THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, TENTH THREAD.

ican, I and most everybody else knows, but you asked the question. You need to learn the basics of search. It's really simple if you have a mind to learn the facts. I can take a horse to water, but...

And this is the one weakness in the Constitution when we have a president that ignores professional advise and does what he pleases without the brains to know when to stop our losses.

What is the professional advice that you think the president is ignoring and ought not ignore?

ican, If you try hard enough, you might see the answer. Most others see it except you! You must engage your brains first; a difficult task for you, it seems.

And this is the one weakness in the Constitution when we have a president that ignores professional advise and does what he pleases without the brains to know when to stop our losses.

What is the professional advice that you think the president is ignoring and ought not ignore?

ican, Go and learn what advise were provided to Bush by 1, General Shinseki, 2. the Iraq Commission, and 3. The American People.

Coming hard on the heels of the negative response to his proposed escalation of the Iraq war, President Bush stepped up to the microphone for his Saturday radio address and said:

"But those who refuse to give this plan a chance to work have an obligation to offer an alternative that has a better chance for success. To oppose everything while proposing nothing is irresponsible."

I seem to recall a minor parade of alternative proposals chewing up the news space over the past few months, starting with the Iraq Study Group and moving onward through the Congress and the media.

The fact that Bush ignored every single one of them does not mean that they did not exist.

Our neighbors at the U.S. Army War College debunked some of the false assumptions that led us into this war before it even started.



There also were dissenting views deep inside the Defense Department and our intelligence agencies ?- which is why the vice president made daily trips to the CIA in hopes of extracting any possible morsel of information that might justify the stupid, counterproductive war they'd all been jonesing to launch since the late 1990s.

There has been no shortage of ideas to do the Iraq war a different way. Start with Gen. Eric Shinsecki, who testified to Congress in 2002 that the operation would take "several hundred thousand" troops, contradicting the administration's "small light force" philosophy. Within days, the Defense Department "retired" him ahead of schedule.

Meanwhile, the president went on "60 Minutes" Sunday to grump that, well, maybe he was wrong about WMD but so was everybody else. Well, Scott Ritter, who was on the inspection teams in 1998, knew there weren't any. So did Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, who ran inspections right up until Bush ordered inspectors out of Iraq in 2003.

Anybody remember any of the creative insults that were lobbed at these guys by the administration and its friends at Fox News at the time?

And yet this president thinks he needs to see better ideas before anybody criticizes him. You'd dump a cell phone or cable TV provider that messed up your service as often, and as consistently, as this bunch has bungled Iraq.

cicerone imposter wrote:

ican, Go and learn what advise were provided to Bush by 1, General Shinseki, 2. the Iraq Commission, and 3. The American People.

some interesting stuff here

link

...

cicerone imposter wrote:

ican, Go and learn what advise were provided to Bush by 1, General Shinseki, 2. the Iraq Commission, and 3. The American People.

some interesting stuff here

link

...

ican, What I think is not important.

At this time, it is important to me what you think is the professional advice that the president is ignoring and ought not ignore.

Bush was provided with first rate advise that he decided on his own to ignore, and continues to ignore to this day - even when the majority of Americans do not want him to send more troops into Iraq.


Your head is fortified by lead, and nothing seems to penetrate it that doesn't agree with your support of Bush.

You are wrong, again Cicerone!

I have repeatedly posted here that I did not and do not support Bush's management of the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan. I have also repeatedly posted here what I thought Bush should have done instead. But now, what Bush should have done instead no longer interests me.

What does interest me at this time is what you think is the professional advice that the president is ignoring and ought not ignore.

So stop "beating around the bush" and tell me: what you think is the professional advice that the president is ignoring and ought not ignore.

around noon today i saw a short interview with 'liam nedden' , a marine who served in vietnam , on the CBC(canadian TV news) .
...
did you see the interview ?

No!

do you think any elected representative will lend support to this group ?

Yes!
I think that once they learn of the petition some elected representatives will advocate complying with that petition.

watching from the other side .
hbg

Do you think any elected representative should advocate complying with the petition?

Attack on Sadr will widen war in IraqPublished: Sunday, 14 January, 2007, 11:01 AM Doha Time

By Patrick Cockburn

BAGHDAD: He is a strange figure to be targeted as the number one enemy of the US in Iraq. Four years ago, few had heard of the Shia nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr inside or outside Iraq. Even somebody as suspicious as Saddam Hussain did not think he would play any role in the coming crisis.

Now he holds the future of Iraq in his hands. He has far more popularity and legitimacy than many of the pro-American Iraqi leaders cowering in the Green Zone. He is seen by millions of Shia in Baghdad and across southern Iraq as their spiritual and national leader.

Rightly or wrongly, he is feared by most Sunnis as their nemesis, a physical symbol that they are battling for their existence in Iraq.

He has now become part of the White House's demonology in Iraq. At one time the US believed that Saddam Hussain was responsible for all its problems in Iraq ?- problems that would be resolved once he was overthrown. Today Sadr, a 32-year-old cleric in his black robe with fierce, staring, dark eyes, is denounced as the fomenter of sectarian warfare.

Many Iraqi leaders never leave the Green Zone. Sadr has never entered it. He has a cult-like following. He controls Sadr City, the ramshackle, sprawling slum in east Baghdad which is home to 2,5mn Shia, important cities such as Kufa and provinces such as Maysan.

He can probably put 100,000 armed militiamen into the field. Much of the Baghdad police force follows him. Army barracks where Shia units are stationed have pictures of him pinned to the walls.

Once in 2004 he was wanted "dead or alive" by the US forces and dismissed as "a firebrand". They soon found that his movement had deep roots. He controls 32 out of 275 seats in the Iraqi parliament. He is the most important ally of the Prime Minister, Nour al-Maliki.

In 2004, the US and its former exile allies paid a heavy price for trying to exclude him from power. In 2005 and 2006, they recognised his strength. He became part of the political process in Iraq while opposing the US-led occupation.

Now, astonishingly the US may be about to confront Sadr and his powerful social and political movement. This could lead almost immediately to a crisis for the US and President Bush's new strategy for Iraq.

If the US Army, along with Kurdish brigades of the Iraqi army, do assault Sadr City, they are unlikely to win a clean victory. The rest of Shia Iraq is likely to explode. The US is already at war with the 5mn-strong Sunni community and is now fast alienating the Shia.

For the first time this year, polls showed that a majority of Shia approve of armed attacks on US-led forces.

An offensive against Sadr's Mehdi Army will be portrayed as an attempt to eliminate militias. But it is, in reality, an attack on one particular militia, because it is anti-American.

The Kurdish brigades in the Iraqi army take their orders from the Kurdish leaders and not from Maliki. The US also has good relations with the other Shia militia, the Badr Organisation, which is the military wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

There is no doubt that the Mehdi Army includes death squads targeting Sunni - but this is also true of Badr.

Sadr first confronted the US when he twice fought the US Army in 2004. Though militarily unsuccessful the fighting established his credibility in his community. He attracted supporters because of the prestige of his family, and his blend of Iraqi nationalism and Shia religion.

He is also seen as the voice of the impoverished Shia while Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the Hawza, the Shia religious establishment, are more representative of the better-off.

His emergence as one of the most important political figures in Iraq was one of the great surprises after 2003. He is neither eloquent nor particularly charismatic, but he has made very few political mistakes.

His swift rise is explained first by his family. He was born in 1974, the third son of Mohamed Sadiq al-Sadr. He is a distant cousin of Ayatollah Mohamed Baqr al-Sadr, the Shia revolutionary thinker, who was murdered by Saddam along with his sister in 1980.

He had sought to develop a religious response to Marxism and Baathism by advocating a politically and socially activist Islam in contrast to the traditionally quietist Shia religious leaders.

Muqtada's father, Mohamed Sadiq al-Sadr, became influential in the 1990s. At first he was given leeway because he was an Iraqi nationalist and opposed to Iranian claims to lead the Shia of Iraq.

His sermons began with the words: "No, no to America; no, no to Israel; no, no to the Devil." But it soon became clear he was also opposed to Saddam. He was assassinated by Saddam's gunmen with two of his sons in 1999.

Muqtada al-Sadr became so powerful so fast because he was in the same tradition as his relatives. His militiamen are generally not paid and supply their own weapons. They are beginning to have a core of trained, paid professionals but they were never as militarily effective as the insurgents, many of whom were experienced soldiers.

A US attack on Sadr will open another front in the war in Iraq. It would split the Shia coalition into pro- and anti-American factions. It would disrupt the Shia-Kurdish alliance. It probably would not conciliate the Sunni insurgents.

Sadr's movement thrives on martyrs. The only certain result of an all-out US assault on the Mehdi Army would be to deepen and widen the war in Iraq. - The Independent

ican wrote again: What does interest me at this time is what you think is the professional advice that the president is ignoring and ought not ignore.

He's ignored the best advise he's recieved on this war in Iraq from 1) General Shinseki (past), 2) The Iraq Study Group(recent), 3) The American People(current), and now 4) Congress.

You are not alone. Many who appear to think like you are similarly reluctant to give their own opinions and instead quote the opinions of others. Is that reluctance a psychological thing? Or, is it a political thing?