THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, TENTH THREAD.

ican :
you seem to believe that the u.s. army has set up police-stations where iraqis can go and report "rotters".

I don't assume any such thing. I assume that right now some Iraqis can and do go up to any American soldier they see and report whomever they think is a rotter or are rotters.

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to the best of my knowledge , no german was killed by occupying forces after the war ended

To the best of my knowledge, during the occupation of Germany no Germans were deliberately waging war against German civilians. In other words, during the occupation, no Germans were rotters. So the occupiers had no reason to kill Germans.

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i guess , the days where , when a war was over the two opposing parties could sit down and have a cuppa are sadly gone .

The Iraq war isn't over yet. Take heart, those days aren't gone. When the war is over, I'm sure the opposing parties will "sit down and have a cuppa."

hbg

The funny thing is, you seem to assume that the only one who can see what reality is, is you, and that everyone else must be delusional. This is an attitude that isn't exactly what one would call 'normal' or 'sane.'

Cycloptichorn

The current military leadership in Iraq has already embraced many of the ideas in the doctrine. But some military experts question whether the Army and the Marines have sufficient troops to carry out the doctrine effectively while also preparing for other threats.

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Quote:

Military Hones a New Strategy on Insurgency

WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 --The United States Army and Marines are finishing work on a new counterinsurgency doctrine that draws on the hard-learned lessons from Iraq and makes the welfare and protection of civilians a bedrock element of military strategy.

The doctrine warns against some of the practices used early in the war, when the military operated without an effective counterinsurgency playbook. It cautions against overly aggressive raids and mistreatment of detainees. Instead it emphasizes the importance of safeguarding civilians and restoring essential services, and the rapid development of local security forces.

The current military leadership in Iraq has already embraced many of the ideas in the doctrine. But some military experts question whether the Army and the Marines have sufficient troops to carry out the doctrine effectively while also preparing for other threats.

The subtleties of the battle were highlighted Wednesday when the Iraqi Interior Ministry suspended a police brigade on suspicion that some members had been involved in death squads. The move was the most serious step Iraqi officials had taken to tackle the festering problem of militias operating within ministry forces.

The new doctrine is part of a broader effort to change the culture of a military that has long promoted the virtues of using firepower and battlefield maneuvers in swift, decisive operations against a conventional enemy.

"The Army will use this manual to change its entire culture as it transitions to irregular warfare,"said Jack Keane, a retired four-star general who served in 2003 as the acting chief of staff of the Army. "But the Army does not have nearly enough resources, particularly in terms of people, to meet its global responsibilities while making such a significant commitment to irregular warfare."

The doctrine is outlined in a new field manual on counterinsurgency that is to be published next month. But recent drafts of the unclassified documents have been made available to The New York Times, and military officials said that the major elements of final version would not change.

The spirit of the document is captured in nine paradoxes that reflect the nimbleness required to win the support of the people and isolate insurgents from their potential base of support -- a task so complex that military officers refer to it as the graduate level of war.

Instead of massing firepower to destroy Republican Guard troops and other enemy forces, as was required in the opening weeks of the invasion of Iraq, the draft manual emphasizes the importance of minimizing civilian casualties. "The more force used, the less effective it is," it notes.

Stressing the need to build up local institutions and encourage economic development, the manual cautions against putting too much weight on purely military solutions. "Tactical success guarantees nothing," it says.

Noting the need to interact with the people to gather intelligence and understand the civilians' needs, the doctrine cautions against hunkering down at large bases. "The more you protect your force, the less secure you are," it asserts.

The military generally turned its back on counterinsurgency operations after the Vietnam War. The Army concentrated on defending Europe against a Soviet attack. The Marines were focused on expeditionary operations in the third world.

"Basically, after Vietnam, the general attitude of the American military was that we don't want to fight that kind of war again," said Conrad C. Crane, the director of the military history institute at the Army War College, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and one of the principal drafters of the new doctrine. "The Army's idea was to fight the big war against the Russians and ignore these other things."

A common assumption was that if the military trained for major combat operations, it would be able to easily handle less violent operations like peacekeeping and counterinsurgency. But that assumption proved to be wrong in Iraq; in effect, the military without an up-to-date doctrine. Different units improvised different approaches. The failure by civilian policy makers to prepare for the reconstruction of Iraq compounded the problem.

The limited number of forces was also a constraint. To mass enough troops to storm Falluja, an insurgent stronghold, in 2004, American commanders drew troops from Haditha, another town in western Iraq. Insurgents took advantage of the Americans' limited numbers to attack the police there. Iraqi policemen were executed, dealing a severe setback to efforts to build a local force.

Frank G. Hoffman, a retired Marine infantry officer who works as a research fellow at an agency at the Marine base at Quantico, Va., said that in 2005, the Marines sometimes lacked sufficient forces to safeguard civilians. As a result, while these forces were often effective "in neutralizing an identifiable foe, they could not stay and work with the population the way the classical counterinsurgency would suggest."

The effort to develop the new program began a year ago under Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the Army's Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, former commander of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command and the current chief of the First Marine Expeditionary Force. Colonel Crane, Lt. Col. John A. Nagl and Col. Douglas King of the Marines were among the major drafters.

Academics and experts from private groups were asked for input. A draft was completed in June and was circulated for comment. Almost 800 responses were received, but military officials said they would not alter the substance of the new doctrine.

'We are codifying the best practices of previous counterinsurgency campaigns and the lessons we have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan to help our forces succeed in the current fight and prepare for the future," Colonel Nagl said.

In drafting the doctrine, the military drew upon some of the classic texts on counterinsurgency by the likes of T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, and David Galula, whose ideas were partly informed by his experience in Algeria.

Colonel Crane said that many of the ideas adopted for the manual had been percolating throughout the military. "In many ways, this is a bottom-up change," he said. "The young soldiers who had been through Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and now Iraq and Afghanistan, understood why we need to do this."

As the manual is being drafted, the military has also revised the curriculum at its war colleges and training ranges to emphasize counterinsurgency. At the National Training Center in California, the old tank-on-tank war games against a Soviet-style enemy have been supplanted by combat rehearsals in which troops on their way to Iraq and Afghanistan engage in mock operations with role players who simulate insurgents, militias and civilians.

Dennis Tighe, a training program manager for the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, said the rehearsals were vital for preparing troops for their new counterinsurgency mission. But the Army is stretched so thin and so many units are focused on rehearsing for Iraq and Afghanistan at the training center that concerns have grown that the Army may be raising a new group of young officers with little experience in high-intensity warfare against heavily equipped armies like North Korea.

"That is one of the things folks are a little concerned about," Mr. Tighe said.

While the counterinsurgency doctrine attempts to look beyond Iraq, it cites as a positive example the experience in 2005 of the Army's Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which worked with Iraqi security forces to clear Tal Afar of insurgents, to hold the town with Iraqi and American troops, then to encourage reconstruction there, an approach known as "clear, hold, build."

One military officer who served in Iraq said American units there generally carried out the tenets of the emerging doctrine when they had sufficient forces. But protecting civilians is a troop-intensive task. He noted that there were areas in which there were not enough American and Iraqi troops to protect Iraqis adequately against intimidation, a central element of the counterinsurgency strategy.

"The units that have sufficient forces are applying the doctrine with good effect," said the officer, who is not authorized to speak on military policy. "Those units without sufficient forces can only conduct raids to disrupt the enemy while protecting themselves. They can't do enough to protect the population effectively and partner with Iraqi forces."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/05/washington/05doctrine.html?_r=1&oref=login&pagewanted=print

I have consistently maintained that garnering world support for our cause is crucial to winning, and that maintaining a high ethical standard is crucial to garnering that world support.

Yes, you have consistently maintained that. You have consistently maintained that without providing any evidence whatsoever to support what you have maintained. What you maintain is nothing more than the proverbial pipe dream. World support will be obtained as it always has in the past, when we become a credible force, a force that is perceived capable of succeeding and/or actually succeeding.


With more support from other nations, the number of troops in Iraq could increase doubly or triply. But it won't happen, because the Bush admin are not lovers of international diplomacy and apparently are not fans of compromise (they certainly haven't exhibited it). This is a major reason that I have called for investigations and the removal of Bush and his administration.

We have tried and failed numerous times using the international diplomacy approach. The most recent failure, but certainly not the only one, is the failure of the Clinton administration to make that work. Even Clinton abandoned that approach in Bosnia. Only when it looked like we would succeed in Bosnia were we able to enlist military support from other countries--even from other countries that were at greater risk with the status quo than we were.

I think Iraq can be calmed down and saved if we have many, many, many more troops there. I think we can survive ourselves without getting kicked out if we pull out, though the region will be lost to us. I think we will be kicked out if we stay and don't change what we are doing.

We agree superficially: We must change what we are doing. We must change what we are doing to that which has actually worked, and will actually work again. Fairytale-like prognostications serve no useful purpose. They serve at best to entertain and at worst give comfort to our enemies, the rotters.

Cycloptichorn

No more a fairytale than your belief that we are going to kill our way out of this problem. You don't have an ounce of evidence that your plan is working/has worked, or if such a thing would be acceptable to the American public.

Cycloptichorn

Three years after the invasion of Iraq, it is believed that half the Christians in the country have fled, driven out by bomb attacks, assassinations and death threats. So why haven't the coalition forces done more to protect them? Mark Lattimer reports



The Guardian: 'In 20 years, there will be no more Christians in Iraq'

The 'New Middle East' Bush Is Resisting
By Saad Eddin Ibrahim

08/23/06 "Washington Post" -- President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may be quite right about a new Middle East being born. In fact, their policies in support of the actions of their closest regional ally, Israel, have helped midwife the newborn. But it will not be exactly the baby they have longed for. For one thing, it will be neither secular nor friendly to the United States. For another, it is going to be a rough birth.

What is happening in the broader Middle East and North Africa can be seen as a boomerang effect that has been playing out slowly since the horrific events of Sept. 11, 2001. In the immediate aftermath of those attacks, there was worldwide sympathy for the United States and support for its declared "war on terrorism," including the invasion of Afghanistan. Then the cynical exploitation of this universal goodwill by so-called neoconservatives to advance hegemonic designs was confirmed by the war in Iraq. The Bush administration's dishonest statements about "weapons of mass destruction" diminished whatever credibility the United States might have had as liberator, while disastrous mismanagement of Iraqi affairs after the invasion led to the squandering of a conventional military victory. The country slid into bloody sectarian violence, while official Washington stonewalled and refused to admit mistakes. No wonder the world has progressively turned against America.

Against this declining moral standing, President Bush made something of a comeback in the first year of his second term. He shifted his foreign policy rhetoric from a "war on terrorism" to a war of ideas and a struggle for liberty and democracy. Through much of 2005 it looked as if the Middle East might finally have its long-overdue spring of freedom. Lebanon forged a Cedar Revolution, triggered by the assassination of its popular former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri. Egypt held its first multi-candidate presidential election in 50 years. So did Palestine and Iraq, despite harsh conditions of occupation. Qatar and Bahrain in the Arabian Gulf continued their steady evolution into constitutional monarchies. Even Saudi Arabia held its first municipal elections.

But there was more. Hamas mobilized candidates and popular campaigns to win a plurality in Palestinian legislative elections and form a new government. Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt achieved similar electoral successes. And with these developments, a sudden chill fell over Washington and other Western capitals.

Instead of welcoming these particular elected officials into the newly emerging democratic fold, Washington began a cold war on Muslim democrats. Even the tepid pressure on autocratic allies of the United States to democratize in 2005 had all but disappeared by 2006. In fact, tottering Arab autocrats felt they had a new lease on life with the West conveniently cowed by an emerging Islamist political force.

Now the cold war on Islamists has escalated into a shooting war, first against Hamas in Gaza and then against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel is perceived in the region, rightly or wrongly, to be an agent acting on behalf of U.S. interests. Some will admit that there was provocation for Israel to strike at Hamas and Hezbollah following the abduction of three soldiers and attacks on military and civilian targets. But destroying Lebanon with an overkill approach born of a desire for vengeance cannot be morally tolerated or politically justified -- and it will not work.

On July 30 Arab, Muslim and world outrage reached an unprecedented level with the Israeli bombing of a residential building in the Lebanese village of Qana, which killed dozens and wounded hundreds of civilians, most of them children. A similar massacre in Qana in 1996, which Arabs remember painfully well, proved to be the political undoing of then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres. It is too early to predict whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will survive Qana II and the recent war. But Hezbollah will survive, just as it has already outlasted five Israeli prime ministers and three American presidents.

Born in the thick of an earlier Israeli invasion, in 1982, Hezbollah is at once a resistance movement against foreign occupation, a social service provider for the needy of the rural south and the slum-dwellers of Beirut, and a model actor in Lebanese and Middle Eastern politics. Despite access to millions of dollars in resources from within and from regional allies Syria and Iran, its three successive leaders have projected an image of clean governance and a pious personal lifestyle.

In more than four weeks of fighting against the strongest military machine in the region, Hezbollah held its own and won the admiration of millions of Arabs and Muslims. People in the region have compared its steadfastness with the swift defeat of three large Arab armies in the Six-Day War of 1967. Hasan Nasrallah, its current leader, spoke several times to a wide regional audience through his own al-Manar network as well as the more popular al-Jazeera. Nasrallah has become a household name in my own country, Egypt.

According to the preliminary results of a recent public opinion survey of 1,700 Egyptians by the Cairo-based Ibn Khaldun Center, Hezbollah's action garnered 75 percent approval, and Nasrallah led a list of 30 regional public figures ranked by perceived importance. He appears on 82 percent of responses, followed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (73 percent), Khaled Meshal of Hamas (60 percent), Osama bin Laden (52 percent) and Mohammed Mahdi Akef of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood (45 percent).

The pattern here is clear, and it is Islamic. And among the few secular public figures who made it into the top 10 are Palestinian Marwan Barghouti (31 percent) and Egypt's Ayman Nour (29 percent), both of whom are prisoners of conscience in Israeli and Egyptian jails, respectively.

None of the current heads of Arab states made the list of the 10 most popular public figures. While subject to future fluctuations, these Egyptian findings suggest the direction in which the region is moving. The Arab people do not respect the ruling regimes, perceiving them to be autocratic, corrupt and inept. They are, at best, ambivalent about the fanatical Islamists of the bin Laden variety. More mainstream Islamists with broad support, developed civic dispositions and services to provide are the most likely actors in building a new Middle East. In fact, they are already doing so through the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, the similarly named PJD in Morocco, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine and, yes, Hezbollah in Lebanon.

These groups, parties and movements are not inimical to democracy. They have accepted electoral systems and practiced electoral politics, probably too well for Washington's taste. Whether we like it or not, these are the facts. The rest of the Western world must come to grips with the new reality, even if the U.S. president and his secretary of state continue to reject the new offspring of their own policies.

The writer is an Egyptian democracy activist, professor of political sociology at the American University in Cairo, and chairman of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a "surprise" visit to Iraq this week. As Juan Cole points out, it had to be a "surprise" visit because otherwise she would be killed. President Bush, who has been vehemently denying his administration has been lying about the progress in Iraq, sent Rice to the region, probably hoping that photo ops with the local government in the Green Zone would knock the chaos out of the news for a day.

Big mistake.

In sending Rice to the hell borne out of his administration's incompetence, President Bush provided the most complete rebuttal to his arguments that Iraq is making steady progress towards peace. Reality, you see, has a pesky way of making itself known when the cameras are rolling:


[S]igns of progress were not much in evidence in the first hours of her visit.

It began inauspiciously when the military transport plane that brought her to Baghdad was forced to circle the city for about 40 minutes because of what a State Department spokesman later said was either mortar fire or rockets at the airport.

On Thursday evening, during her meeting with President Jalal Talabani, the lights went out, forcing Rice to continue the discussion in the dark. It was a reminder of the city's erratic -- and sometimes nonexistent -- electrical service.

She arrived in the midst of an especially bloody few days for American troops. At least 21 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq since Saturday, most in Baghdad. Two car bombings in the city Thursday left at least four Iraqi civilians dead.


You don't need an NIE to tell you that Iraq is a failed state. The evidence simply can't be concealed any longer.

Explosive revelation after explosive revelation in Bob Woodward's article today (emphasis added throughout):

First, the utter lack of a military plan for victory:


Returning from a visit to Iraq, Robert D. Blackwill, the NSC's top official for Iraq, was deeply disturbed by what he considered the inadequate number of troops on the ground there. He told Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, that the NSC needed to do a military review.

"If we have a military strategy, I can't identify it," Hadley said. "I don't know what's worse -- that they have one and won't tell us or that they don't have one."


Second, the characterization of Iraq in secret documents as a "failed state":


On Feb. 10, 2005, two weeks after Rice became secretary of state, Zelikow presented her with a 15-page, single-spaced secret memo. "At this point Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence and undergoing revolutionary political change," Zelikow wrote.

Third, via Henry Kissinger's relationship with the Bush administration, we are quite literally applying Vietnam strategies in Iraq:


"The president can't be talking about troop reductions as a centerpiece," Kissinger said. "You may want to reduce troops," but troop reduction should not be the objective. "This is not where you put the emphasis."

To emphasize his point, he gave Gerson a copy of a memo he had written to President Richard M. Nixon, dated Sept. 10, 1969.

"Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded," he wrote.


Fourth, President Bush lied, time and time again, when he said that troop reductions would be determined by the commanders on the ground:


[General Abizaid, the Centcom commander] held to the position that the war was now about the Iraqis. They had to win it now. The U.S. military had done all it could. It was critical, he argued, that they lower the American troop presence. It was still the face of an occupation, with American forces patrolling, kicking down doors and looking at the Iraqi women, which infuriated the Iraqi men.

"We've got to get the [expletive] out," he said.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

No more a fairytale than your belief that we are going to kill our way out of this problem. You don't have an ounce of evidence that your plan is working/has worked, or if such a thing would be acceptable to the American public.

Cycloptichorn

I have provided you far more than an ounce of evidence that my plan has worked in the past with the support of the American public. You have provided zero evidence that the plan you advocate has worked in the past with or without the support of the American public.

I repeat here my evidence the plan I advocate has worked decisively in the past:

Nazis Germany
Dresden;
Hamburg;

Shinto Japan
Hiroshima;
Nagasaki.

Here's some more:
Nicaragua;
El Salvadore;
Grenada.

In each and everyone of these cases, the rotters (i.e., those who deliberately waged war on civilians) were exterminated, or caused to surrender unconditionally, at the cost of the lives of non-combatants and our military.

Nazis Germany
Dresden;
Hamburg;

Shinto Japan
Hiroshima;
Nagasaki.

Here's some more:
Nicaragua;
El Salvadore;
Grenada.

No more a fairytale than your belief that we are going to kill our way out of this problem. You don't have an ounce of evidence that your plan is working/has worked, or if such a thing would be acceptable to the American public.

... murder of women and children.

Is this what you advocate? That we use death squads to go from house to house in Iraq, and murder every woman and child that we find? This is what was done in your example.

...
You haven't made it crystal clear what you recommend
...
Cycloptichorn