THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

Canada is wanting a few hundred thousand immigrants. All you need is a job up there and you'll be welcomed with open arms.

mesquite, I just don't accept the premis you put forth.

First, our tactics are hardly as destructive to the general population as to the jihadists. The notion itself is absurd, betraying an utter lack of, or at least total disregard for, factual information regarding the situation.

Second, I did not ignore the article re Shinseki's position, I simply do not accept Shinseki's argument, and neither did the war planning staff. He had a position, an opinion, yes. His input was but one one among a number of positions, period. It was a dissenting position, a minority position, and it was not adopted. That it exists makes it neither right nor wrong, no matter how one personally may feel about it. That's it, that's that, and that's all.

Paul Van Riper
Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper (U.S. Marine Corps-Ret.) is a veteran of Vietnam and Desert Storm and currently lecturer at the National Defense University. He spoke with FRONTLINE about the lessons learned from those past wars, his bitterness over what has happened in post-war Iraq, and the failures of the Pentagon's civilian leaders: "We don't have a leadership that's involved intellectually," he says. "They simply want to will their way to this transformation. They don't want to get involved themselves and help think the way through." Despite this, Van Riper, a scholar of warfare, is hopeful: "I see inside the United States Army the germs of a second intellectual renaissance that's approaching these problems. And they're not caught up in the sloganeering that most of the Joint community's caught up in. They really are studying." This interview was conducted on July 8, 2004.
Thomas White
Gen. Thomas White (U.S. Army-Ret.) was Secretary of the Army from 2001 until April 2003, when he was fired by Donald Rumsfeld. In this interview, he talks about Rumsfeld's leadership style and drive to remake the military, the Defense Department's rigid control in planning for a post-war Iraq, and why he believes the Army is on the brink of being broken. "What we are all worried about is that the manpower situation will come unglued. ... The Army is people; it's not weapons or platforms. Somebody once said, 'A soldier's not in the Army; they are the Army.'"This interview was conducted on Aug. 12, 2004.
JOSEPH P. HOAR
Gen. Joseph P. Hoar (U.S. Marine Corps-Ret.) was commander of CENTCOM from 1991 to 1994. In the build-up to war in Iraq, he supported from the outside Colin Powell's reservations about the consequences, joined other military figures to oppose the war plan and more recently to support John Kerry. In this interview, Hoar explains how the concept of military transformation has developed over the years, and why it should be executed cautiously."We were going to be lighter, faster, and we were going to depend more on technology. That part of it was clear -- so far so good," he tells FRONTLINE. "But I think one of the things that the Iraqi campaign has shown us is that you need to go very slowly when you talk about reducing the size of the armed forces." This interview was conducted on Aug. 9, 2004.
DOUGLAS MACGREGOR
A tank commander in Desert Storm and currently a Senior Military Fellow at the Institute of National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, Col. Douglas MacGregor (U.S. Army-Ret.) is a well-known maverick in the military establishment and the author of Breaking the Phalanx, a book on how to reform the Army. Donald Rumsfeld read some of his ideas and as the Pentagon was formulating its war plan, he was invited to consult with military officials. "They brought me in and said: 'We're looking at Iraq. The chief of staff of the Army says it will take at least 560,000 troops.' Well, of course I burst out laughing immediately, because those are more troops than we have in the active component. Secondly, the Iraqi enemy was always so weak. Why would you want that many forces?" This interview was conducted on July 23, 2004.


Pentagon Officials
John Hamre
As deputy secretary of defense in the mid-to-late 1990s, John Hamre was involved in reconstruction planning for Kosovo and Bosnia. He now is president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an organization that has studied every post-war reconstruction task since World War II. In May 2003 the Pentagon asked him and a CSIS team to go to Iraq and evaluate what the U.S. was facing in the aftermath of the war. In this interview, Hamre describes the range of challenges they saw and talks about whether the transformational concepts being pursued by the military today can handle them. "I think we're really having to struggle with a new and much more complicated problem. The security dimension is more diffuse and more complex. It doesn't neatly fit the way we've structured this brilliant military of ours." This interview was conducted on July 23, 2004.
Walter Slocombe
Walter Slocombe is former director of national security and defense in the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. organization charged with overseeing Iraq's reconstruction and transition to democratic rule. He also served in the Pentagon as under-secretary of defense for policy,1994 to 2001. In this interview, he talks about what wasn't planned for in the aftermath of the war and describes the challenges in training Iraqi security forces following the almost total disappearance of the Iraqi Army. "I wasn't completely surprised," he says. "I think the central issue why the army disappeared is that it was a conscript army. … The officers lost most of the control of their troops, and sometimes the will to try to control them." This interview was conducted on Aug. 17, 2004.

So from the time you write your memo until you know it's actually going to happen, what's going on inside the Pentagon?

Well, Secretary Rumsfeld was involved in what you might call a seesaw battle with the Army general officers, senior leadership, on this notion of how many forces. And at one point it shot up to over 200,000, and then it shot down to 68,000. ... The bottom line was that the secretary finally says: "Enough is enough. You've got two divisions. Go with it."

Third, those who think the "kill enough of them" meme is anything other than denonstrably baseless seem to me to be ignorant not only of the nature of armed conflict in general but of the operant situation in specific.

In the Arab world, you shoot one person, you've now alienated a hundred people in the man's family and tribe. If shoot several, if you injure several, if you incarcerate several, you run terrible risks of alienating large numbers of people. Now, some would argue we didn't have any choice. I'm not sure that's true. We were trying, we thought, to deal with an insurgency effectively, and I think what we did is make it worse. We incarcerated, it's estimated, over 46,000 people. And it's been made clear that less 10 percent of that number is really guilty of anything that justified incarceration. And in the meantime, their families were told nothing. Imagine the consequences in our country for that kind of behavior.

People have told us the Army is very close to being broken, if it hasn't been broken already. What do you think?

I think it is. I think it is, absolutely. The stop losses are symptomatic of it. People inside the force are very frustrated and very unhappy. The 12-month tours are a catastrophe. No one wants to enlist to do that sort of work. The people who will enlist are people that are good people, but they have no choice. But your enlistments and your retention are way down. People are frustrated with the chain of command that didn't listen to them, frustrated with their inability to affect any change, frustrated that no one would take seriously their experience, because now you've got soldiers sergeants, lieutenants and captains with infinitely more combat experience than the people commanding them. We need to listen to them.

I agree that it would be shame to let women be enslaved to Islam if they did not wish to be. However, we have no way of knowing if they wish to be or not.

I guess not everybody is looking forward to the armageddon of Iraq.

Mesquite, I had typed up a response to that section of your post and then chose not to submit it... because it is too subjective to argue. Sun Tzu pointed out a very long time ago that your war plan becomes useless when the first shot is fired. Of course, there were mistakes made. Of course, there will be more mistakes made. That has no bearing on the rightfulness or lack thereof of the effort itself.

Revel... I don't want you thinking I disregarded you comments, so...

revel wrote:

I agree that it would be shame to let women be enslaved to Islam if they did not wish to be. However, we have no way of knowing if they wish to be or not.

You don't know if there is a significant number of woman who don't wish to be enslaved? Revel... yes you do. Iraqis are no different than you or I. And if they didn't object to enslavement, because it was so indoctrinated in their way of thinking, would that be less sad?

Consider this:

20% of the citizens of Iraq are girls, 14 years old or younger. Are those FIVE MILLION LITTLE GIRLS worth fighting for? Do they deserve a better lot in life than the essential enslavement that the Islamic Extremists have in mind for them? Does it matter if their parents have been brainwashed into accepting the injustice?

revel wrote:

I guess not everybody is looking forward to the armageddon of Iraq.

No sane person is looking forward to the Armageddon of Iraq.
No sane person looked forward to the American Civil War, either. But it was work that needed to be done.

Interesting Bill - I assume you are aware that Iraq was a secular state and, despite Hussein's excesses, pretty damn enlightened for an Arab state on gender issues.

Your little girls may end up worse off in this regard.

Insofar as there are people all over the world that need rescuing; we agree. That provides no reason or excuse not to rescue these people. The reason for removing Saddam is of little importance at this point. We did. We are now responsible for making sure his replacement is better, not worse. We broke it, we bought it. That means we cannot allow Islamic extremists to enslave the Iraqi women… and make no mistake… that is their intention. Would you have us let them?

A week ago I saw a TV programme- did you see me write about this?- which advanced the opinion that there was no Al-Qa'ida until it was invented by the American Justice Department in order to prosecute a rich arab who was troubling them by funding different rebel islamist groups, one Osama bin Laden.
The worldwide web of sinister muslim figures, out to do us all down, figured in lurid speeches by Mr Rumsfeld and others, is a "bogyman" invented to replace the Soviet threat, invented by those we pay to protect us.

Interesting programme.

Al-Qaida training camps trained thousands of militant Muslims from around the world; some of whom later applied their training in various conflicts around the world such as India, Algeria, Chechnya, the Philippines, Egypt, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Somalia, Yemen, Kosovo and Bosnia. Other terrorists came from parts of Africa, the People's Republic of China (Uighurs), and in one case, the United Kingdom. These terrorists intermingled at their camps, causing all of those causes to become one. Despite the perception of some people, al-Qaida members are ethnically diverse and are connected by their fundamentalist version of Islam.

In February 1998, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri of Egyptian Islamic Jihad issued a fatwa under banner of "the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders" saying that "to kill Americans and their allies, civilians and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who is able." This was also the year of the first major terrorist act reliably attributed to al-Qaida, the embassy bombings in East Africa, which resulted in upwards of 300 deaths. In 1999, Egyptian Islamic Jihad officially merged with Al Qaida, and Al Zawahiri became Bin Laden's right-hand man.

I think it is not unreasonable to hope Iraq will become a place where women will feel free to keep what was good about their old life and add what is good that was previously unavailable to to them.