[OT] Another heated discussion about the Iraq siutation, war and politics.

[Erax]

Primitive, I too think this war was a bad idea, but I don't entirely agree with your points.

Yes, Bush gutted the UN, but now it seems that he wants to repair the damage. Let's give him time to see if he means it.

The 'new cold war' is not GWB's creation, it is a result of at least 100 years of erroneous foreign policy by the former colonial powers. Right now we are going through a crisis in that war, but the war was already there.

Regarding the 'wrong target', although I agree with you I think the USA may have hit the right target while aiming at the wrong one. Time will tell.

I believe that it is far more important now to see what kind of government emerges in Iraq rather than debate the legitimacy of the war. We can't change what happened, but we can try to influence what is happening now.

[deccan]

Originally posted by primitive:
Did he ?
The news over here must be heavily censored, cause I have missed any proof.
Please humour an old geezer and provide me with a link (other than his own statements)

Try this:

http://www.economist.com/displaystor...tory_id=186940

Saddam Hussein HAS used poison gas against Kurds.

[primitive]

Deccan,
That was not the part of the quotation I was referring too. Nobody in his right mind would deny those crimes. Problem is they happened before Gulf war 1 and any UN sanctions against Iraq, and is therefore irrelevant as an excuse for GWB for Gulf war 2. However, they would have made an excellent excuse for Bush sr. to have done the job properly the first time.

My problem with the quotation is that it implies that Iraq built new WMDs and supported terror against the USA between GW1 and GW2 (Although I conceede that it is written in vague language and don’t include any actual dates)

It is this: “ .. built weapons of mass destruction.... and refused to account for them when confronted by the world” that needs proof. Proof of WMDs (and ties to 9.11) please.

[Atrocities]

Originally posted by deccan:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Atrocities:
Most Americans, and people around the world choose to be a silent majoratie that support what Bush and Clair have done.

I bet you meant Bush and Blair here. For some reason, when I saw "Clair", I first thought of Claire Short and did a double-take.

---

Ooops, typo - my bad - fixed

[deccan]

* Shrug *

On balance, I'd say that I supported the war based on the evidence available at that time. I'd say that Iraq's renewed acceptance of the UN's weapons inspectors at the threat isn't sufficient for me because it was a case too little, too late.

Remember that I'm in the Solomon Islands. Here, we had an amnesty period within which the militants were supposed to hand in their weapons in exchange for not being persecuted. However, in order to avoid conflict, the government kept renewing the amnesty over and over again, and made the entire Townsville Peace Agreement which created the amnesty into a laughing stock.

But I would also say that, even based on the pre-war evidence, GWB's claims that Iraq represented a grave and imminent threat to the U.S. were hyperbole. If the rationale for the war were mostly based on that, then I'd agree that the war was unjustified.

My own pre-war reasons for supporting the war was never based on the imminent threat that Iraq supposedly posed to the U.S. As a Malaysian, I saw the war as justified on humanitarian principles, based on overthrowing a despotic regime, universally hated by its people. I saw a chance to establish a democracy in the Middle East and prove that Islam IS compatible with democracy. And I saw a chance for sending a strong, clear warning to any and all rogue regimes in the world that at least one country would be prepared to militarily intervene against evil-doing, particular to North Korea (which IS a concern, given where my country is). It helps that all these things are GOOD in the long-term for the U.S.'s own interests.

Why would I believe that the U.S. would be prepared to do these things? I admit that I certainly have no right to ask the U.S. and its people to take on this responsibility, but if they do want to do this, then certainly I support them.

Overall, however, I am disappointed with the post-war developments. Despite its pre-war claims to the contrary, it is now painfully obvious that the U.S. never did give much thought or make much effort to determine what sort of post-war government Iraq should have. The huge disparity between the pre-war effort made to properly plan the war and the pre-war effort to plan for the future of Iraq is shameful. The abrupt change of the U.S. administrator, the Last-minute frantic efforts to hire experts who understand the local culture (when such people ought to have been properly identified and contacted well in advance), the inability to deliver proper public services to the Iraqis etc. are nearly enough for me to regret my pre-war support for the effort.

Things may yet turn out right in the end, and I certainly hope that they do, but unless they do, it seems that Iraq will turn into another example in a long list of such examples of the U.S.'s tendency to think in terms of short-term benefits and ignore the big picture.

[Wydraz]

Two Towers

Vaguely related to this topic, I know, but I just had to tell you guys about this.

[Ran-Taro]

Originally posted by Erax:
[QB]I am especially interested in this part :

quote:

---

America is working with friends and allies on a new Security Council resolution, which will expand the U.N.'s role in Iraq. As in the aftermath of other conflicts, the United Nations should assist in developing a constitution, training civil servants, and conducting free and fair elections.

QB]

---

Translation: We made a big mess, now we don't know how, and can't be bothered to clean it up. How about you do it for us, and how about everybody else helps pay for it?

[Ran-Taro]

Originally posted by Atrocities:

Because the heithens attacked us and killed nearly 5,000 people over the Last ten years.

Just think of how bad it would have been if Gore had been in office. We'd all be under a chinese dictatorship by now.

There is very little truth in that email, mostly mis-stated half truths and rumors created by hate mongers and trouble makers. The same people who do the same thing to every president. These people may or may not be politically affilated, but their line of crap is always the same.

Is it just me, or do these statements not go together?

And when did Iraq attack the USA in the Last ten years? Not at all. Yet America has attacked Iraq. The fact the some other 'heithens' (not a very nice word)have attacked the US, does not give America the right to strike out at any other percieved enemy, simply because they may share similar religious beliefs.

(edited to make less inflammitory after I read my post again)

[ September 30, 2003, 02:50: Message edited by: Ran-Taro ]

[Unknown_Enemy]

The shame ! The shame to do an on topic post !
Please forgive me I sware I won't do it again...

THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
29 September 2003

by Dr. George Friedman

The Unpredictability of War and Force Structure

Summary

In the United States' open-ended war against al Qaeda and militant Islam, two factors are driving up requirements for the size of the U.S. military. One is the unpredictability surrounding the number of theaters in which this war will be waged in the next two years, and the second is the type of warfare in which the United States is compelled to engage, which can swallow up huge numbers of troops in defensive operations. However, for several reasons, U.S. defense personnel policies have not yet adjusted to this reality.

Analysis

Prior to the beginning of the Iraq campaign, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked how long the war would Last. His response was both wise and true: He said that he didn't know, because the enemy got to vote. Much of the discussion about the length, cost and requirements of U.S. military operations in Iraq should be answered the same way -- there is no answer because the other side gets to vote. The Iraqi command decided to abandon conventional warfare and shift to guerrilla warfare. It is as unreasonable to ask how long this will Last and how much it will cost as it would have been to ask Abraham Lincoln in 1862 when the Civil War would end and how much it would cost. It is an unanswerable question.

War is extremely predictable, with 20-20 indsight. It is easy to say now that the Soviets would defeat the Germans in World War II. All of us know now that the North Vietnamese had the advantage in Vietnam. We all know now that the Normandy invasion would work. That's the easy part of military analysis; predicting the future is the hard part. It is possible to glimpse the outlines of the general forces that are engaged and to measure their relative strength, but the finer the granularity sought, the harder prediction is. The only certainty to be found is that all wars end eventually, and that the war you are fighting is only occasionally the war you expected to fight.

No one, therefore, knows the course of the U.S.-militant Islamist war. The CIA has produced no secret papers nor uncovered any hidden plans in the caves of Afghanistan that reveal the truth. War is about the difference between plans and events: Nothing goes according to plan, partly because of unexpected failures among the planners and partly because the enemy gets a vote. Carl von Clausewitz, the father of modern military theory, had a word for that: friction. The friction of war creates an ever-widening gap between plans and reality.

That means that the first and most important principle of military planning is to plan for the worst. No general was ever condemned for winning a war with too many troops. Many generals -- and political leaders -- are reviled for not using enough troops. Sometimes the manpower is simply not available; demographics limit the number of troops available. But the lowest ring of the military inferno must be reserved for leaders who take a nation to war, having access to massive force but choosing to mobilize the least numbers they think they can get by with, rather than leaving a healthy -- even unreasonable -- margin to make up for the friction of war. Calibrating force to expected requirements is almost always going to lead to disaster, because as we all know, everything comes in late and over-budget.

Washington is engaged with the question of what constitutes sufficient force structure. As one might imagine, the debate cuts to the heart of everything the United States is doing; the availability of force will determine the success or failure of its war. And here, it appears to us, the administration has chosen a radical course -- one of maintaining a narrow margin of error on force structure, based on plans that do not necessarily take into account that al Qaeda gets to vote.

Last week, while speaking at the National Defense University, Rumsfeld repeated his conviction that the United States had deployed sufficient force in Iraq and that with additional deployments it would be able to contain the situation there. Last week, U.S. officials announced the mobilization of additional reserve and National Guard units for 18 months of duty.

The reality is this: The United States went to war on Sept. 11, 2001, and since that date, it has not increased the aggregate size of its armed forces in any strategically significant way. It has raised the effectively available force by reaching into its reserve and National Guard units. That short-term solution has served well for the first two years of the war. However, deployment requirements tend to increase over the course of a war, so the needs in the first year were relatively light and increased progressively as additional theaters of operation were added.

The problem with this structure of forces is simple. People can choose to leave the military and its reserve and National Guard components -- and they will. Following extensive deployments, or anticipating such deployments, many will leave the active force as their terms expire or leave the reserve components when they can. In order to replace these forces, the pipeline should be full of recruits. This is not World War II. The requirements for all specialties, including combat arms, will not be filled by basic training and a quick advanced course. Even in the simplest specialties, it will take nearly a year to develop the required expertise -- not just to be deployed, but to be deployed and effective. For more complex specialties, the timeline lengthens.

U.S. leaders appear to be giving some attention to maintaining the force at its current size, although we think the expectations on retention in all components are optimistic. But even if they are dead on, the loss of personnel will be most devastating among field-grade officers and senior noncommissioned officers -- who form the backbone of the military. These are men and women in their 30s and 40s who have families and mortgages -- none of which might survive the stress of a manpower plan designed in a way that imposes maximum unpredictability and disruption on mature lives. The net result is that the military might keep its current size but become thin-waisted: lots of young people, lots of gray hair, not nearly enough in between.

The problem, however, is that keeping the force stable is not enough by a long shot. The United States is involved in two significant conflicts, in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is also operating in smaller deployments throughout and on the periphery of the Islamic world. Added to this are immediate and potential requirements for homeland security, should al Qaeda strike again, as the U.S. government consistently predicts is likely. When these requirements are added up and compared to the kind of force planning and expectations that were being discussed prior to Sept. 11, it is obvious that the U.S. force is at its limit, even
assuming that the complexities of reserve units weren't added to the mix.

The strategic problem is that there is absolutely no reason to believe that the demands on the current force represent the maximum. The force level is decided by the administration; the force requirement is decided by a committee composed of senior Pentagon officials, Congress and al Qaeda. And on this committee, al Qaeda has the decisive vote.

Al Qaeda's strategy is to expand the conflict as broadly as possible. It wants to disperse U.S. forces, but it also wants U.S. forces to intrude as deeply into the Islamic world as possible in order to trigger an uprising not only against the United States, but also against governments allied with the United States. There is a simple-minded answer to this, which is to refuse to intervene. The flaw in that answer is that it would serve al Qaeda's purpose just as well, by proving that the United States is weak and vulnerable. Intervention carries the same cost as non-intervention, but with the upside that it might produce victories.

Therefore, the United States cannot easily decline combat when it is offered. Al Qaeda intends to offer as much combat as possible. From the Philippines to Morocco, from central Asia to Central Africa, the scope -- if not the tempo -- of operations remains in al Qaeda's hands. Should Indonesia blow sky high or Egypt destabilize, both of which are obviously among al Qaeda's hopes, U.S. forces will be required to respond.

There is another aspect to this. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States is engaged in guerrilla wars. The force required to combat a guerrilla army is not determined by the size of the guerrilla forces, but rather by defensive requirements. A very small guerrilla force can menace a large number of targets, even if it cannot hit them all. Those targets must be protected for military or political reasons. Pacification cannot take place when the population is exposed to guerrilla forces at the will of the guerrillas. A narrow defensive posture, as has been adopted in Afghanistan, cedes pacification. In Iraq, where ceding pacification is not a political option, the size of the force is determined not by the enemy's force, but by the target set that must be protected.

Two factors, therefore, are driving up requirements for the size of the U.S. armed forces. First, no one can define the number of theaters in which the United States will be deployed over the next two years. Second, the type of warfare in which the United States is compelled to engage after the initial assault is carried out is a force hog: It can swallow up huge numbers of troops in duties that are both necessary and parasitic -- such as patrolling 15 bridges, none of which might ever be attacked during the war, but all of which must be defended.

Rumsfeld's reassurances that there are enough forces in Iraq miss the key question: Are there enough troops available and in the pipeline to deal with unexpected events in two years? Iraq might be under control by then, or it might not. Rumsfeld doesn't know that, Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi doesn't, Osama bin Laden doesn't. No one knows whether that is true. Nor does anyone know whether the United States will be engaged in three or four other theaters of operations by that time. It is certainly al Qaeda's intention to make that happen, and so far al Qaeda's record in drawing the United States into difficult situations should not be discounted.

The problem is that on the one hand, the Defense Department is in the process of running off critically needed troops with unpredictable and spasmodic call-ups. Second, the number of men and women in the training pipeline has not taken a quantum leap forward in the course of the war. The United States is engaged in a global war, but its personnel policies have not adjusted to that reality. This is the first major war in American history that has not included a large expansion of the armed forces.

There are a number of reasons for this. At the beginning of the war, the administration envisioned it as a primarily covert war involving special forces and some air power. Officials did not see this war as a division-level conflict. They were wrong. They did not count on their enemy's ability to resort to effective guerrilla warfare. They did not expect the old manpower hog to raise its ugly head. In general, Rumsfeld believed that technology could substitute for manpower, and that large conventional formations were not necessary. He was right in every case but one: large-scale guerrilla warfare. Or more precisely, the one thing the United States didn't want to be involved in is the one thing the enemy dealt up. When you think about it, that makes sense.

The assumption on which this war began was that there was ample U.S. force structure for the requirements. At this point, that is true only if one assumes there are no further surprises pending. Since this war has been all about surprises, any force structure built on that assumption is completely irresponsible.

We suspect that Rumsfeld and his people are aware of this issue. The problem is that the Bush administration is in an election year, and increasing the force by 50 percent or doubling it is not something officials want to do now. It cannot be done by conscription. Not only are the mechanisms for large-scale conscriptions missing, but a conscript army is the Last thing needed: The U.S. military requires a level of technical proficiency and commitment that draftees don't bring to bear.

To keep the force at its current size, Congress must allocate a large amount of money for personnel retention. A father of three with a mortgage payment based on his civilian income cannot live on military pay. Military pay must not be permitted to rise; it must be forced to soar. This is not only to retain the current force size but to increase it. In addition to bringing in raw recruits and training them, this also means, as in World War II, bringing back trained personnel who have left the service and -- something the military will gag over -- bringing in trained professionals from outside, directly into the chain of command and not just as civilian employees.

Thinking out of the box is something Washington always talks about but usually does by putting a box of corn flakes on top of their heads. That's all right in peacetime -- but this is war, and war is a matter of life and death. In the end, this is the problem: While American men and women fight and die on foreign land, the Pentagon's personnel officers are acting like this is peacetime. The fault lies with a series of unexpected events and Rumsfeld's tendency to behave as if nothing comes as a surprise.

The defense secretary needs to understand that in war, being surprised is not a failure -- it is the natural commission. The measure of a good command is not that one anticipates everything, but that one quickly adjusts and responds to the unexpected. No one expected this type of guerrilla war in Iraq, although perhaps in retrospect, everyone should have. But it is here, and next year will bring even more surprises. The Army speaks of "A Force of One." We prefer "The Force Ready for the Unexpected." The current U.S. force is not.

[dogscoff]

Saw a TV documentary a few nights ago about the current situation in Baghdad. ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programme...ma/3097864.stm ) It was pretty well balanced, interviewing both Iraqis and americans, ppl on the streets, soldiers and politicians (including de Mello, a few days before his death.) I won't go into details of the atrocities documented because someone will label it inflammatory, but suffice to say some of the footage was utterly horrific.

You all know where I stand on the war, so I'll try not to go over ground already covered, but I'll say this:

Soldiers do not make good policemen. I can see why the Iraqis are protesting against the US, despite their role in the fall of Saddam. From what I saw there are probably Iraqis out there now who were opposed to Saddam 12 months ago, but now find themselves wishing he'd come back.

I felt sorry for some of the US soldiers out there, who were doing their best to make peace with the locals, but many others came across as ignorant, brutal and arrogant. The office-bound military types had absolutely no clue (or at least were in complete denial) as to what was happening at street level. They flat out refused to even acknowledge the problems their own troops were showing the BBC's reporters.

However I feel most sorry for the random Iraqis getting beaten up and shot just because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yes I know these things and worse happened under Saddam as well, but these are supposed to be the good guys, aren't they? Surely the current situation was avoidable. Surely the power vacuum and the resultant lawlessness could have been predicted and planned for. It seems as though no planning at all has gone into the peace action, despite the overwhelming effectiveness and forethought of the war action.

The conspiracy theorist in me believes that Bush wants as much chaos and destruction in Iraq as possible, so that Halliburton and the rest can reap all those oil dollars in cleanup costs, but I accept that this kind of motive is only circumstantially provable. Nonetheless, even if it's all down to negligence rather than malice then it's just as bad for the people suffering there.

Just my 0.02 local currency. I really wish I could point you all to an mpeg of the documentary, I promise you it would add a lot of weight to what I've said. Did anyone see it?