>I am about pride and saving face. We disgraced the military and the >country by quitting. Now, I never thought that we should have been in >Vietnam in the first place. We suffered from not paying attention to >history. Other countries tried what we did and failed. I see no reason >why we would have made a difference. But then again, that war was being >fought by the politicians and the military had to fight with one hand >tied behind their backs. Perhaps if the politicians had let General >Westmorland fight the North the way he wanted, things would have been >different. Just like if Clinton had allowed tanks and bradleys in >Somalia like the General that was running that conflict had asked for, >things would have been different as well. The military got to run WWI, >WWII and Desert Storm and you see the results of that? We won hands >down. The wars that politicians want to fight, Vietnam, Somalia were all >lost. Do you see a pattern here?
One second now, who ran the war again? You're making the same arguments that the german extremists did at the end of the first world war. Was it the politicians or the military who ran the Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation. According to the official history, and lessons learned it was the army who fucked up. So Bruce, if you're going to BS at least get the BS straight. >From the International Herald Tribune (BTW I can post almost the same article >from the Washington Times if you need something closer to the right). http://antiwrap.com/x486cf344b1706 http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/29/mideast/army.php Occupation plan for Iraq faulted in U.S. Army history By Michael R. Gordon Sunday, June 29, 2008 WASHINGTON: Soon after U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, General Tommy Franks surprised senior U.S. Army officers by revamping the military command in Baghdad. The decision reflected the assumption by Franks, the top U.S. commander for the Iraq invasion, that the major fighting was over. But according to an army history that is to be made public on Monday, the move put the military effort in the hands of a short-staffed headquarters led by a newly promoted three-star general and was made over the objections of the army's vice chief of staff. "The move was sudden and caught most of the senior commanders in Iraq unaware," states the history, which adds that the staff for the new headquarters was not initially "configured for the types of responsibilities it received." An aide to Franks said that the former commander had covered Iraq decisions in his book, and Franks told army historians that it was the Pentagon's responsibility to make sure the new Iraq headquarters was properly established. The story of the American occupation of Iraq has been the subject of numerous books, studies and memoirs. But now the army has waded into the highly charged debate with its own 696-page account: "On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign." The unclassified study, the second volume in a continuing history of the Iraq conflict, is as noteworthy for who prepared it as for what it says. In essence, the study is an attempt by the army to tell the story of one of the most contentious periods in its history to military experts - and to itself. The study adds to a growing body of literature about the problems that the United States encountered in Iraq, not all of which has been embraced by army leaders. Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling of the army ignited a debate when he wrote a magazine article that criticized American generals for failing to prepare a coherent plan to stabilize postwar Iraq. In 2005, the RAND Corp. submitted a report to the army, called "Rebuilding Iraq," that identified problems with virtually every government agency that played a role in planning the postwar phase. That report, after a long delay, is scheduled to be made public on Monday. But the "On Point" report carries the imprimatur of the army's Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas. The study is based on 200 interviews conducted by military historians and includes long quotations from active or recently retired army officers. Publication was delayed six months so that General George Casey Jr., the current army chief of staff and former top commander in Iraq, could be interviewed for the study and senior army leaders could review a draft. The study's authors were instructed not to shy away from controversy while withholding a final verdict on whether senior officials had made mistakes that decisively altered the course of the war, said Colonel Timothy Reese, the director of the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, who along with Donald Wright, a civilian historian at the institute, oversaw the preparation of the volume. Even so, the study documents a number of problems that hampered the army's ability to stabilize the country during Phase IV, as the postwar stage was called. "The army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better Phase IV planning and preparations through its voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff," the study noted. "The military means employed were sufficient to destroy the Saddam regime; they were not sufficient to replace it with the type of nation-state the United States wished to see in its place." For his part, Franks said through an aide that he had covered Iraq decisions in his book and had not seen the forthcoming report. The study focuses on the 18 months that followed President George W. Bush's May 2003 announcement that major combat operations in Iraq were over. It was a period when the army took on unanticipated occupation duties and was forced to develop new intelligence-gathering techniques, armor its Humvees, revise its tactics and, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, review its detention practices. A significant problem, the study says, was the lack of detailed plans before the war for the postwar phase of the conflict, a deficiency that reflected the general optimism in the White House and in the Pentagon, led by the secretary of defense at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, about Iraq's future, and an assumption that civilian agencies would assume much of the burden. "I can remember asking the question during our war gaming and the development of our plan, 'O.K., we are in Baghdad, what next?' No real good answers came forth," Colonel Thomas Torrance, the commander of the 3rd Infantry Division's artillery, told army historians. The allied land war command, which was led by Lieutenant General David McKiernan and which reported to Franks, did additional work on the postwar phase, but its plan was not formally distributed to the troops until April 2003, when the ground invasion was under way. Inadequate training was also a factor. Lieutenant Colonel Troy Perry, the operations officer of the 1st Battalion, 68th Armor Regiment, told army historians that his unit trained extensively, but not for the sort of problems that it would encounter in conducting "stability operations" for securing Iraq once Baghdad fell. A fundamental assumption that hobbled the military's planning was that Iraq's ministries and institutions would continue to function even after Saddam Hussein's government was toppled. "We had the wrong assumptions, and therefore we had the wrong plan to put into play," said General William Wallace, who led the V Corps during the invasion and currently leads the army's Training and Doctrine Command. Faced with a brewing insurgency and occupation duties that they had not anticipated, army units were forced to adapt. But organizational decisions made in May and June 2003 complicated that task. L. Paul Bremer 3rd, who replaced Jay Garner as the chief civilian administrator in Iraq, issued decrees to disband the Iraqi Army and ban thousands of former Baath Party members from working for the Iraqi government, orders that the study asserts caught U.S. field commanders "off guard" and "created a pool of disaffected and unemployed Sunni Arabs" that the insurgency could draw on. Some of Franks's moves also appeared divorced from the growing problems in Iraq. Before the fall of Baghdad, Colonel Kevin Benson, a planner at the land war command, developed a plan that called for using about 300,000 soldiers to secure postwar Iraq, about twice as many as were deployed. But that was not what Franks and the Bush administration had in mind. In an April 16 visit to Baghdad, Franks instructed his officers to be prepared to reduce forces rapidly during an "an abbreviated period of stability operations," the study notes. "In line with the prewar planning and general euphoria at the rapid crumbling of the Saddam regime, Franks continued to plan for a very limited role for U.S. ground forces in Iraq," the report says. The next month, Franks directed McKiernan, then the senior officer in Baghdad, to leave Iraq, along with the staff of his land war command, which had helped plan the invasion and had overseen the push to Baghdad. A new headquarters would be established to command the military forces in Iraq. It was to be led by Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who was newly promoted and had led the 1st Armored Division into Iraq. Sanchez had been picked to succeed Wallace as the head of the army's V Corps, which was to serve as the nucleus of the newly established command. When General Jack Keane, the vice chief of staff of the army, learned of the move, he was upset. Keane had helped McKiernan assemble his headquarters, which had long been focused on Iraq and had more high-ranking officers than V Corps, which had been deployed from Europe. Keane assumed that McKiernan's headquarters would oversee what was fast becoming a troubled occupation. "I think we did not put the best experienced headquarters that we had in charge of that operation," Keane said in an interview with army historians. "It took us months, six or seven or eight months, to get some semblance of a headquarters together so Sanchez could at least begin to function effectively." Keane told the historians that he raised his concerns at the time with Lieutenant General John Abizaid, who had been picked to succeed Franks as the head of Central Command. "I said, 'Jesus Christ, John, this is a recipe for disaster,"' Keane told army historians. "I was upset about it to say the least, but the decision had been made, and it was a done deal." Asked about the decision to establish a new headquarters, Franks told army historians that he had told the Pentagon what was needed and that it was the Defense Department's responsibility to ensure that the headquarters was rapidly installed. He said he told the Pentagon leadership that a new headquarters was needed and that it was up to them to "figure it out." Sanchez, who has retired from the army and recently published a book about his time in Iraq, told historians that his new command was hampered by staff shortages and by the failure to coordinate the transfer of responsibilities to his new headquarters. "There was not a single session that was held at the command level to hand off or transition anything," he said. Summing up the episode, Wallace told historians that the shift to a new headquarters involved a complicated transfer of responsibilities at a critical time. "You can't take a tactical headquarters and change it into an operational headquarters at the snap of your fingers," he said. "It just doesn't happen." >I see the same thing happening now and it disturbs me. We can win in >Iraq, but we have to be able to do it by letting the generals run the >war, not the politicians. Politicians need to do what they do best, >lying, cheating and pandering their way into and staying in office and >let the military do what they do best, fight and win wars. > >Bruce > >Gruss Gott wrote: >> And what'd we lose by leaving Vietnam and Somalia? Seems like there >> was zero downside. 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