THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, ELEVENTH THREAD

ican wrote: Some said that during WWII: they were a small percentage.
Some said that during the Korean War: they were a small percentage.
Some said that during the Vietnam War: they were a small percentage.
Some said that during the Quwait War: they were a small percentage.


Show proof for all of these. We're talking about active troops fighting in the war.

Worldwide we have over 2 million volunteer troops in our military.

ican, I'm not sure where you're getting two (2) million in our military, but according the the Department of Defense, we have less than 1.5 million.

ican, Is that your best answer? "Some, but not all?" That's not even an answer. It only confirms what I stated. You're too pig-headed to admit this is now happening, and tried to make it sound "conditional."

Bully for you!

ican, ... I said we are now recruiting criminals and those without high school education. Why do you continue to insist we are not short of troops?

(1) No, we are not knowingly recruiting criminals.

(2) Yes, we are knowingly recruiting some, not all, who have criminal records.

(3) Yes, we are knowingly recruiting some, not all, who do not have high school educations.

The total of (2) and (3) amount to less than 10% of those we are recruiting.

ican, See if you can understand this perspective. If we have 2.5 million in our military, and Iraq has 25 million population, there is no way in hell we can send all 2.5 million of our military into Iraq, because there is a logistical problem - whether anybody wishes to acknowledge that or not.

There is no way to protect our country, our allies, and Iraq with 2.5 million soldiers. You're as screwed up as Bush and the generals who thinks anything can be accomplished in a country where violence continues to increase, and sectarian and insurgency continues to increase. All this, while there is in-fighting between the "newly" trained military and police force in Iraq (Sunnis vs Shia, and Sunnis vs Sunnis).

I didn't say we needed all 2 million plus in Iraq to win in Iraq. All I said was:
However, even if the war in Iraq were to even begin to fail, it would have to be rescued and made a success.

The al-Qaeda confederation cannot be allowed to win in Iraq, period

Our active troops and reserves are overstretched beyond acceptable levels in a illegal, unjustified war.

...
The goal of the new Baghdad security plan is to fix [Baghdad's sectarian lines that are too deadly to cross] -- to fashion a peace that stitches the city's cleaved neighborhoods back together. After three weeks, there are a few signs of progress. The number of bodies found daily has decreased to 20 or fewer from 35 to 50. In some areas closely patrolled by American troops, a few of the families that fled the violence are said to be returning.
...

ican wrote:
What evidence do you have that:

(1) "our active troops and reserves are overstretched beyond acceptable levels?"

(2) the war in Iraq is an "illegal war?"

(3) the war in Iraq is an "unjustified war"?


Been there, done that!

Desperation Helps Out In Baghdad
By Jim Hoagland
Washington Post
Sunday, March 4, 2007; Page B07

The Bush administration is tossing babies off the Iraq sled as the wolves of disintegration creep closer. Desperation runs through the flurry of initiatives that the White House and State Department have breathlessly wheeled out to deal with Iraq's war in recent weeks.

And so it should. Desperation is the right conclusion to reach, and to communicate, to an Iraq that totters on the edge of extinction as a nation-state. Desperation is Iraq's ground truth, a ground truth the administration has long sought to deny and evade.

The sense that even President Bush will be eyeing the exit if Iraq's chaos worsens has spurred Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to take serious steps -- at long last -- to encourage Iraqis to look for compromise rather than endlessly pursue revenge against each other and to persuade Washington to give Iraq more room to deal with its neighbors in its own right.

The sobering effect that these steps are having may turn out to be more important than the immediate practical outcomes of the overlapping and in places contradictory initiatives that the administration has recently unveiled. These include Bush's military "surge," a regional political "realignment" and an international conference in Baghdad. Individually, none of these measures does much beyond buying time while the administration stalls critics and moves to define success in Iraq downward.

"The administration has been so focused on perception that it has frequently missed the point" of Iraq's complex realities, says Qubad Talabani, Washington representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government. "If how it looks in Washington becomes more important than how it works out in Baghdad, we all lose."

That is a caution that applies to war critics who insist on unrealistic benchmarks or deadlines as well as to war supporters who insist on Bush's freedom of action. Both tend to overestimate U.S. ability to manage withdrawal -- or escalation -- on its own terms, relegating Iraqis and others in the region to the status of bit players in an American political drama.

The addition of 17,500 troops into Baghdad that Bush announced Jan. 10 smacked initially of being another gimmick, of resembling an exit-covering escalation, as in an old Western where the gunslinger backs out the saloon door with guns blazing.

But the impression of impending crisis has either prompted or helped Maliki to develop a political initiative of his own to accompany the surge -- and has encouraged U.S. officials to give him more room to maneuver. Bypassing the dysfunctional " national unity" cabinet that U.S. officials helped force on him nearly a year ago, the prime minister has created four committees to work directly with Gen. David Petraeus in implementing the new Baghdad security plan.

"General Petraeus seems to agree that the prime minister's Baghdad security plan should not be seen as a crackdown but as a political effort that has important security aspects," Ahmed Chalabi, who heads the committee charged with building public support for the new effort, told me by telephone from Baghdad last week.

Maliki has turned to the energetic but controversial Chalabi -- once supported by key figures in the Bush administration and then dumped by the White House, allegedly because of his ties to Iran -- to work on the task of reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis at the neighborhood level. "People are fed up with the violence" and may be ready to overcome old differences, says Chalabi, who seems to have noticeably softened his harsh judgments of the limited place ex-Baathists should occupy in Iraqi society.

Another sign of change: Washington settled last week for effective federalism in Iraq rather than clinging to unrealistic hopes for centralization of state power. U.S. officials prodded Maliki's cabinet into accepting a new petroleum law allowing the Kurdish regional government to let contracts for exploration and production in the north while promising Sunnis a fair share of all oil revenue.

Iraq-centered realism may also be at work on the diplomatic track. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's newly declared willingness to go to Baghdad to meet with Iranian, Syrian and other regional officials -- if a preparatory ambassadorial meeting to be held there Saturday makes progress -- rewards persistent efforts by Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari to host an international conference in the Iraqi capital. This looks like a more promising option than Rice's previously announced effort to exploit a diplomatic "realignment" that in effect would have pitted Sunnis against Shiites throughout the region.

These shifts amount to straws in a hurricane that still has to run its course. But in the Middle East, as elsewhere, desperation is frequently the mother of all progress.

During a White House meeting last week, a group of governors asked President Bush and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about their backup plan for Iraq. What would the administration do if its new strategy didn't work?

The conclusion they took away, the governors later said, was that there is no Plan B. "I'm a Marine," Pace told them, "and Marines don't talk about failure. They talk about victory."

Pace had a simple way of summarizing the administration's position, Gov. Phil Bredesen (D-Tenn.) recalled. "Plan B was to make Plan A work."

In the weeks since Bush announced the new plan for Iraq -- including an increase of 21,500 U.S. combat troops, additional reconstruction assistance and stepped-up pressure on the Iraqi government -- senior officials have rebuffed questions about other options in the event of failure. Eager to appear resolute and reluctant to provide fodder for skeptics, they have responded with a mix of optimism and evasion.

Even if the administration is not talking about Plan B, the subject is on a lot of minds inside and outside the government. "I would be irresponsible if I weren't thinking about what the alternatives might be," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates acknowledged last month to Congress, where many favor gradual or immediate withdrawal.

Gates did not elaborate. Several administration officials, while insisting that a wide range of options was discussed before Bush's Jan. 10 announcement, firmly closed the door on the subject of fallback plans. "I don't think anyone is going to be inclined to discuss any contingency-type planning," said National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

National security experts outside the government have stepped into the void, offering detailed options through public papers, speeches and policy proposals over the past several weeks.

"The ultimate Plan B is pull everybody out," said Stephen D. Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adviser to the Defense Department. "Nobody wants to do that. Most are looking at the middle ground between surge and pullout."

Most options involve partial or complete U.S. redeployment from Baghdad and other violent urban centers, followed by containment of the civil war within Iraq's borders -- keeping out meddlesome neighbors such as Iran and preventing a wider, regional conflict. Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, a former chief of Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for the Middle East, said Congress is "drifting toward containment" and predicted that option will soon begin gaining popularity.

Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack of the Brookings Institution last month released the most comprehensive public exploration of containment. The two national security experts seemed to wince even as they proposed keeping up to 80,000 troops along Iraq's borders, cautioning that "there would be no end in sight either for the war or for their mission." But it is "the only rational course of action," they wrote.

"I firmly believe that is where we should wind up, and is what we should be doing now," said retired Air Force Gen. Charles F. Wald, formerly the No. 2 U.S. officer in Europe.

One military officer involved in long-term planning for Iraq said he does not think the idea is feasible. "It would be a massive operation," the officer said. "But having said that, it's probably the best option if they go into open civil war."

Other senior military officials are skeptical of containment, fearing that it would be almost impossible to achieve and that a policy of standing back and letting Iraqis kill each other would be morally indefensible and a recruiting boon for al-Qaeda and other extremist groups. Even proponents of containment warn that it would leave U.S. troops as concentrated targets while limiting their ability to control the situation militarily.

A related option would involve redeploying U.S. forces to the relative safety of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq, to more peaceful areas in the south and to Anbar in the west, where they could focus on fighting al-Qaeda. "You can have your civil war without us," columnist Charles Krauthammer recently suggested that Bush tell Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. "We will be around to pick up the pieces as best we can."

Biddle, who noted that new Iraq strategy proposals "proliferate hourly" in the public domain, said another variant is to set up "heavily defended forward operating bases out in the desert somewhere [and] either sit there and mind our own business and do nothing except be present -- enabling us to say we're still there -- or, in a somewhat more activist flavor, to conduct raids of various kinds" against al-Qaeda bases and rescue missions for Iraqi military units.

Steven N. Simon, senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the NSC's director for national security threats during the Clinton administration, last month proposed U.S. disengagement from Iraq itself, calling for containment from the outside with a reinforced U.S. presence elsewhere in the region and the opening of a regional diplomatic dialogue. Those steps should be initiated immediately, Simon wrote, before the costs of the war begin to widen across the Middle East and beyond.

Still other withdrawal possibilities center on the replacement of conventional troops with a significant Special Forces contingent to engage in counterterrorism, along with what Biddle called "facilitating ethnic cleansing" by providing armed escorts for Iraqis who want to leave contested areas.

Any containment option is likely to add substantially to the nearly 4 million Iraqis who have fled to Jordan and Syria or have been displaced from their homes within Iraq, said Carlos Pascual of the Brookings Institution, who served as director of the State Department's Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization until October 2005. Humanitarian agencies are already drawing up plans for huge refugee camps inside and around Iraq's borders, although many are concerned they will only add to the country's problems.

"When refugees and displaced persons start collecting in camps," Pascual said, "you get a vulnerable population -- and a lot of unemployed men -- who are subject to attack, recruitment and internal violence. This is where you often get further radicalization, and the camps themselves become a source of the problem."

Over the years of U.S. involvement in Iraq, new plans have been launched with assurances of success -- the return of sovereignty to a handpicked Iraqi administration in the summer of 2004; a democratically elected government in January 2005; "Plan Baghdad," designed to retake the capital from insurgents and militias, in the summer of 2006. The current Plan A is arguably already Plan D or beyond.

Since last summer, public opinion has turned against Bush's handling of the war and favors withdrawing, rather than increasing, troops. Although the administration has said the new strategy should show progress within months, many officials privately say it could be years, if ever, and the Democratic majority in Congress has shown little inclination to wait patiently.

Any substantive administration planning for other contingencies is occurring at the margins of policy, far from key decision-makers. "Planners plan, but I don't think anyone is saying, 'Let's do the partition,' or 'Let's pull back and let Baghdad burn,' " one Pentagon official said. "That would be a tectonic shift. That would be catastrophic failure."

One military officer and another defense expert said they believe that retired Army Col. James Kurtz, a specialist in strategic planning, has been asked by the Pentagon to begin studying alternative strategies at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a government-run think tank. "It's just not appropriate to ask for that," Kurtz said in response to an inquiry. "We keep what we do with our sponsors, okay?"

Bush has warned that the U.S. commitment to Iraq is not open-ended and will require increased effort from Iraqis. Pressed to specify U.S. limits, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice promised the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that there would be ample opportunity "to see whether or not in fact the Iraqis are living up to the assurances they gave us."

"And what if they don't?" Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) asked.

"I don't think you go to Plan B," Rice replied. "You work with Plan A."

Coalition Raids Police Intelligence Center;
Al-Maliki Protests Raid as Illegal;
4.5 Million Malnourished Iraqi Kids

British soldiers accompanied by Iraqi forces raided a National Intelligence Center in the southern city of Basra. They said they discovered evidence of torture and accused the police running it of being terrorists involved in setting roadside bombs targetting British convoys.

So to whom exactly did this facility belong? Even al-Zaman does not seem to know, exactly. At one point its article says that the facility belongs to the federal Ministry of the Interior. At another point it says that it was overseen by a multi-party committee. Many police facilities under the Interior Ministry had been infiltrated by the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. But the Basra provincial council is dominated by the Islamic Virtue Party, which has its own paramilitary, which has been infiltrated into the Basra police. The intelligence center was likely either Badr or Virtue. I suspect the latter, since Badr is highly disciplined and to my knowledge has not attack Coalition troops frontally.

Now here is what is odd. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki denounced the British raid on the facility! He called for an investigation and called the action illegal. His office accused the British of releasing the prisoners held there (themselves presumably involved in political violence), but the British military said that the prisoners had accidentally escaped.

It would be very interesting to know the back story here, but no one is being explicit about whom exactly, among the various parties and militias in Basra, the British were hitting, or why al-Maliki should protest as a result.

Under US, Kurdish and Sunni Arab pressure, the al-Maliki government appointed an indpendent, Jawad al-Bulani, to head the ministry of the interior, and he is reported to have purged thousands of employees from it who had ties to militias and death squads. These were primarily members of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who had been using the ministry as a vehicle for patronage for party members and Badr Corps militiamen. I am suspicious, however, about the depth of this purge and have the sense that SCIRI and Badr still have a large presence in the ministry.

ican, You seem to have the "final solution" for Iraq. How about the following problem in Southern California? How should "they" find the solution before they take over the world/California?

White supremacist gang gains clout
By GILLIAN FLACCUS, Associated Press Writer
Sun Mar 4, 7:24 PM ET
...

ican, Your solutions haven't been working, has it? You seem to think your ideas to solve problems has some value, but they're all "pie in the sky" solutions, because nobody can eliminate all crime nor find solutions for the mess in Iraq. Your simpleton ideas are just that; unrealistic and simplistic.

ican, Your solutions haven't been working, has it? You seem to think your ideas to solve problems has some value, but they're all "pie in the sky" solutions, because nobody can eliminate all crime nor find solutions for the mess in Iraq. Your simpleton ideas are just that; unrealistic and simplistic.

...
Ican, where do you derive your credibility in any military issue from, given the fact that you have been spectacularly wrong in the recent years about many issues having to do with that subject? Why should anyone listen to you?

Cycloptichorn