Article

2006-11-26 Iraq

Archived material is restricted to Rantburg regulars and members. If you need access email fred.pruitt=at=gmail.com with your nick to be added to the members list. There is no charge to join Rantburg as a member.

Posted by Zenster 2006-11-26 04:04|| || Front Page|| [7 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Um, haven't we been 'involved' in Germany & Japan for quite some time now?

Posted by Raj 2006-11-26 08:32|| 2006-11-26 08:32|| Front Page Top

#2 Just look at how long the US military's been in the former Confedereate States! It's a quagmire!!!

*spit*

The Democrats are still pissed over the defeat of their "military wing" -- the Klan -- and never want to see the US defeat their fellow travellers again.

Posted by Rob Crawford">Rob Crawford 2006-11-26 08:49|| http://www.kloognome.com/]">[http://www.kloognome.com/] 2006-11-26 08:49|| Front Page Top

#3 In an irony of egregious proportions, the liberals
who have infected our government with PC moral relativism and
equivalency simultaneously cry out "quagmire" when it is they
themselves bogging down the issue with their morass of irreconcilable
demands.

This is the best summary of the problem I have ever read.

Posted by Excalibur 2006-11-26 08:59|| 2006-11-26 08:59|| Front Page Top

#4 Oops. Grabbed your highlighter there.

Posted by Excalibur 2006-11-26 09:00|| 2006-11-26 09:00|| Front Page Top

#5 Well, this may be long and hard, but it is one conflict that we had better learn to deal with because the underlying pretext of what is making this a war is not something we can Live with. Just because it is hard and it costs lives does not mean it is not the right thing to do, and because we have people willing to do it still is a testament to the power of riteousness. Bless you who are still slogging this out, you will not be forgotten.

Posted by newc">newc 2006-11-26 09:06|| 2006-11-26 09:06|| Front Page Top

#6 And how long were trans-Appalachian territories with both indigenous and raiding aborigines being 'settled' before statehood? Far longer. With minds like these back in the 19th century, most of the west would still be unsettled. And with the resources and expanded population which those states did provide not available, the 20th century struggle against authoritarianism and totalitarianism would have turned out a lot different.

Posted by Procopius2k 2006-11-26 10:40|| 2006-11-26 10:40|| Front Page Top

#7 "...in a war torn 1948 Europe..."

Had the US not interceded in WWII, Germany would have had time to complete their heavy water experiments and perfected the A Bomb for the V2 rocket or kamikaze pilots. The thought of A bombs raining down on western metropolises in the late nineteen forties, would have given Japan the extra edge it needed for a pacific invasion of the US. And Hitler would not have shared his new 'wonder weapon' with the Japs; that went against the protocols leading to the establishment of the Third Reich (Aryan Supremacy)!

Posted by smn 2006-11-26 10:57|| 2006-11-26 10:57|| Front Page Top

#8 haven't we been 'involved' in Germany & Japan for quite some time now?

Yes, but not in the sense of an active (hot) military war. I knew that some would attempt to point out our extensive involvement with NATO and the Asia Pacific Alliance. This is why I noted a "war torn 1948 Europe." Somehow, in a much more extensive conflict, we were able to terminate hostilities in a shorter amount of time. That was my sole point.

the underlying pretext of what is making this a war is not something we can Live with.

Which is why I have supported our involvement in Iraq from day one.

Had the US not interceded in WWII, Germany would have had time to complete their heavy water experiments and perfected the A Bomb for the V2 rocket or kamikaze pilots.

Again, my Europe reference was solely for the sake of showing how protracted Iraq has become and not commentary on the indisputable merits of America's participation in WWII.

Posted by Zenster">Zenster 2006-11-26 11:47|| 2006-11-26 11:47|| Front Page Top

#9 Zenster, I salute your clear-eyed passion, and support your analysis. Except in one, perhaps dark respect: what you refer to as PC, and what I usually refer to as over-analysis, is actually a raging ailment within the uniformed services, not just the civilian ranks. It's probably a combo of mundane careerism issues and mistaken concepts of war-fighting, and it seems mostly to be in the Army, but I've heard (to my horror) a few Marine officers show symptoms as well. It's hard to summarize, but if one must do so, we can reduce it to: you can't win a war by fighting, killing the enemy, breaking his will and capacity to fight, and motivating, impressing, or scaring everyone else into compliance or submission. Since all the basic tools of warfare are discarded, a priori, as insufficient, all sorts of silliness fills the resulting vacuum. Mostly ill-timed or irrelevant economic and social measures, in the mistaken belief that these levers are effective in a militarized, violent context (they're not).

I call it war without warfare. It's mostly a mindless application of logical concepts without regard for specific situations. A civil affairs outreach and reconstruction effort in a poor Shi'a community in southern Iraq that has some Mahdi Army presence or recruiting makes perfect sense - the same approach in Anbar or a Sunni neighborhood of Baghdad where the team of die-hard Ba'athists and jihadis hold the whip hand of fear is insane.

Oversimplified, but essentially correct.

In some ways, the application of force in many situations is so parsimonious that we aren't even seeing the mistaken war-fighting doctrine being given a proper test. There is a robust end of the scale at which the non-kinetic activities presume some ass-whuppin' up front, but as that is so rare in Iraq (Fallujah II being the sole large exception), a careful observer might say that even the new-fangled, and suspect, approach to warfare that is our main problem hasn't even been properly tested.

Many of our fine military officers (and they are fine, and the cream of our crop in so many ways) seem to have out-smarted themselves.

Posted by Verlaine 2006-11-26 13:10|| 2006-11-26 13:10|| Front Page Top

#10 Zenster, given what you say above, and assuming it is true, should we make all of Iraq look like post-war Germany? Or do we try and take a less destructive approach? Someone chose "less destructive", and this is what we get. Would you and/or I prefer more-destructive? Would it be more effective?

In your very first line, you hit the nail on the head: Everyone says we want "peace", but what they really want is to kill their enemy and to call victory "peace". If we had flattened Iraq like we did Germany, perhaps noone would be willing to fight; anybody convinced that they would win would be dead, and those left alive had experienced so much hardship that they became convinced that their previous political path was wrong.

I'm not saying that this is the way to fight a war, but perhaps it is. I do know that I would be interested in how much violence was taking place in Europe during 1945-50. Perhaps there is a method of getting such information.... ;-)

Posted by Mark E. 2006-11-26 13:11|| 2006-11-26 13:11|| Front Page Top

#11 Except in one, perhaps dark respect: what you refer to as PC, and what I usually refer to as over-analysis, is actually a raging ailment within the uniformed services, not just the civilian ranks. It's probably a combo of mundane careerism issues and mistaken concepts of war-fighting, and it seems mostly to be in the Army, but I've heard (to my horror) a few Marine officers show symptoms as well.

However reluctantly, I am willing to accept what you say, Verlaine. There have been too many incidents of such lame military doctrine to ignore. I suppose that in my haste to place blame where it was overwhelmingly due, I neglected to spread the manure around the way it needed.

should we make all of Iraq look like post-war Germany? Or do we try and take a less destructive approach? Someone chose "less destructive", and this is what we get. Would you and/or I prefer more-destructive? Would it be more effective?

Without wanting to sound indecisive; Somewhere in between. Fallujah should have been flattened with Moqtada Sadr still inside it. Has we found the nerve to do this, there would be far less strength in the Shiia militias today. Instead, al-Maliki's henchmen run riot and the bloodshed continues. Sadr City springs to mind as well. Major militia strongholds of either sect need to be viewed as enemy territory and treated as such.

Posted by Zenster">Zenster 2006-11-26 13:34|| 2006-11-26 13:34|| Front Page Top

#12 I think conflict continued with some Germans beyond the official armistace date.

I think the US took far higher casualities during WW2 as well. Interesting trade-off, if possible would the American public have taken 10x the military casualities, endured a draft, and rationing, if we could have finished the war in 4 years?

Since we don't know how long the conflict will actually take its an unfair question but an intersting one none-the-less.

Posted by rjschwarz 2006-11-26 13:34|| 2006-11-26 13:34|| Front Page Top

#13 Small correction, Zenster - Sadr was in Najaf, not in Sunni stronghold Fallujah.

Carry on - excellent comments.

Posted by .com 2006-11-26 13:36|| 2006-11-26 13:36|| Front Page Top

#14 Thank you, .com. Either way, Sadr needed to be tucked in for a nice long dirt nap years ago. Our failure to do so has caused unending grief for ourselves and Iraq as well.

Posted by Zenster">Zenster 2006-11-26 13:39|| 2006-11-26 13:39|| Front Page Top

#15 No arguments from me. He's an obvious Iranian agent.

Posted by .com 2006-11-26 13:46|| 2006-11-26 13:46|| Front Page Top

#16 I love the part where Iran is chiding us for poor security in Sadr city when it's Malicki, at the behest of Iran's man, Sadr, who insisted on taking down the checkpoints the Coalition had set up.

While those checkpoints were active, there were few, maybe no, bombings in Sadr city. The Shiites insist that the slaughter of their own people must continue.

Posted by KBK 2006-11-26 14:05|| 2006-11-26 14:05|| Front Page Top

#17 Verlaine, #9,

Very cogent. I've been advocating the same. You overcome the opposition with brutal force. It's very hard for the PC club to swallow, but its true. And, the oppostion very much is the civilian populace as well. When they suffer, they exert suffering onto the truoblemakers. Or they at least identify them. Going in with social programs does no good whatsoever until true paciifcation of the enemy. When the general populace feels safe from attack from either side, they will begin cooperating. Not before. By not applying force in this mess, I believe we'll leave due to the mounting political climate in US, despite the efforts by those of you on the ground. This will only delay the real application of extreme force next time. Next time, very few troops will be involved. Only a few SOF for early targeting.

Posted by SpecOp35 2006-11-26 14:36|| 2006-11-26 14:36|| Front Page Top

#18 By not applying force in this mess, I believe we'll leave due to the mounting political climate in US, despite the efforts by those of you on the ground. This will only delay the real application of extreme force next time. Next time, very few troops will be involved. Only a few SOF for early targeting.

Word, SpecOp35. Any delays imposed by these foolhardy Muslims fighting their petty sectarian vendettas only act as a force multiplier. Most likely, in an exponential fashion.

Posted by Zenster">Zenster 2006-11-26 15:06|| 2006-11-26 15:06|| Front Page Top

#19 Zenster wrote:

We must relearn the lessons of The War to End All Wars. When confronted with a foe who does not flinch at the most barbaric forms of slaughter and mayhem, such gruesome tactics must be brought to their door and doubly repaid. We no more belong in Iraq at this late date than we would have in a war torn 1948 Europe.

One such example is the ongoing academic, intellectual, and moral assault on area bombing, something that helped reduce German and Japanese capacity and will to continue the fight.

I wrote a lengthy critique of one these revisionist authors books that attacked the Allied (meaning the US and UK) conduct during WW II.

Such area bombing would crush Sadr City in a matter of days, but our modern-day PC military command cannot even countenance such a policy. So we slog on, setting ourselves up for yet another defeat (please, I know, we didnt lose a single battle in Nam and Iraq. Yea, yea, great and a few weeks ago the Pittsburgh Steelers held the Oakland Raiders offense to 97 yards, but who won? Pssttt Raiders 20, Steelers 17).

I wrote this back in December 2004, when many were still hopeful that Iraq was winnable:

No commander knowingly commits his troops into combat with estimates of casualty figures in the twenty-five percent range. Only under the most unavoidable of circumstances does a commander commit his men knowing casualties will reach such a high percentage. Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower comes to mind. On the eve of the D-Day landings in Normandy, he was told that as much as fifty percent of the airborne would be lost in the pre-invasion nighttime parachuting behind German lines (fortunately, the 82nd and 101st airborne suffered only ten percent casualties on June 5-6, 1944.) The great danger of urban combat derives not from the international condemnation that comes from killing hapless civilians either too feeble or stubborn to evacuate and for whose deaths responsibility lies entirely with the insurgents. Rather it comes from the seemingly endless angles of fire the enemy can pour unto an attacking force. Enemy fire often comes in the form of stealth, ambush, and ruse. Again, Filkins (NYT reporter in Fallujah, Iraq) informs us of the madness of such fighting:

Sometimes the casualties came in volleys, like bursts of machine-gun fire. On the first morning of battle, during a ferocious struggle for the Muhammadia Mosque, about 45 marines with Bravo Companys Third Platoon dashed across 40th Street, right into interlocking streams of fire. By the time the platoon made it to the other side, five men lay bleeding in the street.

The most glaring portion of that account stares the critical reader right in the face: during a ferocious struggle for the Muhammadia Mosque it is a line that ought to infuriate every American patriot. It should infuriate the Commander in Chief and his advisors to the point that a new war-fighting declaration of principles ought to be proclaimed. American-led Coalition Forces (code for U.S. forces and the occasional Iraqi National Guard unit) will no longer storm a mosque from which incoming fire has been received. The new war-fighting declaration of principles (call it A Declaration of War Against Islamo-Fascist Criminality) should name a date and state that from that day on, any mosque used as a bunker, a shooting post, a weapons depot, or any other military-terrorist purpose, will be subjected to pulverizing air strikes. We will no longer expend Coalition lives by trying to take such mosques using only infantry assaults. We will no longer limit our firepower in order to avoid offending the Arab Street or the collective hyper-sensibilities of the global Left. If the Jihadi-Baathist Fascist alliance wants martyrdom by turning mosques into fighting-posts in clear violation of all internationally recognized rules of war as well as religious sanctions against such actions, then they will ingloriously die in the thunderous detonation, flames, choking dust, and rubble of carpet-bombings.

Bottom line is Zenster is right, if we wage war in such a cautious, clinical manner, against this existential foe, we're doomed to one disappoinment after another to be followed of course, by study groups scratching their collective gonads and wondering, gee, why are we not winning?

Posted by Lancasters Over Dresden 2006-11-26 18:07|| http://www.michaelcalderonscall.com]">[http://www.michaelcalderonscall.com] 2006-11-26 18:07|| Front Page Top

#20 My quote concerning the need for air power in Fallujah comes from Fallujah and Beyond: A Deadly Game of Whack-a-Mole

Posted by Lancasters Over Dresden 2006-11-26 18:19|| http://www.michaelcalderonscall.com]">[http://www.michaelcalderonscall.com] 2006-11-26 18:19|| Front Page Top

#21 I don't think I'm unique in being taught from my first day in the military that war was the use of controlled force to achieve a political objective (von Clauswitz's "politics by another means"). Unfortunately, the politican objective in Iraq is poorly defined, constantly changing, and less conducive to massive firepower than previous wars. The first objective that MUST be identified and stated in plain language is, "What is our goal?" From that derives, "How do we achieve that goal?" The next step is "What forces are needed to achieve that goal, and how should they be used?" We won the initial war - we destroyed Saddam Hussein's ability to remain in power, we destroyed his Ba'athist government, and we "broke the cycle" of dictatorial tyranny in Iraq. Now we're faced with a different problem that requires different tactics, different force levels, and different goals. We're not adapting to those different problems very well, mainly for lack of leadership. The use of military force cannot be held back and accomplish anything. We need to provide our military with goals and objectives, and allow them to do what it takes to achieve them. Instead, we're trying to play PC games. Give the guys on the ground the job of determining how to achieve the goals, and they'll do it. Keep playing these PC games and we'll have another mass exodus like we did after Vietnam.

Posted by Old Patriot">Old Patriot 2006-11-26 21:11|| http://oldpatriot.blogspot.com/]">[http://oldpatriot.blogspot.com/] 2006-11-26 21:11|| Front Page Top

#22 Keep playing these PC games and we'll have another mass exodus like we did after Vietnam.

I foresee one huge difference between a "last helicopter out" scenario in Iraq and that which we experienced in Vietnam. The South Vietnamese represented the intelligentsia of their divided country. One glance at their current role as American citizens reveals an almost exceptional degree of assimilation. South Vietnamese immigrants are truly glad to be here in the United States, regardless of how homesick they might feel. They have a keen appreciation for the opportunities presented by their American citizenship.

A quick examination of Vietnam's history provides sharp insight as to why this is so. Vietnam is one of the most enlightened of all Asian cultures. As an example, Vietnamese women have always been able to; Vote, own businesses, inherit wealth or property and even fight in wars. Amongst Vietnam's most glorious war heroes are the Trung sisters who fought and expelled the Chinese in 40 AD.

Compare this to the prospect of America inheriting even a slight fraction of Iraq's post-withdrawal refugees. What portion would you suggest we absorb into our already Muslim laden population? While the Kurds spring to mind, they would not be central figures in the waning days of an Iraqi pullout. Instead, we would be confronted with the prospect of bringing to our shores a collection of intensely violent, corrupt and potentially seditious people.

Old Patriot, I do not think your were suggesting that anything like this should be done. My only intent is that we carefully consider the prospects which await such an outcome.

Posted by Hilaliburton Bondi Barbie Div.">Hilaliburton Bondi Barbie Div. 2006-11-26 22:25|| 2006-11-26 22:25|| Front Page Top

#23 Doh! The above post was me.

Posted by Zenster">Zenster 2006-11-26 22:26|| 2006-11-26 22:26|| Front Page Top

22:45 ErickWahne
23:45 Swamp Blondie
23:39 Swamp Blondie
23:29 Zenster
23:25 Glenmore
23:21 Anguper Hupomosing9418
23:06 Zenster
23:06 Anguper Hupomosing9418
22:59 Silentbrick
22:56 Anguper Hupomosing9418
22:52 Anguper Hupomosing9418
22:48 Anguper Hupomosing9418
22:45 ErickWahne
22:35 Chuck
22:26 Zenster
22:25 Hilaliburton Bondi Barbie Div.
22:09 Old Patriot
21:58 USN,Ret
21:57 USN,Ret
21:53 .com
21:52 USN,Ret
21:41 trailing wife
21:32 Frank G
21:30 Frank G