34 Dead as Baghdad Bombers Hit Red Cross, Police

[Ned]

Thanks, Che. Well the agreement was easy to implement in 1973 with only 23,000 US troops left in Vietnam and with the Vietnamese military built up the way it was. Perhaps SV knew in 1968 that it was doomed if we withdrew in 60 days.

Just speculation. But this seems reasonable.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


Im a voter, so i guess in that sense im a policy maker. When i was 18 the US was at peace, and most people who joined the military did so cause they found it convenient. When 9/11 happened I was too old to join (and yes I looked it up) And yes, in forming my opinions i give credence to those who never fought as well as to those who did. I also recognize that the military leadership has its own institutional agendas, and that generals and JCS members are highly political, and their advice isnt guaranteed cause they led a platoon in Nam 35 years ago.

In case you take it personally, you should check on my treatment of lefty chicken chokers when it comes to things like troops exposing themselves to greater risk in the name of avoiding collateral damage, etc. Voters aren't policy makers, whoever it is, once you vote 'em in, you're along for the ride for the next two, four or six years.

I don't necessarily hold JCS types in any higher regard than chickenchokers or chickenhawks. However, in reluctant fairness to career officers, they are in theory placed in a number of command roles in addition to all the school and staff horse****. Haig and Powell have been the most notable exceptions (Haig espeically, since having his nose up Nixon's ass moved him from O6 to O10 in record pace without holding any intermediate command), but even Powell did battalion command, division ADC and Corps command before his NSC tour and political promotion to FORSCOM. Shinseki was politically fasttracked by Clinton from his division command tour on, but prior to that, he worked through the chain of command.

In my system, if you have a CIB or any decoration for actual combat involving significant personal risk (I don't consider hosing infantry at 500 meters with the coax mount on an M1A1 significant personal risk), you get a free pass, but other than that, if you're not MOS 11-B, C, D or Z, 18-, or maybe 12-B or combat aviation, you're in REMF country AFAIK. Uncle Sam's Misguided Children get some slack depending on their MOS, and there's a few squiddies and Air Farce types, but precious few of those. It's my system, I can ignore the opinions of the unqualified if I want to.

As far as the Big Bad Wolfie being under fire, I don't consider being on the opposite end of a building hit in a one-off terrorist attack to qualify him for a medal. Nor do I view a sight-seeing tour, where he was also in a building (albeit much higher, and heavily reinforced) that got popped at, to be more than showboating. I'm sure there are a lot of people with families who would love to get boogied on out of country the first time hostile fire came their way, but only Wolfie gets boogeying rights. It's a lot different from eating sand on a daily basis.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Chemical Ollie
Iraq is not Germany. It is not Korea, Vietnam or even Somalia. The closest comparison would be Afghanistan - Sovjet's invasion, that is. An easy victory, followed by a long occupation and a slow, grinding guerilla war where the occupation forces got new coffins to send home every day, until they eventually decided to leave.

USSR's Afghanistan and Vietnam were very similar. Iraq is also similar to each and the solution is the same. Build up the local military and withdraw. The USSR's problem was that it did not do this but chose to carry on the fight itself. We seem to be heading to a USSR style of debacle.

[Ramo]

Ansars links to AQ are based on individuals with membership in both organizations, like Zarqawi. This is no different then the links between the AQ and JI which pulled off the Bali bombing. The actual number of "sworn" AQ memebers seems to be actually rather small, only a few hundred. The vast majority the graduates of Bin Ladens training camps went off to affiliate organizations. Thats the way AQ works - through affiliates, united more by a common ideology and vision than by detailed organizational links. They seem to have moved even further in this direction since their central organization was attacked after 9/11.

Nonetheless, if al-Qaeda were able to pull off something this complicated in Baghdad, I'd expect the gov't to find at least some direct evidence

Al ansar had limited resources prior to Gulf War 2. Which made sense - there wasnt alot they could do, so AQ directed resources elsewhere - Zarqawi focused more on Saudi and Jordan. Since then two things have happened 1. The overthrow of Hussein, and subsequent instability, have both opened up Iraq as a field of operations, and made it imperative to AQ to see that the US fail in Iraq. 2. The Riyadh bombings of May resulted in a severe crackdown on AQ in Saudi Arabia. Both these would explain the new AQ focus on Iraq, which would result in AQ focusing resources on Ansar.

I don't care how much assistance Ansar has gotten from al-Qaeda. It simply has nowhere near the amount of resources needed to pull something like this off. Ever since the US invasion, Ansar has essentially been castrated - and it really wasn't all that powerful to start off with. The CS Monitor had a really article on the history of the organization a couple weeks ago:

"Such has been the fate of the majority of Ansar's original members, say these detained militants, which makes them skeptical that the group can be behind many of the current attacks in Iraq. Gharib estimates that of the 600 Ansar members, some 250 were killed, 50 "were officials who ran away," and the rest have been arrested by the PUK, have given themselves up, or are still in semi-hiding in Iran. "This virtually means that Ansar is over, by the numbers," says Gharib. "Anybody saying these [current attacks] are done by Ansar has no information. They can't do it.""

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1016/p12s01-woiq.html?related

Other way around - he called himself Syrian, then they decided he was Yemeni.

Ah, my bad.

Yemen has lots of Islamists - theres been a virtual civil war between the Islamists and govt. Are the still Arab nationalists who are not pro-govt?

Well, the gov't is an Arab nationalist one... Why should it matter if they're pro-gov't? And I think you overstate the Islamist rebellion - the gov't clearly has the upper hand.

Maybe, though i havent heard about them lately. The point is that you stated his nationality as evidence that this is NOT islamism at work. If hes yemeni his nationality is not such evidence.

Look at it this way: Half of the population is Shia, and probably at least half of the population is nationalist. The probability of this person being part of al-Qaeda can't be more than 1/4.

2. It happened on Ramadan. But AQ executes operations on Ramadan

Nonetheless, secular nationalists like the Ba'athists would be more likely to launch a major attack on the start of Ramadan than Sunni Islamists like al-Qaeda.

4. No AQ captured yet (that we know of) First this requires ignoring captured Ansar. Second, even if we ignore those, its easily explained by Coalition focus on Baathi, and superior AQ tradecraft.

We're not ignoring al-Qaeda. The idea that we're using disproportionate resources in dealing with the Ba'athists is totally absurd. To wit; look at how badly we've manhandled Ansar.

And again, Ansar is a very different thing from al-Qaeda.

Sure, al-Qaeda may be a more effective organization than the Ba'athist resistance given the number of people in them, but they're not gods. If they really are committing these sorts of resources to Iraq, I'd expect to at least see some hard evidence.

Is it POSSIBLE that its not AQ? certainly. But Id say theres at least a 75% probability that it was AQ and affiliates involved.

I'd say the opposite.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Ned
LoTM, I have a hard time understanding MtG because he seems to be inconsistent. I still would like to understand why he thinks building up the SV or Iraqi military and withdrawing US troops was or is a bad policy.

I'm very consistent. You just have to look deep under the surface.

"Building up the SV military" is exactly the problem. We let the generals in Saigon draft every g**k in the countryside they could lay their hands on, and simply facilitated absorbing VC elements into the ARVN. RF-PFs and MAT/DATs? They hosed our advisors on a regular basis. ARVN officers stealing payroll, or extorting cuts from the conscripts for them to get paid?

Due primarily to cultural differences, language barriers, and an institutional lack of desire to look at the unpleasant underbelly of things (like the Strategic Hamlet program), there was an entire undercurrent to building up the ARVN that nobody in command was interested in paying attention to. US troops and field commanders never liked having to rely on ARVN units other than the volunteer ARVN Rangers and Marines (who were a bit undisciplined and underarmed, but at least politically reliable and had some balls).

With respect to Iraq, we have a similar problem - it takes time to produce a coherent professional force, and we need to get swinging Cheneys into the line faster than we can sort out their backgrounds (to elininate political and intel risks), train them, make sure they really do get paid, make sure they're not riddled with infiltrators and sympathizers (or that we don't balkanize or sovietize things by having Kurds and Shiites be the main "local" ground force in Sunni areas).

We also have to train them to coordinate with US forces, to integrate with US command elements, and ideally, at least at critical staff and command levels, we want to have some semblance of peer relationships. All of that takes time to do properly, and takes resources to do properly, and many of those resources are in short supply (especially US interpreters with adequate expertise, background briefings, etc.)

Meanwhile, all this nice touchy-feely stuff doesn't have an immediate or near term impact on the security situation on the ground, so if you don't plan for them as two separate issues (creating an apolitical, accountable, professional Iraqi military force for long term security and stability when we let them run their own country again, vs. the immediate needs to break some heads on the ground), they get muddled together, and one gets shortcut to expedite the other.

That's where we ****ed up with the ARVN, but then we had to go through the dual set of motions that the generals we more or less had as our boys were in fact elected independent leaders on the one hand, and at the same time, really were our boys and didn't have their own thugopolistic agendas at cross-purposes to our agenda.

The US approach to this sort of thing is to make excuses that "we've done this and this and this for them, but that is their problem" - trouble is, if the house of cards goes poof, it doesn't really matter to the end result if it was an Iraqi card or an American card that went first. Especially if one side or the other things whosever card it was, it really should have been the other guy's.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Ned


USSR's Afghanistan and Vietnam were very similar. Iraq is also similar to each and the solution is the same. Build up the local military and withdraw. The USSR's problem was that it did not do this but chose to carry on the fight itself. We seem to be heading to a USSR style of debacle.

Perhaps the ONLY similarity is that the political leadership's grandiose pronouncements before the fact were disconnected from reality on the ground to a similar extent.

Remember, Iraq has to become a "model of hope" and a "beacon of democracy" for the entire arab world. You ARE still committed to your President's vision, aren't you?

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Chemical Ollie
Iraq is not Germany. It is not Korea, Vietnam or even Somalia. The closest comparison would be Afghanistan - Sovjet's invasion, that is. An easy victory, followed by a long occupation and a slow, grinding guerilla war where the occupation forces got new coffins to send home every day, until they eventually decided to leave.

The soviets had FAR higher casualty rates (per enemy killed and per day) than we do.

[Dr Strangelove]

I dunno, at this point I'm really looking forward to our boys leaving a big cache of arms in Shiite country and letting them finish the job for us.

[Giancarlo]

A worthy chart of notice for you all:

Source: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Oct2...0-D-6570C.html

[Kuciwalker]

Fez... that looks like it was made in Excel

[SlowwHand]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat


Perhaps the ONLY similarity is that the political leadership's grandiose pronouncements before the fact were disconnected from reality on the ground to a similar extent.

Remember, Iraq has to become a "model of hope" and a "beacon of democracy" for the entire arab world. You ARE still committed to your President's vision, aren't you?

Bush is just being a HELL of a lot more decent in his response to events than many would be.

[Giancarlo]

Originally posted by skywalker
Fez... that looks like it was made in Excel

I didn't make it... ask the guys in the DOD.. And what's wrong with excel?

[Ramo]

It doesn't even have proper units listed. Thousands of what? Newtons? Looks like Shrub fails his math assignment again.

[MOBIUS]

Originally posted by Ramo
It doesn't even have proper units listed. Thousands of what? Newtons? Looks like Shrub fails his math assignment again.

Bananas! That's it! 275,000 Bananas have been deployed against the terrorist threat in Iraq...

Another unfortunate case of Bush saying one thing and getting a different outcome...

[Ramo]

I wonder what Shrub's (and Bremer's) response will be. It seems like they may crack down on the Shia, thus playing into the hands of the Ba'athists. Hopefully, as Rummy seems to be out of the loop nowadays, Powell may be able to inject a little bit of reason into his actions.