Brave Iraqi Freedom Fighters attack New World Order Baghdad HQ

[HershOstropoler]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


there also seems to be an assumption that the Baathists and the Sunni fundamentalists are completely distinct. In fact senior Sunni clergy where appointed by Saddam and supported him in their sermons.

"senior clergy" and "fundamentalists" are two pairs of shoes.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


the expats claim they were in regular contact with allies on the inside. And the claim that the expats didnt have knowledge was made by State and CIA, who seem to be less well placed for knowledge of the inside than the INC.

More time for planning - well yes, but the two different sides of the admin had conflicting plans, and the conflicts were never resolved. The State plan was apparently to give up control to the UN and thus use foreign troops - DoD vetoed. Dod's plan was to use the INC - State and CIA vetoed. In the absence of agreement it was hoped some conventional Iraqi army units would come over intact and act as police - but that didnt happen - then it was time to improvise.

Winging it on the occupation phase isn't very smart, especially with the WMD findings. If Saddam really was an imminent security threat, then there was no choice about timing, but the evidence is that he was not an imminent threat, just a long-term pain in the ass that needed removing at a time more of our convenience. Nothing at this point really indicates that we couldn't have picked a delayed entry (this assumes going back and delaying transport and predeployment of forces), toned down the rhetoric, and attacked at the end of summer, with the additional time used to prepare both for infrastructure issues and occupation/transition issues.

For the Bush admin and the US, it's the result at the end, not at the beginning, that determines our success or failure. Most people, left or right, agreed before this started that we needed to do an exceptional job in the occupation and transition, to have the desired effect in the middle east. Overall, our performance is a real mixed bag - we're mopping the floor with the deck of cards people, but behind schedule and underperforming on a lot of mundane issues that have a lot of collective importance and prestige.

[GePap]

In the later part of his regime Saddam was playing up the Islamic card as a way to dvide the popualce and seek conformity and support from the Sunni center. But to me that smells of using religion as a tool, not in being a believer for a second, and Baathist ideology does not particualrly play well with fundy Islam. as for Ansar, another exmaple of using someone who is a thorn on the side of an enemy (Kurds).

[GePap]

I am sorry, but as for the "deck of cards" people: I think the general expectation was that with the fall of the regime all these people would be hisotry within days. That several months later we are stil hearing about clubs of this, diamonds of that might make great news, but hardly seems like the sign of a gret successs. After all, it points to a messy, no linear ending to a quick little war.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Considering that people like Barbie, Eichmann, von dem Bach-Zelevski, Lammerding, et al took decades to run down, or never were run down, I wouldn't get too bent that we only have half and change of the deck within the first six months.

I don't know who would expect them all to be gone within days, certainly not the Pentagon or Bush admin that I heard.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by GePap
In the later part of his regime Saddam was playing up the Islamic card as a way to dvide the popualce and seek conformity and support from the Sunni center. But to me that smells of using religion as a tool, not in being a believer for a second, and Baathist ideology does not particualrly play well with fundy Islam. as for Ansar, another exmaple of using someone who is a thorn on the side of an enemy (Kurds).

teh question is not whether saddam was a believer in his heart of hearts but whether there is any clear demarcation between Baathist Fedayeen and AL Ansar and other Islamist terrorists. As for Baathist ideology, its by no means obvious to me that anyone in the regime is seriously commited to Baathist ideology anyway - (not that i think that there was a clearcut end to ideology in '68 as some claim - IMHO Baathism was closer to fascism and farther from social democracy than most apologists for Michel Afleq will admit)

[GePap]

Iraq was not Nazi germany: it didn;t take years an hundreads of thusands of lives to win this war, and the enemy was not a significant power. Plus most of the people you name were lower, second tier scum. Hitler didn;t make it past day 0 after, people like georing and Himmler and Geobles were gone pretty much instantly, or less time afterwards. Ditto for the Speer's and Fricks and so forth. And ditto for the Japanese, so if we are going to use WW2 as a measure, no this is no success.

As for not hearing anything on the matter from Bush: this is the same admin. that epects WMD"s to be found in mass still, wouldn;t say how many troops or howmuch it would cost before hand, so really what they say is pretty much immaterial most of the time.

What matters is the perception of Iraqis. How easy is it tot hink :hmm, these guys can win a war in three weeks, but several months later they don;t have Saddam and we have spotty power..what is wrong with them?

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by GePap
I am sorry, but as for the "deck of cards" people: I think the general expectation was that with the fall of the regime all these people would be hisotry within days. That several months later we are stil hearing about clubs of this, diamonds of that might make great news, but hardly seems like the sign of a gret successs. After all, it points to a messy, no linear ending to a quick little war.

Im not trying to make a comparison to some predicted linear ending of a quick little war. As you have said so eloquently, theres nothing to be gained by going back and comparing predicitions. We are where we are. And I was merely pointing out an important fact.

[GePap]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


teh question is not whether saddam was a believer in his heart of hearts but whether there is any clear demarcation between Baathist Fedayeen and AL Ansar and other Islamist terrorists. As for Baathist ideology, its by no means obvious to me that anyone in the regime is seriously commited to Baathist ideology anyway -

That they two may share interest does not mean they share commands, nor tactics, nor aims. As for not being commited Baathist, fine, but you have to be commited to blow yourself up in a truck.

My guess is that we have Baathist cells and Islamist cells, and that if once in a while they cooperate, they cenrtainly don;t all follow the same pied piper.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat


Winging it on the occupation phase isn't very smart, especially with the WMD findings. If Saddam really was an imminent security threat, then there was no choice about timing, but the evidence is that he was not an imminent threat, just a long-term pain in the ass that needed removing at a time more of our convenience. Nothing at this point really indicates that we couldn't have picked a delayed entry (this assumes going back and delaying transport and predeployment of forces), toned down the rhetoric, and attacked at the end of summer, with the additional time used to prepare both for infrastructure issues and occupation/transition issues.

\
Given the deep, and profoundly ideological divisions in the administration (outlined above) I dont see how waiting any further would have resolved the division over the occupation strategy.

And at what point would you have made this change - In early March? Retreating at that point would very likely have made re-entry in a few months politically impossible, would have left the Kuwaitis and Qataris in the lurch and very vulnerable, and would have undercut the Pal-Israeli peace process and other US initiatives.

[SlowwHand]

Originally posted by GePap
I am sorry, but as for the "deck of cards" people: I think the general expectation was that with the fall of the regime all these people would be hisotry within days. That several months later we are stil hearing about clubs of this, diamonds of that might make great news, but hardly seems like the sign of a gret successs. After all, it points to a messy, no linear ending to a quick little war.

You mean, even with Bush saying it would be a long time, some dumb bastards thought it would be a matter of days??
Who's fault is that? Bush, I suppose.

[ixnay]

I'd put my money on US soldiers calling in an airstrike on the UN HQ after seeing a man with an apple and mistaking it for a grenade.

[GePap]

This admin was planning this war from the middle of 2002 onward. They had plenty of time to give these notions good thought. I am sure many in the admin. did beliee Iraq to be an imminent threat, though clearly they were wrong. Still, the entire process by which we came to going to war was a huge mess, and the most significant reason by far why I opposed this whole enterprise. And the shoddy and incomplete preparations have given us an even more murky end that this whole thing would lead to. And we aren't even yet at the hard part: which comes when it comes time to devide the spolis of politics in a more permanent way.

[GePap]

Originally posted by SlowwHand
You mean, even with Bush saying it would be a long time, some dumb bastards thought it would be a matter of days??
Who's fault is that? Bush, I suppose.

You mean the same Bush who on May 1st declared and end to "major combat"?

Of course the admin. said it would not be easy early on (though they never qualified the costs or what it would take beofre the war anyhow): they changed their tune by mid time (I remeber all those triumphal comments and cartoons that came out mid April to early may), but now we are back to "long term?" What ever happened to the occuaption being done and over in 6 months? (though the guy who made tha statement did not outlive it for long)

How quickly views on this change, no?

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by GePap


That they two may share interest does not mean they share commands, nor tactics, nor aims. As for not being commited Baathist, fine, but you have to be commited to blow yourself up in a truck.

My guess is that we have Baathist cells and Islamist cells, and that if once in a while they cooperate, they cenrtainly don;t all follow the same pied piper.

they may not share ultimate aims, but they certainly share the short term aim of driving the coalition out of Iraq. And its not clear that the local Sunni Islamists, at any rate, have any better prospects in the long term than the return of Saddam. Unlike the foreigners, who rules in Iraq really matters to them. ANd unlike the Shiites, they have no prospect of taking power on their own. So a Saddam return is probably the best they can do.

Share tactics - I assume they will share whatever works. While suicide bombing is historically the province of Islamists, not of Arab nationalists, the Al Aqsa Martyrs brigades in Palestine is a branch of historically secular Arab nationalist Fatah, and yet has adopted suicide bombing as a tactic. So it does not seem far fetched to me that a hard core fedayeen, faced with no future, with the defeat of their lifelong goals and ambitions, both ideological and personal, and with the likelihood of death at the hands of vengeful of Iraqis at some point anyway, would be willing to commit suicide.

Share command? well i certainly dont claim to know the stucture of command of the baddies there. I suspect there are more than two chains of command - it does not seem likely that Baathists all over the country have the communications ability to maintain a single coordinated chain of command. So probably there are different organizations in different parts of the country.While there may be some places where Baathists and Islamists maintain parallel chains, its not at all unlikely that in some places Baathists work under Islamist command, and Islamists work under Baathist command - even if i accept your distinction (which i dont, entirely) between Baathists and islamists.

IIUC during WW2 partisans of very different ideological stripes worked together and even under common command against a common enemy.