[quote]ZEB wrote:
BB, just read about his capture prior to signing onto the forum. I think this is really big in terms of slowing down the insurgency!
[/quote]
I sure hope it does, I have a buddy in the marine reserves headed over there this weekend
Coming from people from Iraq: As they see it:
Z"…Zarqawi’s strategy is simple, make the situation in Iraq look like a cycle of violence spiraling out of control and add to that dead American soldiers. He hopes this will cause Kerry to win the election and pull out of Iraq, or at least turn it over to UN control. This is a proven Al-Queda strategy (Mogudishu).
He backs off when Sadr is active because Sadr’s violence adds to the media perception that Iraq is out of control. This gives Zarqawi a rest (which he needs, because he is relatively weak).
I doubt the two are collaborating, and if they are they are both plotting to do the other in should they succede in their goal.
If Bush wins the election they won’t have much options and things will get better. If Kerry wins, they’ll increase the violence to try and force Kerry to withdraw or turn over control to the UN. If that happens, they will strike some bogus peace accord with the UN in exchange for control of the country…"
Dear Zeyad, thanks for updating. I wonder how many of your fellow Iraqis view the situation that same way as you? You seem to have a very good understanding. Do moderate Iraqis see what is at stake for their future? If so, what are they doing besides joining the civil services?
A. Mustad, San Francisco | Email | Homepage | 09.16.04 - 1:53 pm | #
Because we all remember what John Kerry
will do go to the UN..Appease the terorists. Appease all those that are endorsing him as President, as far as leaders go. And we all know who those will be…WHo are waiting for him to be the next President. And you tie that inm with his speech he gave to the National Guard. And now this moveon.org ad? Ahh whose hands are they playing into?? Just embolden the terorists even more. Lets do more car bombings. motar attacks, and kidnappings… Lets kill more Americans. Get more of the press the media on our side. More actors, actresses, and musicians. Get AMerica as it was back in the 1960’s!! Let us divide America even further..WE love it!! And then John Kerry, the pacificsit. The peace maker. The appeaser. will be the next President. This is exactly as this person in Iraq sees it. What the goals are of the trrorists.
Joe
Chuck:
Actually, the WSJ makes basically the same point as your email’s first in an editorial today:
The Enemy in Iraq
September 17, 2004; Page A14
Violence is spiking again in Iraq, and U.S. officials are warning that it is going to get worse before it gets better. So now is a good moment to sort out where we are in Iraq, and more important, to remember who precisely our enemy is.
The first thing to stress is that Iraq is not in “chaos,” nor is there some general uprising against either Coalition forces or the interim government led by Ayad Allawi. If that were true, the violence would be far worse. The latest CIA assessment is negative, at least according to the spin of yesterday’s news leaks, but given the agency’s track record in Iraq that estimate may or may not be accurate. One clear CIA mistake has been its predictions of communal or religious fighting; the striking thing is how little Sunni vs. Shiite, or Kurd vs. Arab, violence there has been so far.
The second crucial point is that the Shiite majority remains committed both to elections and to a pluralistic Iraq. The moderate Grand Ayatollah Sistani is the recognized Shiite authority in Iraq, as his role in negotiating the recent Najaf ceasefire shows, and he has explicitly rejected the Iranian model of religious government.
In Najaf, recent demonstrations were held to blame not the Americans but rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr for the recent violence there. Al-Sadr’s followers are mostly underemployed young men who can be coopted into the political process once they’re convinced that America intends to honor its promise to hold elections. Al-Sadr himself still needs to be arrested or killed, but the way to neutralize his support is to show progress toward the January polls.
So who are we fighting? The answer is a combination of Saddam Hussein’s former Fedayeen, intelligence services and other Baathists, as well as jihadists led by the long-time Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi. The extent of their cooperation is unknown, but they certainly share the same immediate goal of promoting violence – both random, and precisely targeted against Iraqis who work with the Coalition – to drive the Americans out and create enough mayhem so they can take over.
Regarding the Baathists, it’s safe to say that the U.S., and especially the CIA, underestimated both their strategy and ruthlessness. In retrospect, the current guerrilla campaign probably was the Saddam strategy all along, starting with those raids in Nasiriyah on the invasion route to Baghdad.
As long ago as April 2003 we were hearing talk of a so-called “Party of Return,” or attempt by the Baath Party to go underground and slowly undermine work toward a free Iraq. Coalition forces have found documents, also dating from the immediate post-invasion period in 2003, outlining a detailed plan for the efforts, including the establishment of Fallujah as a staging area with weapons caches and hideouts. The Bush Administration ought to release those documents to enhance American understanding of who our troops are fighting. These are bitter-enders who will never surrender and have to be killed.
As for the jihadists, their goal is the establishment of a Taliban-like regime in Iraq, or at least stopping the spread of liberal social and political ideas in the Middle East. Long before the war in Iraq, Zarqawi was linked to terror in Jordan, Georgia and London. The infamous January memo intercepted on its way from Zarqawi to al Qaeda commanders makes this clear: “Blood has to be spilled. For those who are good, we will speed up their trip to paradise, and the others, we will get rid of them.”
The Zarqawi memo also reveals how much recent developments have been the product of a deliberate plan rather than a popular revolt. It talks of using the Sunni Triangle as a sanctuary, and of targeting the Shiite community with car bombs, along with Iraq’s “bastard government.” Stopping the creation of Iraqi security forces appears to be Zarqawi’s primary aim. “How can we kill their cousins and sons and under what pretext,” he asks, “after the Americans start withdrawing?” This week’s attack on the recruiting station in Baghdad and on a group of Iraqi police to the north shows that strategy at work.
The refuge for both of these groups is the Sunni Triangle, and especially the city of Fallujah. Our softly-softly attempts to handle the Sunni Triangle through outreach to local leaders may have been a reasonable gamble. But the problem is that we’ve been unable to protect and reassure the many Sunnis who would, all things being equal, choose our side. The recent murder of a leading Iraqi National Guard officer in Fallujah is one of too many tragic examples.
The start-stop battle of Fallujah this April was a mistake, and has left that city as a staging area for attacks in Baghdad in particular. At least the White House now seems to appreciate its error. U.S. commanders have lately been given the green light to attack Tal Afar, a mini-Fallujah near the Syrian border, with military success. A recent deal to allow U.S. and Iraqi forces to pacify Samarra, another Sunni city, also has potential. Donald Rumsfeld has said that other targets may have to wait until more Iraqi troops can be trained, and that makes sense if we have the time. Former commander of the 101st Airborne, Major-General David Petraeus, is making notable progress on the training front, but most of his Iraqis are still some months away from being an effective force.
Meantime, our enemies will continue to do whatever damage they can. They can read the U.S. election calendar as well as al Qaeda read Spain’s, and their hope is to create precisely the appearance of “chaos” that American critics of the war are broadcasting for their own partisan purposes. It hasn’t helped that many prominent Democrats, including recently John Kerry, are giving the impression that they will start to pull out as early as six months from taking office. Iraqis of all kinds have heard that too. As we’ve said, we think the stronger Kerry ground, on politics and substance, would be to criticize President Bush for not prosecuting the war fiercely enough. But the Senator doesn’t seem capable of making that argument.
The Fallujah sanctuary has left the timing of engagements up to the enemy, so we can expect more car bombing and mortar attacks from now to November. We understand that some parts of the Bush Administration are wary of provoking more violence before the election. But what would be truly damaging politically aren’t further troubles in Iraq by themselves, but any perception that we aren’t really fighting to win.
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Break it down, and what do you have? Several disgruntled officers with bad opinions of the President and Rumsfeld – some of whom manage to damage their credibility with ridiculous overstatements …[/quote]
There are four experts quoted: two “prominent retired generals” and two of “the US military’s leading strategists”. You don’t like the message, so you attack the messenger.
DUH? I’m supposed to be stymied by the fact that the BRAINS of the operation are shitting bricks, but the average grunts might think differently? Also, which polls are you referring to that have monitored if the grunts think the mission is a success? How do you know the majority of grunts think we’re winning in Iraq?
Do you realize that the military’s definition of SUCCESS is completely different than the White House’s version of success?
The White House claims we are bringing a democracy to Iraq.
The military says that as soon as the Iraqis have a certain amount of their own security forces, we are leaving.
These are two different versions of success, but surprise! You won’t hear any Republicans talking about that. Our side can’t even agree on what the mission is!
What do you mean, “any dissension” is the harbinger of doom. CAN YOU READ? The BEST we can hope for is a flimsy Iraqi government and flimsy security (“tenuous at best”). How long do you think that will last, in the crucible that is the Middle East? The worst case we can expect is civil war, with the “trend lines” indicating that is what will happen. READ THE ARTICLE.
Historically, generals and civilian leaders have not always agreed on things. For example, Truman fired MacArthur in Korea, and Lincoln fired McCellan, among others – and McCellan ran against Lincoln in the Presidential election.
Where are the military opinions saying things are NOT on the brink there?
[quote]Let’s just stick to the facts of what’s going on over there, which, as I’ve said, are a mixed bag.
[/quote]
I guess you think the leading miltary strategists aren’t “sticking to the facts” when they say Iraq is a clusterfuck on the verge of disaster… “worse than Vietnam”.
BostonBarrister calls that a “mixed bag”.
There is one thing, that we have to concentrate on here. WHich is something several people are now saying. BostonBarrier spoke about it in the arrticle he posted. Even the President, mentioned the same thing in his radio address this morning. And that is what that person in Iraq has stated. That there is a resaon for Sadhr and Zarquawi’s actions. To instill fear in the US. They are doing all they are,to make a influence on the US Elections. For these people are no dummies. Terorists today, are very educated and smart. And they know what they are doing. And have a prurpose iin what they do. And they do not want to see George Bush, elected President. And will do anything they can, to influence the Presidental Elections. They did it in Spain. And will try it in other countires of the world. Especailly when they see a candidate who will rather go to the UN. Not be strong, when it comes to defense. Has no set plans for Iraq, on the War on Terror. WHo constantly changes his position. For this is the very person they want to see as President.
Soemone who will rather talk then send in the troops. So this is why the situation one sees as unstable. And bleak. The terrorists know how to manipulate the press, meida, music , movies, and tv in their faavor. The see how they report the conditions in Iraq. They know they will center on the bleak, the bombings, kidnappings,
the attacks. Rather than concentrate on the good. They know how Dean. Gore. Kennedy, and so many others, have talked about the War, and villified the President. They see the actions of Move.org. Don’t think they see it all. They do. And they know what buttons to push, if they do this. Who will react to what they do in their behlaf. And the more they do, the more they bomb, etc. The more they show the doom and gloom in Iraq, the more they feel, they can have the influence in this Presidental election. For that is what they want to see Kerry as President. Not Bush. And by their actions they believe they can turn the tide in Kerrys’ favor. And that is the bottom line…
Joe
More balanced views on Iraq:
All the good things they never tell you about today’s Iraq
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 19/09/2004)
The other day, the BBC interviewed Kofi Annan. Don’t ask me why. But, in the course of the programme, the United Nations Secretary-General said that the liberation of Iraq did not conform to the UN Charter and therefore was “illegal”.
The best response to that comes from George W Bush, after Gerhard Schroder made a similar point last year: “International law?” said the President. “I better call my lawyer. He didn’t bring that up to me.”
As the Australian Prime Minister John Howard (not to be confused with Michael Howard, ever) observed, the problem with the UN is that it’s “paralysed”, and that paralysis favours the bad guys, whether in Iraq or Iran, where perpetual International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitoring seems to be barely a hindrance to the full-steam-ahead nuclear programme.
In Sudan, the civilised world is (so far) doing everything to conform with the UN charter, which means waiting till everyone’s been killed and then issuing a strong statement expressing grave concern.
As for Iraq, the UN system designed to constrain Saddam was instead enriching him, through the Oil-for-Food programme, and enabling him to subsidise terrorism. Given that the Oil-for-Fraud programme was run directly out of Kofi Annan’s office, the Secretary-General ought to have the decency to recognise that he had his chance with Iraq, he blew it, and a period of silence from him would now be welcome.
He’s not the only voice from the lost world of September 10, 2001 weighing in. John Kerry, the doomed Democrat, has abandoned any talk of “victory” - in Iraq, I mean; he’s still hopeful of holding New Jersey. But instead he is promising to let America’s troops “come home”, which is another way of saying “surrender”.
Then there are the naysayers at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office who, as we now know, were claiming before the war that nothing could be done, nothing would go right, patently absurd to think Iraq can ever be a democracy, old boy. Topple Saddam, install his replacement, and pretty soon Iraq would be reverting to type. “Military coup could succeed coup until an autocratic Sunni dictator emerged who protected Sunni interests. With time he could acquire WMD.”
I have no problem with that. If the best-case scenario is that Iraq winds up as agreeable as my beloved New Hampshire, the worst case was laid out by yours truly in this space three years ago, on September 27, 2001, when I acknowledged that a post-Saddam Iraq might wind up merely with "a thug who’s marginally less bloody.
But a new thug is still better than letting the old thug stick around to cock snooks at you. If Saddam had been toppled, the nutter du jour would have come to power in the shadow of the cautionary tale of his predecessor".
That’s still the bottom line. It is the stability of the Middle East - the stability of the Ba’athists, Ayatollahs, Sauds, the Arafats and Mubaraks - that has enabled it to export its toxins. At a bare minimum, we need a kind of Sam Goldwyn Doctrine: I’m sick of the old dictators-for-life. Bring me some new dictators-for-life.
But in Iraq we are already way beyond that. After the predictions of hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and a mass refugee crisis and a humanitarian catastrophe and wall-to-wall cholera and dysentery all failed to pan out, the naysayers fell back on predictions of imminent civil war. But the civil war’s as mythical as the universal dysentery.
There is a problem in the Sunni Triangle and in certain Baghdad suburbs. If you look at the figures for August, over half the 71 US fatalities that month died in one province - al-Anbar, which covers much of the Sunni Triangle.
Most of the remainder were killed dispatching young Sadr’s goons in Najaf or in operations against other Sunni Triangulators in Samarra, with a couple of isolated incidents in Mosul and Kirkuk. In 11 of Iraq’s 18 provinces, not a single US soldier died.
Do you remember that moment of Fallujah-like depravity in Ulster a few years ago? Two soldiers were yanked from a cab in the wrong part of town and torn apart by a Republican mob. A terrible, shaming episode in the wretched annals of Northern Irish nationalists. But in the rest of the United Kingdom - in Bristol, in Coventry, Newcastle, Aberdeen - life went on, very pleasantly.
That’s the way it is in Iraq. In two-thirds of the country, municipal government has been rebuilt, business is good, restaurants are open, life is as jolly as it has been in living memory. This summer the Shia province of Dhi Qar, south-east of Baghdad, held the first free elections in its history, electing secular independents and non-religious parties to its town councils.
The Kurdish North, which would be agitating for secession if real civil war were looming, is for the moment content to be Scotland. The Sunni Triangle, meanwhile, looks like being the fledgling Iraqi federation’s Northern Ireland for a while to come.
That’s a pity. But, if you can quarantine it, the difference between it and the rest of the country will become starker, month by month.
The “insurgents”, meanwhile, so admired by Michael Moore, John Pilger and Tariq Ali, are rather short of supporters closer to home, which isn’t surprising given that they are killing many more Iraqis than Americans.
But the beauty of handing over “sovereignty” to Ayad Allawi is that the new Prime Minister has more freedom of manoeuvre than Paul Bremer ever had, and, as he doesn’t have to give press conferences on CNN every morning, there will be fewer questions afterwards.
What I find odd about the gloom’n’doom crowd at the FCO is that, for all the condescending cracks about how these blundering Yanks haven’t a clue about this colonialism business, it is the Foreign Office wallahs who seem to have lost their collective imperial memory.
The Malayan “emergency”, to take one example, lasted from 1948 to 1960, and at the end of it Britain midwifed what can reasonably claim to be one of the least worst Islamic states in the world. The nellies briefing Jack Straw seem to have lost all historical perspective.
That is not to say there are not serious questions about both short-term tactics (Fallujah, Najaf) and long-term goals (a democratic Iraq). But neither the newly parochial post-internationalist Left, unable to get past its “BLAIR LIED!!! PEOPLE DIED!!!” nursery rhymes, nor the snob Right - the Max Hastings/Douglas Hurd/Crispin Tickell crowd - has any useful contribution to make to this debate.
Instead, all the discussion is within factions of the American Right - between the “neocons”, with their plans to democratise the Middle East, and the more traditional “assertive nationalists”, whose hopes for a foetid region are a little less ambitious. That’s worth arguing over, but it is not an argument you can enter if you have got no useful proposals of your own.
And, in the end, the reality is this. A few weeks ago, Prof Bernard Lewis, the great historian of the Muslim world, told Die Welt that “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century”. That seems demographically unavoidable.
Given that much of what we now know as the civilised world will be Muslim, it seems prudent to ensure that what is already the Muslim world is civilised. And, for those who say that Islam is incompatible with democracy, we might as well try to buck that in Iraq today than in France, Scandinavia and Britain the day after tomorrow.
[quote]Lumpy wrote:
There are four experts quoted: two “prominent retired generals” and two of “the US military’s leading strategists”. You don’t like the message, so you attack the messenger. [/quote]
I wasn’t attacking the messenger – merely pointing out that out of the entire military establishment Hersh has argued this position based on four individuals’ opinions. Care to wager on whether one could find four people who thought everything was successful? Or whether we’d find a whole bunch more with a more middle-of-the-road, balanced, view?
[quote]
DUH? I’m supposed to be stymied by the fact that the BRAINS of the operation are shitting bricks, but the average grunts might think differently? Also, which polls are you referring to that have monitored if the grunts think the mission is a success? How do you know the majority of grunts think we’re winning in Iraq?
Do you realize that the military’s definition of SUCCESS is completely different than the White House’s version of success?
The White House claims we are bringing a democracy to Iraq.
The military says that as soon as the Iraqis have a certain amount of their own security forces, we are leaving.
These are two different versions of success, but surprise! You won’t hear any Republicans talking about that. Our side can’t even agree on what the mission is![/quote]
Perhaps there is more than one definition of success because there is more than one goal? Growing a democratic ally as a government in the middle east is a goal; taking out terrorists is a goal; stabilizing the area is a goal. But I guess it’s as hard for a lot of Democrats to accept multiple goals as it was for them to understand that WMD was but one of 4 major reasons for going into Iraq in the first instance.
[quote]
What do you mean, “any dissension” is the harbinger of doom. CAN YOU READ? The BEST we can hope for is a flimsy Iraqi government and flimsy security (“tenuous at best”). How long do you think that will last, in the crucible that is the Middle East? The worst case we can expect is civil war, with the “trend lines” indicating that is what will happen. READ THE ARTICLE.[/quote]
I read. See above.
Yes, I’d call the situation a mixed bag. The article by Sy Hersh is another story.
Here’s a letter from a USMC Major over in Iraq, which was published on the Captain’s Quarters weblog - Note, Lumpy, this is just one guy’s opinion, but he’s on the ground in Iraq, and it goes against Sy Hersh’s four opinions:
A thought from Iraq ? ?Doom & Gloom about Iraq?s future?.I don?t see it from where I?m sitting.?
[For those of you who haven?t gotten my ?Thoughts? before, I?m a Major in the USMC on the Multi-National Corps staff in Baghdad. The analysts and pundits who don?t see what I see on a daily basis, in my opinion, have very little credibility to talk about the situation ? especially if they have yet to set foot in Iraq. Everything Americans believe about Iraq is simply perception filtered through one?s latent prejudices until you are face-to-face with reality. If you haven?t seen, or don?t remember, the John Wayne movie, The Green Berets, you should watch it this weekend. Pay special attention to the character of the reporter, Mr. Beckwith. His experience is directly related to the situation here. You?ll have a different perspective on Iraq after the movie is over.]
The US media is abuzz today with the news of an intelligence report that is very negative about the prospects for Iraq?s future. CNN?s website says, ?[The] National Intelligence Estimate was sent to the White House in July with a classified warning predicting the best case for Iraq was ?tenuous stability? and the worst case was civil war.? That report, along with the car bombings and kidnappings in Baghdad in the past couple days are being portrayed in the media as more proof of absolute chaos and the intransigence of the insurgency.
From where I sit, at the Operational Headquarters in Baghdad, that just isn?t the case. Let?s lay out some background, first about the ?National Intelligence Estimate.? The most glaring issue with its relevance is the fact that it was delivered to the White House in July. That means that the information that was used to derive the intelligence was gathered in the Spring ? in the immediate aftermath of the April battle for Fallujah, and other events. The report doesn?t cover what has happened in July or August, let alone September.
The naysayers will point to the recent battles in Najaf and draw parallels between that and what happened in Fallujah in April. They aren?t even close. The bad guys did us a HUGE favor by gathering together in one place and trying to make a stand. It allowed us to focus on them and defeat them. Make no mistake, Al Sadr?s troops were thoroughly smashed. The estimated enemy killed in action is huge. Before the battles, the residents of the city were afraid to walk the streets. Al Sadr?s enforcers would seize people and bring them to his Islamic court where sentence was passed for religious or other violations. Long before the battles people were looking for their lost loved ones who had been taken to ?court? and never seen again. Now Najafians can and do walk their streets in safety. Commerce has returned and the city is being rebuilt. Iraqi security forces and US troops are welcomed and smiled upon. That city was liberated again. It was not like Fallujah ? the bad guys lost and are in hiding or dead.
You may not have even heard about the city of Samarra. Two weeks ago, that Sunni Triangle city was a ?No-go? area for US troops. But guess what? The locals got sick of living in fear from the insurgents and foreign fighters that were there and let them know they weren?t welcome. They stopped hosting them in their houses and the mayor of the town brokered a deal with the US commander to return Iraqi government sovereignty to the city without a fight. The people saw what was on the horizon and decided they didn?t want their city looking like Fallujah in April or Najaf in August.
Boom, boom, just like that two major ?hot spots? cool down in rapid succession. Does that mean that those towns are completely pacified? No. What it does mean is that we are learning how to do this the right way. The US commander in Samarra saw an opportunity and took it ? probably the biggest victory of his military career and nary a shot was fired in anger. Things will still happen in those cities, and you can be sure that the bad guys really want to take them back. Those achievements, more than anything else in my opinion, account for the surge in violence in recent days ? especially the violence directed at Iraqis by the insurgents. Both in Najaf and Samarra ordinary people stepped out and took sides with the Iraqi government against the insurgents, and the bad guys are hopping mad. They are trying to instill fear once again. The worst thing we could do now is pull back and let that scum back into people?s homes and lives.
So, you may hear analysts and prognosticators on CNN, ABC and the like in the next few days talking about how bleak the situation is here in Iraq, but from where I sit, it?s looking significantly better now than when I got here. The momentum is moving in our favor, and all Americans need to know that, so please, please, pass this on to those who care and will pass it on to others. It is very demoralizing for us here in uniform to read & hear such negativity in our press. It is fodder for our enemies to use against us and against the vast majority of Iraqis who want their new government to succeed. It causes the American public to start thinking about the acceptability of ?cutting our losses? and pulling out, which would be devastating for Iraq for generations to come, and Muslim militants would claim a huge victory, causing us to have to continue to fight them elsewhere (remember, in war ?Away? games are always preferable to ?Home? games). Reports like that also cause Iraqis begin to fear that we will pull out before we finish the job, and thus less willing to openly support their interim government and US/Coalition activities. We are realizing significant progress here ? not propaganda progress, but real strides are being made. It?s terrible to see our national morale, and support for what we?re doing here, jeopardized by sensationalized stories hyped by media giants whose #1 priority is advertising income followed closely by their political agenda; getting the story straight falls much further down on their priority scale, as Dan Rather and CBS News have so aptly demonstrated in the last week.
Here’s a good weblog roundup of interesting stories coming out of Iraq:
This may be a little off topic but here is my general thoughts on what will happen. Bush is going to win this election quite handily. He needs to because we still have 8 years until judgement day, as predicted by the mayins and others. Hillary Clinton will win the 2008 Presidential election and become the first woman president in history. By this time, with 4 more years under Bush, the world will settle down some. Terrorist activities will have slowed or almost stopped and our economy will be continuing to slowly strengthen itself. Behind the scenes the terrorist networks (al qeada and their supporters) will regroup and join forces, they will also attempt to gain strength by gaining nation support from anti western countries.
Hillary will take office and be the weakest president in history and the terrorists and enemy nations will realize this. They will have 4 years to strengthen their support and lay out a plan for how they will attempt to finally strike us down. This they know will be thier best chance as there will be a strong republican candidate on the rise and will be likely to seriously challenge hillary for the 2012 election.
Sometime around the election day in the year 2012 there will be terrorist attacks of a scale that will make 9/11 look like a 4th of july display. There is a strong possibility this will include direct attacks by enemy nations that know their number is up and it is a kill or be killed mentality. the lines between who is an enemy and who is a friend will become blurred. and the end of WWIII wil have begun. 6 months of the most devestating war the world has ever known. WWIII by predictions will last 12 years. sept 11 2001 - sometime 2013.
The terrorists will have accuired suitcase nukes and dirty bombs as well as other electromagnetic pulse weaponry that will render our highly computerised automated battle machines generally useless. Instead of pulling everything back to our borders and weathering a really bad storm. The leaders of our country will act on emotion and begin nuking the enemy nations. This will only worsen things as other nations who are sitting on the fence will see our country as the bigger threat to human kind and the will be a second offensive against our shores, this time by countries with bigger bombs and guns.
People will survive this war. And there will be a very long time of peace ahead of us. As a species we will have looked complete fear, terror and pure evil in the face by simply looking into our own souls. This will cause a great ascension to occur and nearly all humans will ascend to a higher spiritual plane. Competition will be discarded as an act of the animal kingdom and cooperation will be adopted as humans renounce thier heritage as animals and take their places on the entry levels of the divine spiritual realm of existance.
There are many gatekeepers currently awakening to the task of delivering the rest of humanity into this great future. They will be tommorrows teachers, the teachers of many things, but mostly of our true existance, our real form or anatomy if you will (it is much greater than what you look at in the mirror). They will teach of emotions and other tools given us as we were once taught to read and write. They will teach of other forms of communication and it will be truly exciting and amazing.
Just in case anyone was wondering what is going to become of all that is happening now.
Vegita ~ Prince of all Sayajins
[quote]…about the National Intelligence Estimate.? The most glaring issue with its relevance is the fact that it was delivered to the White House in July. That means that the information that was used to derive the intelligence was gathered in the Spring - in the immediate aftermath of the April battle for Fallujah, and other events. The report doesn’t cover what has happened in July or August, let alone September.
[/quote]
The situation has actually deteriorated since the report was written!
So, you may hear analysts and prognosticators on CNN, ABC and the like in the next few days talking about how bleak the situation is here in Iraq, but from where I sit, it?s looking significantly better now than when I got here… It causes the American public to start thinking about the acceptability of ‘cutting our losses’ and pulling out, which would be devastating for Iraq for generations to come, and Muslim militants would claim a huge victory, causing us to have to continue to fight them elsewhere[/quote]
Last weekend on the McLaughlin Group, Tony Blankley of the Wall Street Journal predicted that we would need to be in Iraq for the next 5 to 10 years.
That’s not how the war was sold to the US taxpayers. If the admininstration had been honest with the public about what the real costs of the war would be, in time, money and lives, the public would NOT have supported the invasion in the first place!
As far as a possibilty that we could make the situation worse, that should have been obvious to everyone (but apparently wasn’t). As I wrote before, Bush’s Iraq debacle may cause the destablization of the entire Middle East. The idea that we ‘shouldn’t talk about it’ because ‘that’s bad for morale’ is idiotic. We should certainly talk about what the hell we aree doing there, we should have been talking about it all along. But dissent against the war was labeled “unpatriotic” before the war, and now I’m supposed to care that it’s bad for morale?
What’s really bad for morale is when the commander in chief has started an unneccesary war of choice, with no plan for success and no exit strategy.
It’s bad for morale when the suits and ties in the White House don’t listen to the planning of the military commanders, and try to do things on the cheap.
It’s bad for morale for the president to rush 40,000 of the troops into battle without the proper body armor, causing hundreds of extra unnecessary deaths and dismemberments.
It’s bad for morale for our troops to have to act as bodyguards and run interference for personnel from outside contractors like Halliburton, when these people (truckers, for example) make four times as much money as our troops, they often have zero military experience and they aren’t even in shape, and will do anything to avoid risking their own lives, even though they are in a war zone.
It’s bad for morale for the president to challenge the enemy to “bring it on” when our troops were getting ambushed 30 times a day on average (currently averaging 80 times per day) and the president has only spent a scant couple of hours in Iraq, and was well out of harms’ way.
It’s bad for morale to have National Guard members who are engineers and technical experts be forced to do security work and combat. It’s bad for morale to have Stop-Loss measures enacted that force them to serve additional time beyond their regular tours.
It’s bad for morale to tell a soldier he’s not going home when he’s supposed to, because things have been bungled at the top, not by the military commanders, but by the clowns in suits and ties planning the war who have no actual military experience.
Excellent piece from someone in Iraq…
Someone right on the frontlines, and what he sees… And speaks his mind too…
A thought from Iraq - “Doom & Gloom about Iraq’s future…I don’t see it from where I’m sitting.”
[For those of you who haven’t gotten my “Thoughts” before, I’m a Major in the USMC on the Multi-National Corps staff in Baghdad. The analysts and pundits who don’t see what I see on a daily basis, in my opinion, have very little credibility to talk about the situation - especially if they have yet to set foot in Iraq. Everything Americans believe about Iraq is simply perception filtered through one’s latent prejudices until you are face-to-face with reality. If you haven’t seen, or don’t remember, the John Wayne movie, The Green Berets , you should watch it this weekend. Pay special attention to the character of the reporter, Mr. Beckwith (the Journalist in the movie) . His characters experience is directly related to the situation here. You’ll have a different perspective on Iraq after the movie is over.]
The US media is abuzz today with the news of an intelligence report that is very negative about the prospects for Iraq’s future. CNN’s website says, “[The] National Intelligence Estimate was sent to the White House in July with a classified warning predicting the best case for Iraq was ‘tenuous stability’ and the worst case was civil war.” That report, along with the car bombings and kidnappings in Baghdad in the past couple days are being portrayed in the media as more proof of absolute chaos and the intransigence of the insurgency.
From where I sit, at the Operational Headquarters in Baghdad, that just isn’t the case. Let’s lay out some background, first about the “National Intelligence Estimate.” The most glaring issue with its relevance is the fact that it was delivered to the White House in July . That means that the information that was used to derive the intelligence was gathered in the Spring - in the immediate aftermath of the April battle for Fallujah, and other events. The report doesn’t cover what has happened in July or August, let alone September.
The naysayers will point to the recent battles in Najaf and draw parallels between that and what happened in Fallujah in April. They aren’t even close. The bad guys did us a HUGE favor by gathering together in one place and trying to make a stand. It allowed us to focus on them and defeat them. Make no mistake, Al Sadr’s troops were thoroughly smashed. The estimated enemy killed in action is huge. Before the battles, the residents of the city were afraid to walk the streets. Al Sadr’s enforcers would seize people and bring them to his Islamic court where sentence was passed for religious or other violations. Long before the battles people were looking for their lost loved ones who had been taken to “court” and never seen again. Now Najafians can and do walk their streets in safety. Commerce has returned and the city is being rebuilt. Iraqi security forces and US troops are welcomed and smiled upon. That city was liberated again. It was not like Fallujah - the bad guys lost and are in hiding or dead.
You may not have even heard about the city of Samarra. Two weeks ago, that Sunni Triangle city was a “No-go” area for US troops. But guess what? The locals got sick of living in fear from the insurgents and foreign fighters that were there and let them know they weren’t welcome. They stopped hosting them in their houses and the mayor of the town brokered a deal with the US commander to return Iraqi government sovereignty to the city without a fight. The people saw what was on the horizon and decided they didn’t want their city looking like Fallujah in April or Najaf in August.
Boom, boom, just like that two major “hot spots” cool down in rapid succession. Does that mean that those towns are completely pacified? No. What it does mean is that we are learning how to do this the right way. The US commander in Samarra saw an opportunity and took it - probably the biggest victory of his military career and nary a shot was fired in anger. Things will still happen in those cities, and you can be sure that the bad guys really want to take them back. Those achievements, more than anything else in my opinion, account for the surge in violence in recent days - especially the violence directed at Iraqis by the insurgents. Both in Najaf and Samarra ordinary people stepped out and took sides with the Iraqi government against the insurgents, and the bad guys are hopping mad. They are trying to instill fear once again. The worst thing we could do now is pull back and let that scum back into people’s homes and lives.
So, you may hear analysts and prognosticators on CNN, ABC and the like in the next few days talking about how bleak the situation is here in Iraq, but from where I sit, it’s looking significantly better now than when I got here. The momentum is moving in our favor, and all Americans need to know that, so please, please, pass this on to those who care and will pass it on to others. It is very demoralizing for us here in uniform to read & hear such negativity in our press. It is fodder for our enemies to use against us and against the vast majority of Iraqis who want their new government to succeed. It causes the American public to start thinking about the acceptability of “cutting our losses” and pulling out, which would be devastating for Iraq for generations to come, and Muslim militants would claim a huge victory, causing us to have to continue to fight them elsewhere (remember, in war “Away” games are always preferable to “Home” games). Reports like that also cause Iraqis begin to fear that we will pull out before we finish the job, and thus less willing to openly support their interim government and US/Coalition activities. We are realizing significant progress here - not propaganda progress, but real strides are being made. It’s terrible to see our national morale, and support for what we’re doing here, jeopardized by sensationalized stories hyped by media giants whose #1 priority is advertising income followed closely by their political agenda; getting the story straight falls much further down on their priority scale, as Dan Rather and CBS News have so aptly demonstrated in the last week.
From: http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/
ou want to read the truth what is going on…
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Some good news!
A group of Iraqi citizens in Al Karkh/ Khidr Al Yas arrested 6 Syrian terrorists after placing a land mine at the gate of Bab Al Mu?a dam bridge from Al Karkh side.
According to New Sabah newspaper, after a road side bomb exploded missing an American convoy that was patrolling in the area, a group of citizens who happened to be there noticed a bunch of young men who looked foreigners (turned out to be Syrians) that were gathering near the place and that looked suspicious. The citizens found their atittude very suspicious and they were not from the area, so they jumped on them and kicked them until some of them started to bleed and then turned them on to the American forces. Eyewitnesses said that the citizens were shouting ?Terrorists. You are targeting our children and families. You are killing our youths?
This incident that took place near Haifa street comes after many attacks that terrorist Arabs were accused of carrying against American forces and Iraqi police stations.
And this is very good too…
Iraq is not an adventure. Toppling Saddam was never the main reason for the war and should never be thought of as this. Removing Saddam could?ve been done 13 years ago by just preventing him from using his helicopters in the uprising. It could?ve been done also by deploying the Iraqi opposition groups into the north, which together with the Peshmerga and with air support from the coalition could?ve done the job. It could?ve been done through a military coup planned by the CIA or the M.I.6. After all, Saddam regime proved to be much weaker than it looked. It certainly didn?t need hundreds of thousands of coalition soldiers and all this massive power. Besides, if it was the main reason, then why didn?t the American troops pull out of Iraq soon after doing it?
The task of liberating Iraq and establishing democracy in it is nothing like any limited war America had fought before. It?s as serious as WW1 and WW2, and even more serious than the cold war. Anyone who thinks that America can pull out and be settled with toppling Saddam and stopping his WMDs project proves to be shortsighted, the least to say.
Only I want freedom and democracy and so do most of my friends and relatives, and the vast majority of Iraqis I?ve known all my life. So do hundreds of thousands of IP, ING members, hundreds of political organizations and millions of Iraqis who are defending the American administration?s dream (you know, because we can?t have a dream!), and who wait anxiously for the upcoming elections. Are we not Arabs and Muslims? Or were we brainwashed by the American propaganda to believe that their dream was ours?
Here’s some more good news:
US troops arrest radical Shiite cleric’s aides in Najaf
AFP ^ | 9/21/04
NAJAF, Iraq (AFP) - US marines arrested two close aides and several partisans of Moqtada Sadr in a predawn raid on the radical Shiite cleric’s office in the central Iraqi city of Najaf, officials and witnesses told AFP.
“A group of US marines raided the office of Sayed Sadr at 2:00 am (2200 GMT Monday) and arrested Sheikh Ahmed al-Shaibani and Sayed Hosam al-Husseini and a number of other workers in the office,” said Abu Sadeq al-Adhari, an official in Sadr’s office.
The white-turbaned Shaibani is one of the most outspoken Sadr aides in the holy city of Najaf.
Iraqi police and security forces were seen blocking access to the office which is adjacent to the Imam Ali mausoleum in the heart of Najaf.
And, in other good news, Last weeks bombing in Falloujah killed two top Zarquari aides. Truly evil men!
Joe
The author just got back from a trip to Iraq…
http://www.strategypage.com/onpoint/articles/2004921.asp
Touted National Intelligence Estimate Out of Date
by Austin Bay
September 21, 2004
Discussion Board on this On Point topic
The “new” national intelligence estimate touted last week by The New York Times is drastically out of date.
According to the Times, the report from the National Intelligence Council “outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war.”
Wake up the Beltway bureaucrats: The Iraqi civil war started in summer 2003, when a group hard-core Baath (and Sunni-dominated) holdouts decided their route to personal survival – and possible track back to power in Baghdad – was relentlessly savage violence.
Savage violence is the daily routine of the criminal gangs who run dictatorships large and small, so virtually everyone expected some degree of post-Saddam thug resistance. However, no one knew the Baath hardcore had so much money.
The biggest mistake the Iraq coalition made, however, was underestimating the power of criminal arrogance. That’s a mistake we Americans make repeatedly – whether the thug is Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam, Osama bin Laden or one of our own mob chieftains like John Gotti.
First the money: Saddam stole billions. How much of the trove remains? I don’t think the Swiss, Persian Gulf and Asian bankers who helped him stash it know. Recall the crisp $600 million U.S. soldiers found in a building in Baghdad. No doubt stockpiles of Baathist cash remain hidden in Iraq and elsewhere in the region.
The Baghdad rumor mill says Baath warlords pay bombers anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000 per attack, so even a million dollars can buy a lot of bang. It also buys TV time. The thousands of trucks that successfully deliver goods in Iraq don’t make CNN. The one that the mercenary bomber blew to bits does.
It’s a strategic weakness every PR operative knows: TV demands drama. TV magnifies the thug’s bomb.
And it also feeds the arrogance of criminal elites who never believe they’ll be held accountable for their crimes. Here’s an example of that arrogance: In late August, Iraqi cops and Coalition forces cornered one Ahmad T. Tahir (also known as Mohammad Bogy) at the wake of a man that Tahir murdered. Tahir used to work for Saddam’s regime (possibly as an “enforcer”).
When the police arrived, Tahir tried to flee into his victim’s house and even tried to hide behind the daughters and wife of his victim. But the women began slapping Tahir and shoved him toward the security troops, who then arrested him. The women told the police that “he (Tahir) didn’t think we could do anything to him, and that’s why he was here.” In street slang, Mohammad Bogy was strutting his stuff because he believed the fear he instilled put him beyond any law.
Thug arrogance is an all-too common feature of the world’s hard corners, where the criminals have dominated for so long they are certain their iron wills and unmitigated violence will eventually cow all opponents. Scholarly strategists describe war as a clash of wills. The world’s Mohammad Bogys have a lot of willpower – and all too often it only breaks when Free World troops jam a rifle barrel into the cold amazement of their eyes.
“The Shia are sheep,” is an Iraqi Sunni refrain. “The (Baath holdout) Sunnis say they’ve been in charge and they intend to stay in charge (in Iraq),” a U.S. analyst told me in July 2004. While the Sunni resistance isn’t tribal in any strict sense, “… it’s like our tribe always beats your tribe. If they just continue to do what they’ve always done (i.e., murder wantonly), eventually they prevail. That’s what they think will win this (civil conflict) for them.”
However, every month that passes the new Iraqi central government gets stronger. Prime Minister Iyad Allawi (a Shia) has proven he isn’t a sheep.
When does arrogance turn to desperation?
I don’t know – perhaps Mohammad Bogy could give us an opinion. I do know the Baath thugs are attempting to manipulate the U.S. political cycle. If they continue to murder, they believe America will wilt and leave the new Iraqi government in the lurch.
To find out more about Austin Bay and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
Some good historical perspective by Max Boot, writing in the LA Times (Max Boot is, in addition to being a LA Times columnist, a fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations):
History Can Offer Bush Hope ...
John Kerry is right to accuse President Bush of "colossal failures of judgment" in Iraq. These range from decisions taken in the early days of the occupation, such as the premature disbanding of Iraq's army, to more recent missteps, such as allowing Fallouja to become a terrorist sanctuary.
Reading the depressing headlines, one is tempted to ask: Has any president in U.S. history ever botched a war or its aftermath so badly?
Actually, yes. Most wartime presidents have made catastrophic blunders, from James Madison losing his capital to the British in 1814 to Harry Truman getting embroiled with China in 1950. Errors tend to shrink in retrospect if committed in a winning cause (Korea); they get magnified in a losing one (Vietnam).
Despite all that's gone wrong so far, Iraq could still go either way. (In one recent poll, 51% of Iraqis said their country was headed in "the right direction"; only 31% felt it was going the wrong way.)
Lest we be too hard on Bush, it's useful to recall the travails of the nation's two most successful commanders in chief, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.
Lincoln is remembered, of course, for winning the Civil War and freeing the slaves. We tend to forget that along the way he lost more battles than any other president: First and Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Chickamauga.... The list of federal defeats was long and dispiriting. So was the list of federal victories (e.g., Antietam, Gettysburg) that could have been exploited to shorten the conflict, but weren't.
As the Union's fortunes fell, opponents tarred Lincoln with invective that might make even Michael Moore blush. Harper's magazine called him a "despot, liar, thief, braggart, buffoon, usurper, monster, ignoramus." As late as the summer of 1864, Lincoln appeared likely to lose his bid for reelection. Only the fall of Atlanta on Sept. 2 saved his presidency.
Most of the Union's failures were because of inept generalship, but it was Lincoln who chose the generals, including many political appointees with scant military experience. He ultimately won the war only by backing Ulysses Grant's brutal attritional tactics that have often been criticized as sheer butchery.
Roosevelt had more than his share of mistakes too, the most notorious being his failure to prevent the attack on Pearl Harbor, even though U.S. code breakers had given him better intelligence than Bush had before Sept. 11. FDR also did not do enough to prepare the armed forces for war, and then pushed them into early offensives at Guadalcanal and North Africa that took a heavy toll on inexperienced troops. At Kasserine Pass, Tunisia, in 1943, the U.S. Army was mauled by veteran German units, losing more than 6,000 soldiers.
The Allies went on to win the war but still suffered many snafus, such as Operation Market Garden, a failed airborne assault on Holland in September 1944, and the Battle of the Bulge three months later, when a massive German onslaught in the Ardennes caught U.S. troops napping.
Though FDR bore only indirect responsibility for most of these screw-ups, he was more directly culpable for other bad calls, such as the decision to detain 120,000 Japanese Americans without any proof of their disloyalty. Like Lincoln, who jailed suspected Southern sympathizers without trial, Roosevelt was guilty of civil liberties restrictions that were light-years beyond the Patriot Act. And, like Bush, Roosevelt didn't do enough to prepare for the postwar period. His failure to occupy more of Eastern Europe before the Red Army arrived consigned millions to tyranny; his failure to plan for the future of Korea and Vietnam after the Japanese left helped lead to two wars that killed 100,000 Americans.
None of this is meant in any way to denigrate the inspired leadership of two great presidents. Both Lincoln and Roosevelt were brilliant wartime leaders precisely because they were able to overcome adversity and inspire the country toward ultimate victory with their unflagging will to win. That's what Bush is trying to do today.
And, no, I'm not suggesting Bush is another Lincoln or Roosevelt. But even if Bush hasn't reached their lofty heights, neither has he experienced their depths of despair. We are losing one or two soldiers a day in Iraq. Lincoln lost an average of 250 daily for four years, Roosevelt 300 daily for more than 3 1/2 years. If they could overcome such numbing losses to prevail against far more formidable foes than we face now, it's ludicrous to give in to today's fashionable funk.
"Colossal failures of judgment" are to be expected in wartime; I daresay even John Kerry (whose judgment on Iraq changes every 30 minutes) might commit a few. They do not have to spell defeat now any more than they did in 1865 or 1945.
Transcript of Prime Minister Allawi’s speech thanking Americans for what we’ve done for Iraq:
All these speeches and opinions are great…
What happens when we get some type of Fatwah issued concerning the election? You know, when high level clerics make a ruling such that voters will be shot upon entering election booths.
Is there a strategy for this type of behavior yet?
If you think the insurgency is just random and that it is going to melt away as the elections approach you have to be living in a dream world… sort of like the current administration.
It doesn’t matter who wins the election with respect to Iraq, the place is royally screwed and will be a very big problem for the next administration. Part of the problem is that the current administration won’t want to mix it up before the election and give credence to rising resistance levels.
Not keeping a lid on the problem now, either because of being stretched too thin or because of election motives, whatever the case, is going to allow a continuing deterioration. If so, it is going to suck big time. Sure, the US can pull out, but the vacuum left behind would probably be a black eye on the region causing instability for decades.
Tell me the good news, because I really want to hear it. Dollars being spent and speeches from politicians are not good news. Good news is the populace of the region embracing the authorities and militants laying down their arms and becoming involved in the nation building process.
I haven’t heard the good news yet. If it is really there in Iraq, stop keeping it to yourself. I’d really be happy to hear it.
[replaced “processes” with “authorities”]
vroom –
It’s not a matter of insurgency melting away – it’s a matter of getting the Iraqis equipped to deal with it. See what I’ve already written on possible rationales for waiting for the Iraqis to take the lead above.
As for the elections, right now it looks like a good bet they will go forward. The idea of rolling elections looks good, and will make it easier to do security. Also, w/r/t your hypo, they’ve actually talked about just shutting down the hotspots and not having them participate of some cleric or other in an area, or other insurgents, make elections locally too difficult.
Iraq is by no means all set, but the situation over there isn’t all negative either. It would be nice if more folks in the media noticed some of the good stuff along with problems.
Very interesting article in the WSJ, a feature news piece (FYI, it’s only the editorial board of the WSJ that is conservative – the news page actually is center/liberal):
Trial by Fire
On Ground in Iraq,
Capt. Ayers Writes
His Own Playbook
Thrust Into New Kind of War,
Junior Officers Become
Army’s Leading Experts
Risky Deal With Village Sheik
By GREG JAFFE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 22, 2004; Page A1
RAMADI, Iraq – In the space of four minutes in May, two Humvees in Capt. Nicholas Ayers’s unit were hit by roadside bombs. In the chaos, one vehicle was left alone as soldiers, injured and under fire, took cover in a school and radioed for help.
By the time Capt. Ayers arrived on the scene, Iraqis had looted the Humvee’s machine gun and high-tech gun sights. Losing equipment to the enemy is a mistake that can ruin an officer’s career. Standard Army practice holds that the area should be searched immediately.
Instead, Capt. Ayers, 29 years old, took a risk. He went to the village sheik’s house. As a sign of respect, he said, he wouldn’t search the village. But he gave the local leader 48 hours to find and return the equipment. “If we don’t get the equipment back, I am going to come back with my men and tear apart every house in this village,” he recalls saying. If the gear was returned, he promised to reduce patrols in the area.
The gamble ran counter to Capt. Ayers’s training, which states that the longer troops wait to search an area, the less chance they’ll find what they are looking for. His bosses told him he had made a huge blunder. Two days later, though, the sheik returned every scrap of looted equipment to the Army. Later, he would pay a heavy price for that move.
“I was floored,” Capt. Ayers says. “The incident made me rethink the tactics I was using, my relationship with the local sheiks. It made me rethink just about everything.”
Fighting the volatile, growing insurgency in Iraq is putting increased responsibility on younger, lower-ranking officers, who are learning through improvisation and error. For the Army, the heavy reliance on officers such as Capt. Ayers is a significant change. As the war in Iraq has turned into a far different kind of battle than the Army expected, it is triggering major shifts in how the service uses and equips soldiers and remaking its historically rigid and hierarchical command structure.
In May 2002, before the Iraq war, a study commissioned by the Army’s top-ranking general concluded “the reality in the Army is that junior officers are seldom given opportunities to be innovative, plan training or to make decisions; fail, learn and try again.”
Earlier this summer, the same team, led by retired Lt. Col. Leonard Wong, concluded: “Junior officers have become the experts on the situation in Iraq, not higher headquarters.” The fast-moving insurgency is forcing lower-ranking officers, who spend more time in the field, to take a more prominent role.
Sharing Knowledge
Captains are sharing lessons via e-mail and on Web sites such as www .companycommand.com. Subjects range from dealing with sheiks to teaching a heavy-armor unit, accustomed to fighting inside 70-ton tanks, how to patrol on foot with rifles. Lt. Gen. William Wallace has told superiors that officers returning from Iraq who attend the Army’s elite Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., know more about counterinsurgency than their instructors. The change has forced instructors there to shift from traditional lectures to discussion-oriented classes.
“This is entirely a bottom-up war. It is the platoon leaders and company commanders that are fighting it,” says Maj. John Nagl, third-in-command of an 850-man battalion based nine miles from Fallujah.
It’s a shift the Army never made in Vietnam – the last time it fought an insurgency. In that war, the Army fought essentially as it had in World War II, with large formations commanded by senior officers and lots of firepower. Younger officers in the field advocated a different approach, involving smaller patrols and the training of local forces, but the Army rejected such ideas, says Maj. Nagl, who wrote a 2002 book on insurgencies.
Maj. Nagl concludes the Army was “organizationally disposed against learning how to fight and win counterinsurgency warfare.” Recently the Army’s top officer, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, gave copies of Maj. Nagl’s book “Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam,” to all his four-star generals.
When Vietnam ended, the Army didn’t significantly change its way of operating. Instead, it was eager to return to its roots and prepare for more-conventional battles against the rigid Soviet Army. In 1987, Col. Robert Leicht, then a professor at the Army’s Command and General Staff College, set out to teach a class on counterinsurgency warfare. He visited the Army’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School in North Carolina, looking for lessons from the Vietnam era. “The old graybeard there told me that in 1975 he was told to get rid of all the Vietnam stuff,” Col. Leicht says.
‘Pathological Resistance’
Today, some question whether the Army is changing fast enough. Bruce Hoffman, who served as a senior U.S. adviser in Baghdad on counterinsurgency this year, says the U.S. military has shown an almost “pathological resistance” to adapting to the demands of guerrilla fighting. Like many experts, he says the Army’s success in Iraq will depend largely on the ability of officers on the ground to come up with new solutions to defeat the insurgency. Battling guerrilla warfare depends less on firepower, and more on human intelligence, cultural sensitivity and reconstruction.
“The big challenge the Army faces is harnessing the experience of the young field officers and incorporating it into training and doctrine,” Mr. Hoffman says.
Army officials say the service is adapting to new demands. Gen. Schoomaker says the Army is in the midst of the most wide-ranging changes since World War II, aimed at better preparing it for the kinds of wars it is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I’ve compared this to tuning a car engine while the engine is running, which is not only a complex task but dangerous as well,” he said recently.
In Capt. Ayers’s sector, in the heart of the Sunni triangle, locals nicknamed him “Mosool Kabeer” or “Big Chief.” In addition to running raids and patrols, his duties have included overseeing a 200-man Iraqi police force and millions of dollars in reconstruction projects. Earlier this year, local guerrillas felt so threatened by him they distributed fliers in town offering a reward for his assassination.
The vast geography of the region is one reason young officers are given such latitude to innovate and make decisions. Capt. Ayers is one of four company commanders who report to Lt. Col. Thomas Hollis, whose battalion is responsible for about 1,500 square miles. In the kind of warfare he was trained for – using tanks, heavy artillery and air power – his unit would cover one-tenth of that area.
“I tell my captains you have to understand the inner workings of the communities in your area,” Col. Hollis says. “You have to figure out who the key leaders are, you need to know who their relatives are, and what businesses they are involved in.”
Capt. Ayers and his peers are far less influenced by the Army culture that has long viewed firepower-intensive, tank-on-tank battles, like the 1991 Gulf War, as the epitome of land warfare. Many of today’s captains were in junior high school when the 1991 war was fought. Capt. Ayers, the son of a Vietnam veteran, grew up in Southern California, and went on to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. Before coming to Iraq in August 2003, the defining event of his career was his deployment to Kosovo.
In Kosovo, Capt. Ayers was in charge of four small towns, populated by a total of about 4,000 people. Based on his experience there, he knew he had to figure out who was in charge of the area. In Kosovo, that was easy. Each town had a mayor. In Ramadi, there is a confusing network of more than 100 tribes, subtribes, sheiks and subsheiks. Loyalties shifted. “I quickly learned that everyone here likes to say they are in charge,” he says.
To get a grip on who was really running things, Capt. Ayers sent his men out with a survey. He asked the locals who their top sheik was and then crosschecked the answers against what the sheiks were telling him.
Capt. Ayers also set out to win over his sector’s police force. Because local police know the culture, speak the language and are aware of age-old grudges, they are far more likely to spot the enemy. When Capt. Ayers first asked the Iraqi police to patrol with his men, they told him they wanted nothing to do with Americans. After weeks of fruitless negotiations, he cajoled two patrolmen into his Humvee. Between midnight and 1 a.m. they drove through his sector’s empty streets, as Capt. Ayers tried to assure them they could work together.
He met with the police chief, Lt. Col. Mohammed Saleh Taher, almost daily, shared meals with his family and got vehicles, guns and body armor for his men. Soon Capt. Ayers convinced the police chief to fire anyone who refused to patrol with the Americans. Desperate for a paycheck, the Iraqi police climbed into the U.S. Humvees.
Brutal Attacks
The public cooperation drew brutal attacks from the insurgents. In January, they murdered Col. Mohammed and three of his bodyguards at the colonel’s home. Two days later, they attacked the police station, killing five more Iraqi police officers.
After the murders, Capt. Ayers handed out crisp $100 bills to the families of Col. Mohammed and the bodyguards so they could bury their dead. Most of the families were poor, some living in houses with broken windows. “Col. Mohammed was a good friend of mine,” he said, as he handed out the money and expressed condolences. “We are working to make sure that whoever did this will not get away.”
Col. Mohammed’s family told him that the police chief’s second-in-command had played a role in the chief’s murder. Capt. Ayers believed the second-in-command was involved with the insurgency. He felt safer dealing with the third-in-command, Col. Mohammed’s brother – even though locals and other police officers said the brother had a drinking problem and had been extorting money from his men in exchange for promotions.
“I knew [Col. Mohammed’s brother] wouldn’t have me killed and I couldn’t say the same for the alternatives,” says Capt. Ayers. Working with Col. Hollis, he arranged to have the second-in-command transferred to a city near the Syrian border. Despite suspicions, there wasn’t definitive evidence that the man had been involved with the murder of Col. Mohammed or the insurgency. No one has been arrested for the killings.
The murdered colonel’s brother was promoted to chief of police, even though locals complained he continued to extort money from his officers.
“How much corruption is too much?” Capt. Ayers asks. “That’s something they don’t teach you before you come here.”
Capt. Ayers took lessons from his fellow captains. In April, Capt. Jesse Beaudin convinced a friend from the U.S. to send backpacks, notebooks and pencils for schoolchildren. Kids mobbed troops for the goods whenever they went out on patrol. “The kids provided security. No one attacked us when we were surrounded by children,” Capt. Beaudin says. After hearing about this tactic at the dining hall, Capt. Ayers’s men also wrote home requesting school supplies.
The battalion’s captains also worked together to fashion a solution to attacks on supply convoys. In April, the attacks were so severe that some military fuel sites in western Iraq were down to two days’ worth of fuel. Units were running low on water and food.
Most of the convoy attacks began with a remote-detonated roadside bomb. The Army had long assumed most of the bombs were laid at night. Capt. Ayers sent out small teams of snipers with night-vision equipment to pick off people planting bombs. They couldn’t find any.
Talking with fellow company commanders, Capt. Ayers guessed that the bombs were being laid during the day. He theorized the locals were too scared to stop the insurgents or to turn them in to the Americans. Capt. Ayers asked his boss, Col. Hollis, if he could pull some his troops out of the villages and post them on highway overpasses around the clock. Instead of trying to catch the insurgents, he would try to deter the attacks with an overt presence.
The roadside bombs stopped almost overnight. In May, Col. Hollis ordered his other company commanders to adopt the same approach. Since then there hasn’t been an attack on the 38 miles of highway overseen by the battalion – a huge change from April when the U.S. was losing a service member to injury or death on the stretch every 36 hours.
Although the tactic has been effective, soldiers hate sitting for hours and watching traffic. They worry that cutting back on neighborhood patrols has given insurgents free rein in town.
On a recent day, Capt. Ayers and his troops jumped in their Humvee and raced toward a giant column of smoke rising near the police station. Insurgents in a white Opal sedan had fired into an Iraqi truck that had been hauling equipment for the Americans. When the wounded truck driver pulled over, insurgents set the vehicle on fire.
At the scene, Capt. Ayers picked up the spent shell casings to identify the weapon the insurgents used. He interviewed witnesses and studied the skid marks the truck had left on the road. The Army had never trained him for detective work, but he picked up these skills on the job.
When the fire was extinguished, the charred truck was towed to the police station. The next morning, insurgents launched a rocket attack on Capt. Ayers’s base. The barracks’ windows were blown open, but no one was hurt. A similar attack in May killed eight soldiers. Later the same day, insurgents lit the charred truck, still parked in the police department’s lot, on fire again. The terrified police didn’t try to stop them.
Capt. Ayers went back to the police station and confronted the new police chief, Maj. Khalid Ibrahim, who had been appointed by the new Iraqi Interior Ministry. (The previous chief, whose appointment Capt. Ayers had arranged, had been transferred for firing his pistol at one of his officers and demanding money from his officers.)
“How could you let this happen?” Capt. Ayers asked Maj. Khalid, pointing to the still-smoldering truck.
“I am very sorry,” the 50-year-old chief said.
“You don’t need to apologize to me, you need to do better,” Capt. Ayers replied.
The chief promised to step up patrols in the area where the rockets were fired.
Back at his barracks, surrounded by pictures of his wife and two children, ages 1 and 2, Capt. Ayers seemed to be looking for something positive in the day’s events. The new chief is an improvement over his predecessor, he said. “Every day that Iraqi police station is still standing is a victory. It is a small bastion of government control,” he added.
Last week, after 12 months in Iraq, Capt. Ayers returned to his home in Kansas. He’s prepared a tome full of advice for his replacement. In the book are histories of the local sheiks and tribes, their grudges and fleeting alliances. There is a section on funeral etiquette.
He also wrote a section on the sheik who helped him get the machine gun back. A few days after the incident, insurgents, angry that he had aided the Americans, murdered the sheik’s son. “I thought if he had enough influence to get the stuff back, he also had enough influence” to protect his family, Capt. Ayers now says. “I was wrong.” Capt. Ayers says he advised his replacement to handle the sheik with deference.
Capt. Ayers, who was recently selected by the Army to teach at West Point, has begun to think about how a young soldier could prepare for what he’s been through. Before deploying to Iraq, he and his soldiers fought a giant mock tank battle at the National Training Center. It wasn’t helpful.
Instead, he says, “I guess I’d drop soldiers in a foreign high school and give them two days to figure out all the cliques. Who are the cool kids? Who are the geeks?” he says. That would be pretty close to what he has been doing in Iraq, he says, with one big exception: There would also have to be people in the high school trying to kill the soldiers.
Write to Greg Jaffe at greg.jaffe@wsj.com
Security picture not so rosy
BY TIMOTHY M. PHELPS
WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF
September 24, 2004
WASHINGTON - According to Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi yesterday in an address to Congress, his government “commands almost 50,000 armed and combat-ready Iraqis.”
President George W. Bush, standing next to Allawi later at a White House news conference, boasted that if police are added to the number, there are nearly 100,000 “fully trained and equipped” Iraqi soldiers, police and other security forces. Allawi agreed.
But Middle East experts here say those numbers are very misleading - and the generally rosy picture the two men painted of what is happening in Iraq is as well.
In reality, according to Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies here, Allawi has at his disposal a “core force” of only six army battalions - just 4,200 men. The rest are as yet untrained, in other branches or otherwise not available to fight the enduring insurgency on the ground.
While Iraq claims more than 100,000 police and other security personnel, nearly half have no training at all and the majority have no weapons, vehicles or body armor necessary to work in Iraq, Cordesman said, in both cases citing Pentagon statistics.
What’s more, the police are also “deeply corrupt, horribly ineffective” and do not have the will to fight, said Cordesman’s colleague Jon Alterman.
These numbers are important because Iraqi forces are expected to take the leading role in providing security for the elections that Allawi insisted this week will be held in January as scheduled. The Iraqi people adamantly oppose the presence of U.S. forces, according to recent polls, and would not tolerate a U.S. military assault on Fallujah and other renegade cities, which would have to take place before elections if everyone were to be included.
The success or failure of those elections - the extent to which they are seen as legitimate - is likely to determine whether a fledgling Iraq emerges from the protective nest provided by U.S. troops to fly on its own as an independent, democratic state.
But while Allawi insisted the image of pervasive violence in Iraq is a media distortion, the situation in Iraq has gone “from relatively bad to relatively worse,” Michael O’Hanlon, a military analyst from the Brookings Institution, said in a report last week.
He said insurgent attacks on U.S. forces are up 20 percent since spring and have doubled since winter, while the number of resistance fighters has increased four times in that same period.
The positive image of Iraq painted yesterday is “misleading” and “pretty close to just flat-out wrong,” O’Hanlon said yesterday in an interview. The danger, he said, is that the truth will “ultimately erode the credibility of both the heads of state who were joined together at the hip today.”
But other Washington analysts said the pair’s joint appearance had more to do with the U.S. election than the Iraqi election.
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the Democratic presidential candidate, has begun a persistent bombardment of Bush’s Iraq policy this week, replacing domestic issues at least for the moment as the primary issue of the campaign.
Allawi’s remarks were “highly selective and designed to thank the president and ultimately help the president,” said Alterman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The fact is as well that Allawi is visiting six weeks before the election rather than one week before because everybody understands that the Iraq story is not a completely happy story.”
Copyright ? 2004, Newsday, Inc.