SH
gone, but this wasn't the way to handle the aftermath.
\_ This has been gone over so many times. "Bush lied,
people died!" "Halliburton!" "No blood for big
oil!". I'll keep it brief since it really *has*
been covered (and ignored) so many times: every
western intelligence agency in the world believed
SH had WMDs. Period. No one cherry picked anything.
\_ No. They all believed he WANTED WMDs. The Pres.
took that to mean that he had them.
\_ Give it up. The quotes have been posted many
times. Repeating a falsehood doesn't make it
true.
\_ I would be interested to hear what you
have to say about the Carnegie Report on
WMD in Iraq, 2004, particularly from p.15:
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/npp/iraqintell/home.cfm
\_ Uh ok, I went to the site, I clicked the
link, then I opened the pdf, read page
15 and a few pages around it. What
about it? How does that address what I
was saying? Or if that isn't your
point, explain further what you're
talking about and I'll be happy to
address it.
\_ From page 16:
"In brief, the consensus of the intelligence agencies
in early 2002 was that:
-The 1991 Gulf War, UN inspections, and subsequent
military actions had destroyed most of
Iraq.s chemical, biological, nuclear, and longrange
missile capability.
-There was no direct evidence that any chemical or
biological weapons remained in Iraq, but agencies
judged that some stocks could still remain and
that production could be renewed.
-As Iraq rebuilt its facilities, some of the equipment
purchased for civilian use could also be used to
manufacture chemical or biological weapons.
-Without an inspection regime, it was very diffi-
cult to determine the status of these programs."
So here are the truths. Repeating
falsehoods like every western intel
agency believed Saddam had WMD will
not make it so.
\_ So, the The Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace essentially say there was stuff, the stuff
is probably gone, they've been buying stuff that
can be used to reconstitute their programs, but
because they can't inspect they don't know for
sure. So, the President took a better-safe-
than-sorry policy. I've got no problem with
that. Now go back to the 90s like I said and
you'll find quotes from Clinton, Gore, and others
saying SH has WMDs, and no I'm not going to dig
them up for you (again). They'll just get
ignored (again). I said in plain English the
quotes were from the 90s. If you're going to
call someone a liar, get it right. I'm happy to
see that in the next 5 years our quality
intelligence agencies were able to go from "they
have them" to "gosh, we have no clue really but
they've bought the right stuff to have them if
they wanted".
\_ So what you're really saying is that you don't
mind if the western intel did not say that
SH had WMDs because you believe it was enough
that he might have had WMDs. Good for you.
Someday, like a broken clock, you will be
right.
\_ No. I already wrote several times what I'm
saying. Putting words in my mouth is a
third rate rhetorical tactic. If you
actually cared what I was saying you would
have read it but you only seem interested
in "winning" even if it is only in your
own mind. Go read your own links and
quotes if you won't read what I said. They
say the same things I just said even if you
want to misinterpret them for your ego
stroking. And thanks for turning what was
a somewhat interesting discussion into the
now standard motd crap, but I guess that's
just the thing to do once you've run out
of things to say around here. It's ok, I've
come to expect it. I guess we're done here.
Have a nice day.
\_ The French did not believe it, the
Russians did not believe it and the
Germans did not believe it. It is too
bad you drank the kool-aide. You lose.
We had more than enough troops for the invasion, but
\_ We had enough troops to invade, demolish, and get
out, true. We did not have enough troops on the
ground to keep peace afterward.
\_ We absolutely had enough troops. At no point
were troops given orders to take control of
the civilian areas, martial law was never
declared/enforced, rampant looting was allowed
to go on with soldiers watching. All in an
effort to win the hearts and minds. Boo-yah!
\_ no we don't. Shensaki said that based upon
the experience in Bosnia and Serbia, we
needed 300k-500k boots on the ground to
pacify the country..
\_ Based upon a different theatre, a
different war, a different make up of
troops, a different enemy, sigh. If
your army can conquer a region, they can
certainly keep the civilian population
in check *if ordered to do so*.
yes, they screwed up the aftermath. Not because
they didn't have enough troops. They did. Because
they weren't willing to do what needed to be done
with them. Another 500,000 troops would have meant
nothing if their orders are to *not* kill people who
need killing. Had we gone with the Powell Doctrine
of overwhelming force then how many people would be
whining that, "we put so many troops in their country
that of course they're upset. We should have gone
with a much smaller force so as not to enourage the
insurgency." Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
\_ These mythical people who would have complained
do not include me or the Iraqis who wouldn't have
died due to the utter breakdown of civilization
in Baghdad.
\_ No, you're missing the point: a larger force
would have moved slower and allowed even more
of the pro-Saddam forces to slip into civies.
We had more than enough troops to militarily
conquer the country. That is a historic fact
demonstrated 100% by what actuall happened: we
conquered the country in record time with
previously unheard of low casualties.
\_ A larger force could have just have easily
rushed forward the same smaller force to
conquer and then deployed the rest to hold
and pacify. You underestimate the mobility
of the US Armed Forces.
\_ Logistics are extremely difficult. All
those troops need food, water, ammo,
fuel, parts, bunks, training, letters
to/from home, cycle time out, and a bunch
of other things I'm sure I've forgotten.
You don't stick half a million guys in a
wasteland and tell them to just go for
it. At the time I think it was only me,
Rumsefelf, and Bush who believed the
Iraqis were going to be swept aside. The
rest of the world was talking about a
50k loss and months of hard fighting and
endless body bags and baby killers and
"omg itll be a quagmire just like Vietnam
all over again!". They had the troops to
secure the ammo dumps. They didn't.
They had the troops to stop the looting.
They didn't. The orders never came
down. Had they cracked down hard on day
1 in Baghdad the rest of the country
would have continued in the same "never
really had a central government anyway"
kind of way they had for decades. The
so-called Sunni Triangle has Baghdad as
one of the points. That is where all
the trouble began and where a tremendous
number of problems still exist today.
Falluja is a good example. We did
nothing while it turned into a swamp.
Then we sort of half assed a kind of
nothing not-quite, nevermind lets go
home attack. It got worse. Then we
sent in a real force and killed everyone
who raised a gun. It is reasonably
quiet there today. I'm stunned they had
the balls to order that especially after
the grave disappointed and leadership
cowardice shown on the first non-attempt.
You underestimate the abilities and
training of the American military.
Shensaki wanted a Vietnam style Powell
Doctrine troop flood. Yes, let's
repeat our previous mistakes by
refighting previous wars just as poorly
using the same tactics that worked so
poorly then.
\_ Here's what I'm getting from this:
I'm arguing a fantasy based on the
idea that more troops, more research,
and not disbanding the Iraqi bureau-
cratic machine might have led to a
better situation in Iraq; you're
arguing a fantasy that martial law
and more aggressive action would have
led to a better situation in Iraq.
We're both agreed that the current
situation suffered once the invasion
was over.
\_ I'm not arguing fantasy. I'm
arguing based on history. Wars
have always been won by applying
force, and by killing people until
they stop fighting back. I have
no idea what you're arguing, but
if you'd like to call your
arguments a fantasy, I'm ok with
that.
\_ Why did we lose Vietnam? Why
did the German's never wipe
our the Russian partisans?
out the Russian partisans?
Why did the Poles never give
up nor the Yugoslavs? How
about India or Algria or
about India or Algeria or
Indonesia? Your view of how
guerilla warfare works is
ignorant.
\_ Vietnam: lack of will at
home. It was won militarily
after the Tet Offensive.
Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs:
conquered and reduced to a
history book footnote.
What about India, Algeria,
or Indonesia? Your view of
what went down in Iraq post
invasion is what is ignorant,
and you continue to ignore
what I've been saying. There
was no reason to have an
insurgency if we had done
the right thing on day 1 or
even up to a week later.
It's been mildly entertaining
but you're now grasping
wildly at straws tossing out
random other country names in
the apparent hope of I'm not
sure what. It was fun but
now we're done. Go ahead
and take another random
potshot, have the last word
to soothe your ego and we're
done. I won't reply to this
thread any further. Have a
nice day.
\_ FWIW, you're arguing with
at least three different
people now. As far as
fantasy goes, there's no
way of knowing whether
your solution or mine (or)
would have worked because
neither was tried, and
every situation is diff-
erent. I _get_ the pre-
cedent for the success of
martial law, and I would
have been interested to
see what would have
happened if it had been
implemented-- but it was
not, and so it's pure
conjecture at this point
to say that it would have
been an unqualified
success. The same goes for
my suggestions. That said,
this is not debate club,
and I have no illusion
that I'm going to con-
vince you of the superior-
ity of my suggestion.
\_ The point is almost any
country that fought
against colonial
occupation in the last
50 years has emerged
triumphant. As will Iraq.
\_ Tibet?
\_ Hopefully not because
I think that would
make Iraq the first
country ever to
resist democracy.
This is not an act of
colonisation. Then
again this is the
Middle East and theyre
all a bunch of raving
lunatics so whatever.
\_ how about disbanding the Iraqi army? not
securing the the ammunition dump? allowing
disbanded army to melt into civilians is the
worse thing can happen.
\_ I still say disbanding the army was the
better of two poor choices. Not securing
the dumps falls under the "didn't declare
martial law" category and I agree that was
stupid.
And a brief word on Chalabi: who *isnt* partisan but
has an interest and contacts in his third world
government? Everyone has an agenda. There is no
mythical neutral person out there who just wanted
what was "best for the Iraqi people".
\_ Chalabi is/was a snake who is/was never trusted by
people in Iraq. A bit of digging would have
revealed this. Instead, he was believed because
what he had to say fit what the Pres. and his
advisors wanted to hear.
\_ They're all snakes. That's the point. At some
point you have to pick your guy(s) and go with
it. No digging was required. He was already
known to be a snake. It wasn't a secret.
Anyone else would've been a snake, only the
name would change.
\_ Then we should have picked a snake who
actually had an idea of the real picture in
Iraq, someone the Iraqis could have backed.
\_ The problem with that is there is no
such thing as an "Iraqi". They don't
see themselves in national terms which
is why they've had such a hard time
forming an effective government and
associated services. They see themselves
as Sunni, Shia, and Kurd and with good
reason. There is *no one* the mythical
average Iraqi could have backed. I
think Chalabi had an excellent idea of
what was going on. He abused his
position for personal gain and got
busted and now he's out of the picture.
The abuse is the snake part. It is to
be expected.
On exit strategies: there is no exit strategy when
your initial plan doesn't include killing enough of
the enemy to break his will. When I saw reports of
the Iraqi army vanishing into the civilian population
I knew we were in for it, but there was no way to
stop that. We could not have moved any faster and
\_ err., we DISBANDED THE ENTIRE ARMY, remember?
de-Baathification?
\_ Yes. And I still prefer that to replacing the
bastard we knew with a new bastard from SH's
old military. That would be the definition of
failure. The idea wasn't to replace one
bastard with another. The idea was to clean
the whole lot out. And I sure as hell wouldn't
want the Baathist army running around still
slaughtering civilians in the name of stability
on my watch.
your Powell Doctrine sized army would have taken
another 3-6 months to build up, moved slower, taken
more casualties and allowed even more Iraqi military
to disolve into the general population.
\_ The Iraqi army disappeared into the population
because they didn't want to fight for SH. A better
and more honest analysis of the situation would
have revealed this and would have shown that the
dissolution of the IA was a bad idea; reform
would have been a better idea. There were people
in place at the time who could have helped with
that. Now there are not.
\_ The disappeared because they were getting
crushed. Not even crushed. They were getting
swept from the battle field as if they were
never on it. Fighting a classic insurgency
campaign was the only alternative. That is
why SH and his pals were handing out cash left
and right before the fall. It was part of a
staged plan because they knew they couldn't
stop the allied forces. As far as disolving
the army goes, it's one of those ugly choices
with no good answer. Disolve it and rebuild
from scratch which takes time or keep the same
bastards in place who were responsible for
mass killing of their own civilians yet
maintain order? I think they made the better
call. The army was Sunni run and would have
just replaced SH with another Sunni military
dictator making the whole thing for naught.
At least this way there is a chance of doing
something better than replacing one bastard
with another.
\_ This does not match the real situation which
was that SH had created a cult of
personality such that no one had power out-
side of him. Kill/capture SH, and the rest
would have fallen apart. This is why we
tried to get him with missiles several times
before invading.
\_ There was no cult of personality. He
had supreme power because like most
dictators he (mostly) rewarded loyalty
while torturing and executing disloyalty.
Cult of personality? Er, uh, what?
Final word at this time: we have more than enough
troops. Our leadership lacked the will to allow
them to do what they were trained to do: find and
kill the enemy in sufficient numbers to break his
will to fight. That is how wars have always been
won. Not this hearts and minds garbage.
\_ The enemy was found and killed or captured. The
enemy was SH, not the Iraqi people (or even the
Iraqi army). But because we focused on finding
and killing/capturing the enemy, we let the
country slide into ruin. GHWB understood this, and
that's why he didn't push all the way to Baghdad
in GWI. You can't leave a power vacuum, or
anarchy will descend.
s
\_ The enemy was not SH nor the people. It was
SH's military and intelligence establishment
as headed by SH. The army was not some bunch
of poor innocent victims. The lowest end
grunts were constripts and draftees, but
anyone in the officer core was scum and in
good need of jail or killing. The country fell
to ruin because we didn't have a post invasion
plan and probably didn't think about or even
care about it. And the only plan that would
have worked is not something they would have
done: declared martial law, rounded up the
thugs and executed or long term imprisoned
them. I do absolutely agree with you about
power vaccuums. We created one the moment the
SH government vanished and we failed to take
control. We had the troops, we lacked the
will at the leadership level.
\_ HAHAHA SUCK IT CONS! You lied, you are going to now pay for your
lies and incompetence. Too bad all the rest of us are going to
have to pay for and clean up your mess. Can we levy a tax on
Bushbots to pay reparations to Iraq?
link:www.csua.org/u/h9k
\_ I'm guessing a tinyurl with no attribution from a troll isn't
work safe but thanks for caring enough to post.
\_ Work safe chart of stock market-esque tracking of the House
GOP. |
| 5/25 |
|
| www.csua.org/u/h9b -> today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-10-19T044321Z_01_N18268776_RTRUKOC_0_US-CONGRESS-POLL.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C2-TopNews-newsOne-2 Forty-seven percent of respondents said they were less in favor of keeping Republicans in control of Congress, compared to 14 percent who were more in favor of maintaining the current congressional makeup, according to the poll. Only 16 percent of respondents approve of the job Congress is doing, the lowest level since 1992, NBC said. In October 1994, when Democrats held congressional majorities, Congress had a 24 percent job approval, NBC said. Democrats lost 52 House and 8 Senate seats in the 1994 midterm elections. Patterns of Belief View Slideshow NBC said the poll indicates people have been paying attention to the issues they are hearing about -- from Iraq and Bob Woodward's new book on the Bush administration's handling of the war to the unfolding scandal over former Florida Rep. Mark Foley's e-mail messages to teenage congressional aides. The poll numbers and President George W Bush's own job approval ratings, which have been mired in the 30 percent range, are an ominous sign for a party trying to maintain control of Congress, NBC said. Bush had a job approval rating of 38 percent, down 1 percentage point from a previous NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released earlier this month after the Foley news first broke, NBC said. Asked who they planned to vote for in the congressional election, 37 percent of those polled said Republicans and 52 percent said Democrats. The 15 percent difference was the highest disparity ever in the poll and up from a 9-point difference a month ago, NBC said. The poll of 1,006 registered voters was taken from October 13-16 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 31 percentage points. Clashes test plan to put Iraqis in charge BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Fierce battles between militia gunmen and police in the southern city of Amara on Friday tested the Iraqi government's ability to rein in sectarian groups and US-led plans to hand over control to Iraqis. |
| www.carnegieendowment.org/npp/iraqintell/home.cfm WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications This January 2004 Carnegie report studies what the intelligence community understood about Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs before the war and outlines policy reforms designed to improve threat assessments, deter transfer of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons to terrorists, and avoid politicization of the intelligence process. summary tables on Iraq's nuclear, biological, chemical and missile programs have been updated in 2004. "To date, some of the best work on the use of prewar intelligence has been done by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan think tank. Its painstaking study, from January 2004, compared what the various intelligence agencies were estimating about Iraq in the runup to the war to what administration officials were saying." four summary tables on assessments of Iraq's WMD capabilities from the Carnegie report updated to include a concise version of inaccuracies documented by the Senate Intelligence Committee. "A Defiant Bush Stands His Ground & Claims His Foreign Policies are Succeeding," San Francisco Chronicle Op-Ed by Robert Collier, Jan. Click here for a Carnegie chronological collection of quotations from top Administration officials on Iraq's WMD capabilities (August 2002 through November 2003). David Kay, "Interim Progress Report on the Activites of the Iraq Survey Group,House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee, House Appropiations Committee -Subcommittee on Defense, and the Senate Select Commitee on Intelligence, 2 October 2003. David Kay, testimony before Congress on the "Interim Progress Report on the Activites of the Iraq Survey Group," 2 October 2003. |