"any student of history recognizes there is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq,...

[underpants]

to the insurgency in Iraq."
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2934192

[Poiuyt]

1. I wonder if Bush would have hired Petraeus if he knew that he would talk like this

[Fresh_Start]

2. duh, funny he didn't seem so

pessimistic when he testified last month

[underpants]

3. OR in that article-he needs more troops

Lovely how he contradicts himself in the same press op

(that being said he does seem to have a clue as to what he is doing)

[Nickster]

4. So is he under oath this time? Testimony seems to change when you are and aren't under oath. n/t

[TheWraith]

5. Well, gee. Some of us could have told you that years ago, General.

It seems, though, that the top military brass has never actually paused in climbing the ranks long enough to educate themselves in military strategy. If they had, they'd have known that followed through to its logical conclusion, there never was a military solution for occupying Iraq. Superior hardware and superior firepower are not an insurmountable advantage when your enemy is capable of hit-and-fade attacks, ambushes, and remote weaponry. More to the point, it takes a toll on military readiness far out of proportion to the actual damage inflicted.

Go read Sun Tzu. It's well over a thousand years old, but still pretty definitive in terms of the basic tenets of warfare.

[maxsolomon]

6. there is a military solution, just as there has been through history

wholesale slaughter of the resisting population. we're too civilized to do it, but the assyrians, babylonians, romans, crusaders, etc. wouldn't have been so squeamish.

from apocalypse now:

KURTZ
" I've seen horrors...horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call
me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that...But
you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is
necessary to those who do not know what horror means.
Horror. Horror has a face...And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and
moral terrorare your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared.
They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces...Seems
a thousand centuries ago...We went into a camp to innoculate the children.
We left the camp after we had innoculated the children for Polio, and this old
man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went
back there and they had come and hacked off every innoculated arm. There
they were in a pile...A pile of little arms. And I remember...I...I...I cried...
I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I
wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want
to forget. And then I realized...like I was shot...Like I was shot with a
diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead...And I thought:
My God...the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect,
genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were
stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not
monsters...These were men...trained cadres...these men who fought with
their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with
love...but they had the strength...the strength...to do that. If I had ten
divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You
have to have men who are moral...and at the same time who are able to
utilize their primordal instincts to kill without feeling...without passion...
without judgement...without judgement. Because it's judgement that
defeats us. "

[TheWraith]

7. True, though in an environment where the use of force is tempered by public opinion...

... it ceases to be a viable alternative, unless there's sufficient provocation, for the same reasons that our using nuclear weaponry in a first strike would be considered publicly unacceptable. In any event, there certainly is no military solution to the stated goal in Iraq: of effectively forcing a democratic type of government onto an unwilling populace.

Ironically, the best chance of creating such a thing might well have been foregone when we tried creating it on our own--had the ethnic factions all felt sufficiently oppressed under a foreign occupation, they might have banded together in order to combat us, effectively forging a united faction that would later become a government of some type. However, we hitched our star to the Shiites and a handful of expatriate con-artists, the first of a list of mistakes a quarter mile long in fine print.

[ellisonz]

8. "Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure."

Just like Christ, and then the Roman soldier used his lance on the side of God's child...and we know how the story of that object goes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Lance). Fanatics have existed, and gained power by force of violence, since the beginning of "modern" human civilization. They are installed into power to "fight barbarians" and then become barbarians themselves, and when they return, well they tell you it smells like roses when it is nothing but horseshit, and the dead lay on the battlefield wondering what birthright has begotten them this fate. I don't buy cultural relativism, I think it is all tragic.

[Alcibiades]

10. That is certainly correct

I was about to post this very point, but you beat me to it. We could "win" by ending the civil war by picking one group (probably the Sunnis) and wiping them out. Lots of folks see no contradiction in burning the village in order to liberate it.

[Tansy_Gold]

24. Choosing sides may be the dilemma at the heart of this mess

I could be wrong. I frequently am. But it seems to me that the official U.S. attitude so vehemently contradicts itself that it can NEVER succeed. NEVER.

The Sunnis were the original "enemy" because they were the supporters of Saddam, they were the Baathists. So in order to present themselves (I really hate to say "ourselves") as "liberators" of Iraq, the U.S. forces had to liberate the Shia from the domination of the Sunni.

But the Shia are also allied with the Shia in Iran, and Iran is part of the "axis of evil." So that means we/they liberated the supporters of another enemy.

And then it gets more complex because the Sunni are allied with the Sunni in Saudi Arabia, who is our "friend," but at the same time that the Saudis are our "friends," their Wahabi brand of Sunni Islam bred the 9/11 terrorists and therefore. . . .

Obviously, I'm being simplistic, and there are additional complexities -- and that's only if I got it CORRECT; if I'm wrong, it's even worse! -- but the failure to comprehend where these various sectarian alliances and allegiances and animosities would lead seems to have contributed to the impossibility of success.

And when you compound all THAT with the general hatred of Muslims fomented by the right-wing crusaders and their cheerleaders in the media, is it any wonder? I mean, as DUer Trajan said, "How do you win someone else's civil war?" Especially when both sides are your enemies, and both sides are your friends?


Tansy Gold

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

11. Riiiight.

The Romans used wholesale slaughter of the resisting populations, and those barbarians never troubled them again.

:crazy:

[maxsolomon]

12. i didn't ADVOCATE that strategy.

its seems you're linking a method for oppressing a rebel populace to all subsequent invading armies.

the romans slaughtered nearly every inhabitant of jerusalem in 70 AD & tore down the temple & carted off spoils to be paraded through rome. how much trouble were the jews for the romans after that? the jews weren't the barbarians.

i believe my point stands - we could, if we wanted, save the village by destroying it.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

13. How much trouble were Jews for the Romans?

You mean besides the four or five wars that Jews fought against Rome before the collapse of the Roman civilization?

[maxsolomon]

16. again, you're missing the general point for the specific exception

traditional warfare involved wholesale slaughter & brutality. stabbing someone, crushing their skull at close range. chopping off the genitals of your vanquished enemies & parading a cart of them through your capital.

we are not willing to utilize equivalent methods in iraq, but our insurgent/al queda enemy is. what is more remote than a CIA piloted drone, what is more immediate than a suicide bombing? what amazes me is that our soldiers don't commit MORE war crimes - historically, that has been an effective method of cowing an rebellious populace. certainly more effective than forcing them to make naked pyramids.

this was supposed to be a generalized point on 'civilized' warfare - not a dissertation on whether jewish rebellions were or were not rome's biggest challenge.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

19. My general point...

is that people need to study more history.

[Sterling]

23. This was a big part of me argument against the war.

We are not a society that will accept the kinds of policies it would take to pacify a country/society like Iraq. We are not willing to be as ruthless as every other country in that regions government is. There is no way for us to keep the peace in that part of the world unless we were willing to trump the other factions fighting for control over the country level of brutality.

What we will ultimately see will work something like Afghanistan in that the most ruthless faction will most likely gain control and force everyone else in line. This will probably end up dividing the country along religions lines ala Shia/Sunni/Kurd.

[Sterling]

18. The barbarians the slaughtered did not trouble them.

the ones that they armed and used in their armies did though. Example, the Jews vs the Goths? When the Roman armies were made up of Romans they were very effective in their campaigns.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

20. You don't think the Romans slaughtered the Goths?

[Sterling]

22. Read a little about it.

The Romans fought the Goths, sure. The Romans also enlisted the Goths to fight other barbarians for them. Eventually the Goths sacked Rome. The Jews? Not such an impact. Although you can make the case Jews conquered Rome through Christianity?

The treatment of the Jews vs many barbarian tribes differs greatly as do the results of those policies.

[PerfectSage]

9. The top brass are too busy kissing their superior's ass for their next promotion

to study military strategy. The ones who do like John Boyd, don't fit in a pathologically dysfunctional bureaucracy resistant to change, so they don't get promoted.

http://www.d-n-i.net/richards/sword_4_boyd.pdf

[nadinbrzezinski]

21. They do educate themselves

it is called the War College

that said, the brass works for the civilians in DC, not the other way aruond... and not even they have a right to their opinion

In fact, and I am sure you know this, all their statements before congresss are vetted by the executive they work for

[sarge43]

14. Now that's the look of a man staring into a pit and the pit

is staring back. Shitty duty, eh sir?

[MissMarple]

15. Petraeus helped write the army manual on fighting an insurgency. This is huge.

It is all about the politics, the lies, the incompetence, and the hidden agendas of this evil administration.

This was posted at Talking Points Memo. The Army says it needs 20 combat (not support) troops for every 1000 civilian population to fight an insurgency. This "surge" is a crime.

"Kaplan runs through the numbers. But the key points are that you'd need 120,000 combat troops to mount real counter-insurgency operations just in Baghdad. We currently have 70,000 combat troops in the whole country. So concentrate all US combat personnel in Iraq into Baghdad. Then add 20,000 more 'surge' combat troops. That leaves you 30,000 short of the number the Army thinks you'd need just in Baghdad.

Needless to say, Iraq isn't just Baghdad. And if you know anything about how insurgencies work you know that if we actually had enough troops in Baghdad (remember, to even get in shooting distance of that you need to evacuate the rest of the country) the insurgents would just fan out and start literal or figurative fires where we're not.

What this all amounts to is that 20,000 or even 50,000 new combat troops don't even get you close to what the Army says you need to do what President Bush says he's now going to try to do. To get that many troops into the country you'd need to put this country on a serious war-footing and begin drawing troops down from deployments around the globe. All of which, just isn't going to happen, setting aside for the moment of what should happen. And that tells you this whole thing is just a joke at the expense of the American public and our troops on the ground in Iraq.

What's sad about this (and it's hard to know where to start on that count) is that a few years ago, much, much more would have been possible with more troops on the ground. Alternatively, if the president and his key advisors hadn't lied to the country about the number of troops required to stabilize and police Iraq (then-Army Chief of Staff Shinseki said 400k+, I think) we might not have pulled the trigger in the first place."



http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2007_01_07.php#011851

[Tansy_Gold]

26. If. . . . might have. . . . . could have. . . . . maybe. . . . if. . . . .

What it all boils down to is that EVERYTHING that could have /sic/ been done wrong was done wrong. EVERYTHING. From the get-go. From the lying about the reasons to the poor planning to the not knowing nothin' 'bout history or the socio-politics of the territory to not having the right equipment to firing the Iraqi army. . . . .

It's too damn fucking late for the "If we had. . . . " bullshit recriminations. Nothing was done right, everything was done wrong, no good can come from prolonging the agony, everyone -- E V E R Y O N E -- died in vain.

Stop the madness. Withdraw. Pull out. Redeploy. Skedaddle.



Tansy Gold

[Sterling]

17. Funny, the opposite will be true in Iraq. It will be a military outcome.

Whichever group of fundie thugs can kill the most of the other fundie thugs will "win" in Iraq after we leave or pull back. The normal people in Iraq will suffer and most likely the worst types of people will take power due to their sheer ruthlessness.

[Jonathan50]

25. A slightly different perspective on General Petraeus

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007_01_07_balkin_archive.html

Incidentally, I offer the following sidenote about General Petraeus, by almost all accounts an enormously accomplished man: A student of mine at the UT Law School, who had had combat experience in both Afghanistan and Iraq, referred to him as "General Betrayus" because of what was thought to be his inordinate interest in good publicity (and presumed self-promotion) rather than concern for his troops. I have no idea whether this is fair, but I do know that this is what my sober and thoughtful student told me.