The New Official Catch Phrase

Bear
Bear, were you as disgusted as I was to hear Bush repeat the neocon theories about the Middle East during his speach? He has not changed his goals one little bit. He's only trying to protect his "sterling" legacy. I have news for Bush. His legacy is already writ in blood and shame.

BBB

The Architect of Mr. Bush's Plan
The Architect of Mr. Bush's Plan
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report
Thursday 11 January 2007

One of the key architects of President Bush's disastrous Iraq war policy was responsible for writing the president's new plan calling for an increase in US troops in the region.

By relying on the recommendations of neoconservative scholar Frederick Kagan, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, on what steps the White House should take to address the civil war between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, President Bush has once again ignored the advice of career military officials and even some Republican lawmakers - many of whom in recent weeks have urged Bush to resist implementing a policy that would result in escalating the war - and instead has chosen to rely on the proposals drafted by hawkish, think-tank intellectuals that could very well backfire and end up embroiling the United States in an even bloodier conflict.

Perhaps the most alarming element of Bush's "new" plan for stabilizing Iraq is how much it relies upon the recommendations of individuals who have never set foot on a battlefield. Much of what the president outlined in a prime-time speech Wednesday evening - specifically, sending more than 20,000 additional soldiers into Iraq - was culled from the white paper, "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq," written by Kagan last month.

Some of the key points of Kagan's proposal include:

We must change our focus from training Iraqi soldiers to securing the Iraqi population and containing the rising violence. Securing the population has never been the primary mission of the US military effort in Iraq, and now it must become the first priority.

We must send more American combat forces into Iraq, and especially into Baghdad, to support this operation. A surge of seven Army brigades and Marine regiments to support clear-and-hold operations starting in the spring of 2007 is necessary, possible, and will be sufficient.

These forces, partnered with Iraqi units, will clear critical Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods, primarily on the west side of the city.

After the neighborhoods have been cleared, US soldiers and Marines, again partnered with Iraqis, will remain behind to maintain security.

As security is established, reconstruction aid will help to reestablish normal life and, working through Iraqi officials, will strengthen Iraqi local government.
But these recommendations itself aren't new. In fact, this "new" plan has actually been collecting dust for two years.

In January 2005, Kagan, who at the time was associated with the controversial Project for the New American Century, signed a letter sent to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate urging lawmakers to deploy an additional 25,000 US troops to Iraq, not so much to quell the violence between Sunni and Shiite factions as to intimidate Iraq's neighbors in the Middle East by maintaining bases. Kagan, his brother Robert, and PNAC founder and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol wrote that the Bush administration had ignored its suggestions, and chose to stick with a plan drafted by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who said the Iraq war could be won with fewer ground forces and superior air power.

"We write to ask you and your colleagues in the legislative branch to take the steps necessary to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps," states the January 28, 2005, letter sent to Senators Bill Frist and Harry Reid, Congressman Dennis Hastert, and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. "While estimates vary about just how large an increase is required, and Congress will make its own determination as to size and structure, it is our judgment that we should aim for an increase in the active duty Army and Marine Corps, together, of at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years. The administration has been reluctant to adapt to this new reality."

As US casualties piled up, Kagan publicly criticized Rumsfeld's plan for post-war Iraq and began to peddle his ideas for a substantial increase in US troops.

"The secretary of defense simply chose to prioritize preparing America's military for future conventional conflict rather than for the current mission," Kagan wrote in the January 17, 2005, issue of the Weekly Standard. "That position, based on the hope that the current mission would be of short duration and the recognition that the future may arrive at any moment, is understandable. It just turns out to have been wrong."

The lack of soldiers on the ground has been a hot-button issue since the start of the March 2003 invasion. Career military officials believe that is the reason the war hasn't been a "cakewalk." They blame former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld for designing a flawed war plan that has resulted in the deaths of more than 3,000 US soldiers and led to deep divisions between senior military officials and the defense secretary.

In Wednesday's speech, but without identifying him by name, Bush put the responsibility for the quagmire squarely on Rumsfeld's soldiers. But the president also lauded Rumsfeld's war plan. In a televised news conference last year, Bush said there was no need to send additional troops into Iraq.

The Genesis of the Iraq War Plan

In October 2002, Rumsfeld ordered the military's regional commanders to rewrite all of their war plans to capitalize on precision weapons, better intelligence, and speedier deployment in the event the United States decided to invade Iraq.

The goal was to use fewer ground troops, a move that caused dismay among some in the military who said concern for the troops requires overwhelming numerical superiority to assure victory.

Several longtime military officers said they viewed Rumsfeld's approach as injecting too much risk into war planning and said it could result in US casualties that might be prevented by amassing larger forces. Those predictions have been borne out over the past 33 months.

Still, Rumsfeld refused to listen to his military commanders, saying that his plan would allow "the military to begin combat operations on less notice and with far fewer troops than thought possible - or thought wise - before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks," the New York Times reported in its October 13, 2002, edition.

"Looking at what was overwhelming force a decade or two decades ago, today you can have overwhelming force, conceivably, with lesser numbers because the lethality is equal to or greater than before," Rumsfeld told the Times.

Rumsfeld said too many of the military plans on the shelves of the regional war-fighting commanders were freighted with outdated assumptions and military requirements, which have changed with the advent of new weapons and doctrines.

It has been a mistake, he said, to measure the quantity of forces required for a mission and "fail to look at lethality, where you end up with precision-guided munitions, which can give you 10 times the lethality that a dumb weapon might, as an example," the Times reported.

Through a combination of pre-deployments, faster cargo ships and a larger fleet of transport aircraft, the military would be able to deliver "fewer troops but in a faster time that would allow you to have concentrated power that would have the same effect as waiting longer with what a bigger force might have," Rumsfeld said.

Critics in the military said there were several reasons to deploy a force of overwhelming numbers before starting any offensive with Iraq. Large numbers illustrate US resolve and can intimidate Iraqi forces into laying down their arms or even turning against Hussein's government.

According to Defense Department sources, Rumsfeld at first insisted that our vast air superiority and a degraded Iraqi military would enable 75,000 US troops to win the war. General Tommy Franks, the theater commander in chief, convinced Rumsfeld to send 250,000 (augmented by 45,000 British). However, the Army would have preferred a much deeper force.

Kagan Reemerges

Kagan resurfaced in early December with another column in the Weekly Standard, "We Can Put More Forces in Iraq," which suggested sending more troops to the region and continuing to fight the war for up to two years.

"A study of post-conflict operations in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and elsewhere conducted by Ambassador James Dobbins showed that success in those operations - characterized by severe ethnic and sectarian violence - required force ratios of 1 soldier per 100 inhabitants," Kagan wrote. "Iraq poses challenges that are in some respects more severe, at the moment, but it also offers its own rules of thumb. Successful clear-and-hold operations in Tal Afar required a force ratio of around 1 soldier (counting both US and Iraqi troops) for every 40 inhabitants. On the other hand, in 2004, Major General Peter Chiarelli suppressed a widespread uprising in Sadr City (an area inhabited by about 2.5 million Shiites) with fewer than 20,000 US soldiers - a ratio of about 1 to 125."

Following the publication of Kagan's column, Vice President Dick Cheney and senior members of Bush's cabinet began to enter into a dialogue with Kagan to draft an alternative plan for dealing with the violence in Iraq. The move was orchestrated so the White House could avoid adopting the proposals set forth that week by the Iraq Study Group, led by longtime Bush family confidante James A. Baker III, that called for entering into a dialogue with Iran and Syria and redeploying troops in 2008.

Two weeks later, Kagan published "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq," the AEI white paper that recycled his public statements and columns from 2005 that were highly critical of Rumsfeld's post-war planning. Like the January 28, 2005, letter he sent to Congress and the Senate, the 47-page report called for sending more troops into the region to combat the violence between Sunnis and Shiites - which ultimately would ensure the war would continue to rage for at least two years.

Ultimately, President Bush agreed with Kagan, and used the key recommendations of his study as the foundation for his new Iraq policy - a policy that even some staunch pro-war Republicans have distanced themselves from.
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Jason Leopold is a former Los Angeles bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswire. He has written over 2,000 stories on the California energy crisis and received the Dow Jones Journalist of the Year Award in 2001 for his coverage on the issue as well as a Project Censored award in 2004. Leopold also reported extensively on Enron's downfall and was the first journalist to land an interview with former Enron president Jeffrey Skilling following Enron's bankruptcy filing in December 2001. Leopold has appeared on CNBC and National Public Radio as an expert on energy policy and has also been the keynote speaker at more than two dozen energy industry conferences around the country.
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President Bush's new plan for Iraq could soon run into old o
Wed, Jan. 10, 2007
President Bush's new plan for Iraq could soon run into old obstacles
By WARREN P. STROBEL and NANCY A. YOUSSEF
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - President Bush unveiled what the White House called a "New Way Forward" in Iraq on Wednesday night, but the plan faces old obstacles that have defied solution ever since the United States invaded Iraq nearly four years ago.

Bush's plan relies even more than past stratagems on a weak Iraqi government to fulfill promises it's repeatedly broken to take on sectarian militias and end political squabbles.

It calls for Iraqis to beef up their forces in Baghdad to help quell raging violence there, four months after the Iraqi government failed to contribute four of the six battalions of troops it promised to a similar security effort.

The plan calls for reordering Iraq's Interior Ministry, something that American officials have been insisting on since last spring, when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki came to office.

Bush also said that Iraq's government would pass a new law on distributing oil revenues and revise its de-Baathification program, which keeps members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party out of government. But both efforts have been stymied by opposition in Iraq's parliament.

The biggest course change is the declaration that Iraqis will be in charge of the effort to secure Baghdad, which al-Maliki has been pushing for.

Bush aides, who detailed the plan in a series of documents and briefings, insisted Wednesday that this time is different. Al-Maliki has pledged to deploy more Iraqi forces to stabilize Baghdad, and the full U.S. troop contingent and financial aid package won't flow unless he follows through on that and other steps, they said.

But if al-Maliki fails to deliver, the president appears to have little leverage other than to bring U.S. troops home - and abandon the "victory" in Iraq that he insists is vital to U.S. national security.

"An awful lot depends on the Iraqis. We don't control the Iraqis anymore," said Daniel Serwer, a vice president of the government-funded U.S. Institute of Peace.

Some current and former U.S. officials said they believe that by placing so much of the burden on the Iraqis, Bush is preparing to blame them for the debacle in their country and withdraw American troops.

Bush for the first time Wednesday said that the U.S. commitment in Iraq isn't open-ended - though he put no time limit on how long Americans would wait to see whether al-Maliki fulfilled his promises. The first test will come Feb. 15, when the additional Iraqi troops are to be deployed in Baghdad.

The president's strategy, the product of a more than two-month review, does abandon some key tenets that have guided U.S. strategy in Iraq for more than a year.

Gone is the attempt to reach out to Sunni insurgents; previous efforts to bring them into the political process didn't reduce violence, and the U.S. is ending any effort to do so.

Gone, too, is the rapid effort to replace U.S. troops with Iraqi ones, captured in the mantra "As they stand up, we will stand down." While training Iraqi troops remains the key U.S. mission, the No. 1 U.S. goal in Iraq is the defeat of al-Qaida and its supporters.

Outside analysts said they saw some positive elements in the plan, such as a focus on protecting Iraqi civilians and jump-starting the economy from the grass roots - both classic elements of counterinsurgency doctrine. Bush proposes almost $1.2 billion in new economic assistance in Iraq and a doubling of U.S. civil-military reconstruction teams.

But many said they feared Bush's modified tactics are too little and too late to make up for past blunders in Iraq. Those include invading with too few troops, disbanding the Iraqi army, underestimating the cost of the venture and misjudging the rapid growth of Iraq's insurgency.

"The problem is the solutions applied three years ago or two years ago might have stabilized the situation. . . . I find it hard to see they will apply today," said Judith Yaphe, a Persian Gulf expert at the National Defense University.

At best, the current and former officials said, Bush's plan might produce measurable improvement in Baghdad's security - perhaps returning it to the situation before February 2006, when the bombing of an important Shiite mosque in Samarra set off Iraq's civil war.

The core of Bush's "New Way Forward" is a bid to end the endemic violence in Baghdad by deploying 17,500 more U.S. troops and thousands of additional Iraqi troops and police and adopting new rules of engagement.

White House officials said Iraqi forces would take the lead, with American troops embedded in Iraqi units.

That's been tried before, too, and failed, in last summer's joint effort to bring security to Baghdad, called Operation Forward Together.

For the new plan to work, the Iraqi government must crack down on both Sunni and Shiite extremists, top military officials in Baghdad said.

But al-Maliki has refused to move against the militias of powerful Shiite politicians, including firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who are the bedrock of his political support. It is unclear why he'd do so now.

Sunnis, representing Iraq's now-dispossessed minority, criticized the U.S. troop increase even before Bush formally announced it. Sunni insurgents are certain to react with more violence to joint security sweeps by U.S. troops and forces of the Shiite-led Iraqi government.

On Tuesday, some in Iraq thought they saw what a security plan under al-Maliki could look like when Iraqi forces struck Haifa Street in central Baghdad, a longtime Sunni insurgent trouble spot.

U.S. and Iraqi forces fought suspected insurgents for 12 hours in an operation that Sunni politicians charged was sectarian. After Sunnis responded to an attack by al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, they charged, the Iraqi army came in with American forces and struck the Sunnis but did nothing about the Shiite extremists who were there earlier.

The Iraqi government has long claimed that if it quells the Sunni insurgency, the violent reaction from the Shiite militias will end and they'll be disarmed. That approach has been tried and failed, but there's no sign that the al-Maliki government is rethinking it.

Whether Iraqi troops will be up to the task of helping pacify Baghdad neighborhood by neighborhood is as questionable as ever.

During Operation Forward Together, some Iraqi forces did their jobs well. But most daily missions started late, as Iraqi commanders and U.S. forces counted how many Iraqi troops came to work that day.

While U.S. and Iraqi troops were in troubled neighborhoods, such as Amariyah in western Baghdad, crime did fall. But as soon as the troops left, the insurgents moved back in, and the violence, including sectarian killings, car bombings and explosions, surpassed previous levels.

Many wonder where the Iraqi government will find fresh troops for Baghdad. U.S. military transition team leaders in the northern Iraqi city of Sulaimaniyah told McClatchy Newspapers last month that predominantly Kurdish brigades there would dissolve if they were ordered to the capital.

How al-Maliki might bring about political reconciliation, another aspect of Bush's plan, also is unclear. There's intense skepticism that he can move beyond his Shiite base and deliver his half of the bargain, as even a senior Bush aide acknowledged Wednesday.

"There is obviously skepticism, and the president has made that very clear to this (Iraqi) government: People are skeptical - your people are skeptical, our people are skeptical. I will support you, but you need to perform," said the official, briefing reporters anonymously under White House ground rules.

Larry Diamond of Stanford University's Hoover Institution said Bush should have demanded action from the Iraqis before pledging additional U.S. troops and money.

"They've made commitments many times before, and they aren't delivered upon," said Diamond, who served as a democracy adviser in postwar Iraq. "The deadlines and goals are constantly slipping - and they're like mush."
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Youssef reported from Baghdad. McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Leila Fadel contributed from Baghdad.

Yaknow, it really really bothers me that so many Republicans don't know the difference between Strategy and Tactics.

I keep hearing them describe this as Bush's 'new strategy,' but it isn't a new strategy at all; it is a new set of tactics.

Why don't those at our highest levels understand this critical difference? Why can't they use the proper terminology?

It is troubling

Cycloptichorn

i'm sure they know the difference

it's just strategy sounds better, and fools a big chunk of the population

perhaps there is concern that the word 'tactics' might make people believe that it is related to 'tact' - 'the right thing to do' - and who wants to do the right thing ?
let's not talk about that .
hbg

I have a better catch phrase - "Chimpeach!"

Not changed his goals one little bit[/i]
He has never said that his goals were going to change, he has changed the way the golas will be met.
It's the dems that wants the goals changed, cut & run I believe is the catch phrase.
Some of you people are so afraid that the US will win this war that I bet there's a run on Depends, think I'll buy stock in that company now.

Actually...for them, the word is not "strategy." It is "strategery."

It might help if you people realized that Bush calls the shots for the military, unless the new dem congress cuts funds. lol

Unfortunately I think many of us understand this ALL too well.

I fail to see the humor here though? Or the reason to "lol".

They must breed them 'real special' down in Texas huh? (this little jab could be referring to either you or Bush, or both, whichever you prefer)

U.S. Deaths Confirmed By The DoD: 3010
Reported U.S. Deaths Pending DoD Confirmation: 8
Total 3018
DoD Confirmation List
LOL

& not a damn thing you can do about it, so either get in touch with your rep, demand hearings NOW, or get used to Bush being the C-n-C for another two years, almost two years. Even with the hearings I can pretty much guarantee that there will be no impeachment, what did the dems say when Clinton was knee deep in, well....oh yea, there's no there there.
Most humorless folks can't find humor in anything, but I will explain, libs & dems run around screeching & gnawinf ther fingers to nubs about Bush this & Bush that, but your comrades in congress won't do anything about it, you think they're going to cut funding? LOL

3010 dead lol

I've so missed your lol. When i first started posting here i thought that was all you could spell because that's all you ever posted....then I noticed your name & felt guilty for having bad thoughts about you....I got over it though as soon as I realized that you were just making fun of unfortunate people.

LMAO

At the moment of invasion, it was absolutely unclear whether the Iraqi WMD programs had been stopped or merely hidden better. Had the latter been the case, as it might well have been, and had we allowed failed diplomacy to drag on, one of the WMD programs might well have succeeded, and then you might soon be talking about hundreds of thousands dead. You demonstrate a persistent failure to see only both sides of the coin.

And, guess what, this same situation will repeat over and over and over - a terrible dictator attempting to develop WMD, with the exact state of his programs very murky. If we never invade, no matter what, sooner or later, the scenario I describe above will certainly occur.

Eventually America will suffer a gigantic volcano eruption.

Eventually the Earth will be hit by a gigantic asteroid.

Statistically all these things are certainties, in the long run. You are correct Brandon that it is a statistical certainty that someone will use WMD in the long run, sooner or later. You err in believing that anything the US can do will stop this - in the long run.

If the Iran hysteria keeps getting ramped up, the next country to use WMD could very well be the US or Israel...

Cycloptichorn

For maporsche
they must breed the real special down in Texas (tihs jab is for you or Bush, whichever you prefer)
That was a jab? LMAO What it was, on your part, was a lack of understanding of how breding works, if you get my drift.
Now we do have some liberals down here that can't find their butt with both hands, they are the product of inbreeding, maybe that's who you were referring to.

LMAO

I believe that Iran is doing that very thing now.
Plus, nobody knows where Saddams WMDs are, they could still be hidden in the desert (remember the planes that were hidden under the sand?) or they could be in Syria. None of that is known.