Outgoing Marine Corp Chief of Staff Mike Hagee, has stated ...
He says he was deeply concerned about who would take charge of major Iraqi cities, like Najaf, as the Marines pushed through them on their way to Baghdad.Hagee says he asked his boss again and again who would take charge of those cities. He wanted to know what the plan was for Phase IV — military terminology for the phase that follows the end of major combat operations. Phase IV is, in other words, what comes after "mission accomplished." Hagee says that he sent his questions up the chain of command, as they say in the military — and never heard back.
Galactically inexcusable stupidity. The kind we see everyday in real life. WRIT LARGE
In Feb 2003, retiring chief of staff Genl Shinseki warned that OCCUPATION would take several hundred thousand (War games predicted 400,000).
We conquered the joint in the advertised "cake walk" with about 80,000 or LESS at the pointy end of the spear.
John McCain repeatedly has insisted that more men are MANDATORY to achieve anything.
Yet, it has been reported that up to 2/3 of the American people (I don't know where) now think that going into Iraq was wrong. Nobody is adding one man under such a mess of opinion.
If it is not yet clear that garrisoning a state, and introducing self responsibility requires something other than the army and Marines (or JUST the army and marines) then nothing will make this clear. We need a "state construction" force with the know how to create something out of nothing, and the force security to protect the human capital and brains it takes to fulfill such a job, as well as the indigenous brave souls willing to step forward and commit acts.
None of these mistakes makes the ridding of the world of the rule of Saddam Hussein WRONG. It makes the execution of that ridding an inexcusable conglomeration of incompetence and wishful thinking. But the only choice for rejection of this incompetence turns out now to be Pelosi and her choices of Murtha, and Alcee Hastings. This portends very ill for the USA and free peoples. It leads to even more unpalatable and graver situations.
Make no mistake where the responsibility for this lies.
It lies with Mr. Bush
Continue reading "Conflating incompetent execution with right and wrong" »
24 comments:
Epaminondas, I agree entirely with you. The performance of the Bush government has been close to incompetence.
The problem has not been wording but execution.
I see Katrina as another eye opener. How can the mightiest country in world, a hyper power no less, not handle a minor natural catastrophe?
It is sad that a government, which ideologically was on the right track and with a congress backing it, could not create any better results in Iraq. How can politicians be so arrogant and not listen to the military?
Any person with knowledge of military history will tell you that combat troops are not right for the occupation of a country. For that you need at constabulary and lots of it, if you are not prepared to reign with terror. The Romans knew this perfectly well two thousand years ago.
Well, Katrina wasn't minor ..the storm was about the size of France (imagined the entire Iberian peninsula wrapped in 220KPH winds for a day and a half with minimally half a meter of rain)..however, while certain performances were abysmal the largest failure...lack of personal responsibility in preparedness. If you are going to depend on the federal govt to save your ass, you are screwed before you begin.
If you can't help yourself, that's one thing. But the first responders to that are the municipality and county, then the state ( which btw means the national guard, who DID have plenty of assets ), THEN the federal govt, who until Katrina really had not been expected to do much more than guaranty disaster loans and grants.
Only because the local then state govts UTTERLY failed in every way, was the federal response exposed. They failed, but the worse failure was local..note that in Mississippi where the most intense winds were experienced, response was far better locally, and thus the horror stories are missing.
Personal responsibility and individual ingenuity remains the best answer to such emergencies, and by far the most 'american'. Govt sucks. Ours sucks 5% less than most of the rest. Most of the time. That's the good news
Von Schlicht,
The fact that you think Katrina was a minor natural catastrophe shows what bad publicity America and George Bush get in the press. Katrina was the worst natural catastrophe to hit the United States ever, if I am not mistaken. The idea of blaming George Bush or the Federal Government for what happened in the wake of Katrina is completely absurd.
In 1818 or there abouts there was a massive earthquake in the Mississippi basin which caused I don't know how square miles of flooding and what about Mt. Helena we tend to look on national desasters only when there is a large loss of life
BTW, back to occupation of Iraq and the failure until now.
The US has completed two incredibly successful occucapations in history, namely Germany (shared responsibility) and Japan (sole responsibility).
Were/are the same procedures used in Iraq?
I will not discount another possibility: Maybe any occupation of Iraq was doomed to fail. It may simply be this: The use of procedures that work with a civilized people may not work with savages.
Von Schlicht,
There is no reason to be condescending towards me. I wasn't condescending towards you.
My point is, the media lies about America and it lies about George Bush, and they do it on a constant basis. What Epa pointed out is true. The state and local authorities did drop the ball, and in fact, it even look like, in the case of the governor and the state, that they were dead set on defying whatever the feds told them to do.
Yes, the Indonesian tsunami was worse. No doubt. But, I didn't say Katrina was the worst thing to ever happen. I said it was the worst natural catastrophe in American history.
I think you might want to check your numbers on Earthquakes, however. Most of the earthquakes that kill thousands of people are no worse than the ones we sustain in California on a semi-regular basis.
The difference is, we are prepared for them.
And, you know what? We are prepared for them because our federal, state and local governments require that we be prepared.
Pastorius, I did not mean to condescending at all?! If it came out like that I apologize. English is not even my second language and sometimes I lack some feeling for the finer nuances.
You mean I was condescending by explaining why I think Katrina was not a big disaster?
It is difficult to write about this without stepping on national feelings. Of course the earthquakes in California are among the worst and of course there are few casualties because you are prepared on all levels in California.
I also know, having lived in the US in the South and in New England and having visited numerous places that there are huge local differences in the US, as there are in all big countries. The local authorities were incompetent and the people staying put when told to leave were not very bright.
I am also not sure that that we in Europe would have handled a storm like that any better. Here in Southern Europe we sure wouldn't. The storms here fortunately just don't get that big.
But that does not change the fact, and to my disappointment, that the US government in this matter showed failure to resolve the situation. And this to a degree that was remarkable compared to expectations. It did have a political effect outside the US.
Now I was not on the ground when Katrina hit, and I know by experience that the MSM are not to be trusted in their reporting - so of course I take the reporting with a grain of salt.
But I was still disappointed. I count my self as one of the strong supporters of the US and I used to like Bush and his resolve. Now imagine what the US haters got out of the event.
Seems that some of you may have forgotten that ALL the troubles in Iraq, caint be attributed to Iraq alone.. Iran and Syria have made large contributions to Iraq's problems and Saudi has had its additions as well..
The only way to have had it a simple operation was to not have done it at all, and I thank it will still be proven that was not an option either.. Other than that, we would have had to NEUTRALIZE the whole of the Mid East to ever see a solution to the problems that are forever gonna keep raisin their ugly heads there..
To have attempted to do THAT very thang, but one-piece-at-a-time could maybe be seen as foolish or imcompetent, but it was still a helluva lot more than anybody else had tried to do..
Many many times have there been leaders to try and get "footholds" in areas of stife and conflict, and many have been successes and many have been failures, but IMO, the worst failures have been those that did nothin, like those people in Nawlins..
For 60 years attempts to make the levees better in the Nawlins area had been tried, but they had protests and suits and any type of opposition that could be imagined used against it.. Nothin got done, and so a bunch of died and a bunch more are now homeless..
We have also had protests and suits and any kind of opposition you can imagine over Iraq, too.. Will the Mid East be the flood over America's levees ?? To see that, all we have to do, is do nothin !!
Iraq, is one campaign in world wide effort wb, as you say.
Why did Bush fail to lay the groundwork to eliminate Iraq, Iran, Syria, Pakistan-ISI-Waziristan-Taliban, etc as well as the Al Sheik's in KSA...the ledership of the Muslim brotherhood, HAMAS...why did Bush fail to educate the American public that this is all one thing, and that our fate to DEAL with the lot is NOT VOLUNTARY. Why did Bush not call America and free peoples to recognize what cannot be avoided?
Bush failed.
That's it.
Next up.
Hillary?
Who knows, maybe underneath all that soft exterior is the son of bitch we are looking for.
LOL
Von Schlicht,
Sorry. I was grumpy this morning. Let's just forget about it, if that''s ok with you.
:)
G.W. never would have gotten the go-ahead to wage a war that big.. He would have had to admit what it really was then.. A Religious War .. A Crusade !!
What percentage of the people still today refuse to admit that ?? So far, the biggest part of our leaders have managed to deny it, no matter how much the Other Side screams it from the Mosques.. Its gonna take those same screams from every Town Square and Mall in America for the more dense to ever get the point..
We still havent gotten any HONEST analysis of the last election yet, so any thoughts about the next one are a little bit beyond me right now.. But I have noticed that tThe Hildebeast is already to try and buy some votes with Socialized Healthcare promises..
Pastorius, already forgotten :)
Back to fight against islamofascism. We don't disagree enough to forget the real fight.
"Galactically inexcusable stupidity" ???
As journalist with 30 some odd years of experience I claim the right to steal that expression.
"None of these mistakes makes the ridding of the world of the rule of Saddam Hussein WRONG."
True.
However....
It was most likely a strategic blunder of the first magnitude.
Defanging Saddam and chasing his army out of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia seemed reasonable at the time, but 15 years later it must be realised that the secular Hussein was far preferable to the Kuwaiti and Saudi Royals. (By the way, I was briefly in Kuwait and Iraq during the Gulf War as a correspondent for an Israel newspaper)
Our intervention in the dispute was not rewarded by respect and loyalty..far from it, we proved ourselves to be "servants" of the Arab tribes, and therefore less than human, and open to attack....which came swiftly after the liberation.
The Saudi and Kuwaiti tribal chieftains (The "Royals"...former sand merchants and camel butchers) were quick to boast of having bought the services of Infidel armies...so as to keep their hands clean, and avoid spilling the blood of their Iraqi brothers. ("Bought" is a disputed term, as the Royals have not yet paid our "Infidel" governments for services rendered)
If Sadddam had been allowed to remain in Kuwait, and topple the House of Saud..the veil would have fallen from the faces of women in the Gulf, Pubs and bars would have become more popular than the Friday executions that are presently the high point of the Saudi entertainment calender, and the Iranian mullahs would be under pressure from within to follow suit.
We should be fighting a war against ISLAM. If we fail to do so the West and our Republic will disappear from the map, replaced by a goatskin delineating the expanse of the Final Caliphate.
Secular dictators are far more preferable (and easier to negotiate with) than the [Islamic]religious regimes that we have foolishly installed in Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Turkey and Afghanistan. Having said that, we must come to terms with our mistakes and realise that we cannot continue to view Muslim regimes as if they are merely mis-guided Westerners. "Cut and Run" is no longer an option with regard to Iraq. As the Israeli experience has illustrated, a peacful withdrawal from Iraq will only serve to embolden the Islamists, and bring American trained and U.S. armed Jihadis to our own cities and military enclaves.
Islam is based entirely on conquest and submission. Whatever mistakes we have made in the planning and execution of this Iraq war, we must now play by Islam's own rulebook...and let the Ummah know that the price to be paid for messing with the U.S. is to be conquered, their religious and military leaders vanquished...and their entire society forced to submit to American values and traditions.
An Iraqi nation free from the tyranny of Islam, (Banned in public as it was under the great Ataturk)celebrating their freedom by feasting on turkey and cranberries grown in the wetlands of the Tigris and Euphrates, will be a nation that we can confidently leave to their own affairs.
Excellent analysis, Michael Travis. I agree.
I, myself, admit, I could not have forseen the way things turned out in Iraq. I thought what we were doing was a noble endeavor. I still do think so. However, now i look at it as a noble failure. Now, we have to fix it.
Well Michael Travis, I agree with some of what you say...but color me what might be considered neocon...(But actually LIBERAL).
The USA must stand for democracy and individual rights. We must do all we can to SPREAD THAT. We must recognize (a la Kagan) that we are a revolutionary nation, and we always have been, and when we step away from that (as in any handy dictator as long as they oppose communists..we lose out moral superiority, and we lose our MORALE as a nation). Today Bush has abandoned that idea for the realpolitik of any strongman, or strong famiglia (Al Saud) as long as they oppose jihadis. Thus Mubarak, Musharraf...this will be accompanied by the concommittant drop in moral as in the end it makes no different from England circa 1850.
In this world as in business, there is no such thing as STATUS QUO, you are either headed up or down. The USA has always been a dangerous revolutionary nation.
Embrace the Zen of it, beacuse if the tawhid of freedom and rights does not diminish the tawhid of Ibn Tamiyya and Sayd Qutb, and the Khomeinists, we are going to be killing an awful lot of people.
Forget John Foster Dulles, and find your inner TR. Realpolitik will not be enough in this war.
If nothing else, in Iraq the Kurds deserve our protection and support, they are walking the walk..if we walk away from them (AGAIN), we will deserve all the calumny there is.
Epa,
The only way to spread Democracy is to completely destroy the enemy so that he recognizes that he is defeated.
We have not done that in Iraq. I don't think there is a burgeoning human rights respecting Democracy in Iraq.
Do you?
Kurdistan. The Kurds have EARNED our support.
The rest seem to place more value in killing than creating, and settling scores more than setting up self government. Never the less, PULLING out will result in candy begin thrown into the streets in every city from Morocco to the Chinese border at the behest of the murderers.
This tasks me, Mr. Starbuck
Yeah, you know, you are right. It seems that the Kurds have earned our support.
Don't understand the "Mr. Starbuck" reference.
Captain Ahab explaining why he will try the last against the white whale..
I'm embarrassed. I should have remembered that.
HS lit sucks ..it's Gregory Peck I remember, and Leo Genn
No, but I actually loved the book Moby Dick. It's among my favorite novels.
That's why I should have known the reference.
But alas, the coffee shop has replaced the literature in my memory.
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