goldfly
<B>if my thought dreams could be seen</B>
not sure if serious
One thing about G-Dub.
- Thread starter weso1
- Start date
not sure if serious
yeezus
It's OVER 5,000!
Julio3000
<B>A Chip Off the Old Rock</B>
Did he call the play that created this ****-show? Did he call the play that locked the Sunnis out of the government? Should he have called a play to keep 30,000 troops there, at who knows what cost, when they were needed elsewhere, in places like Afghanistan and, I dunno, their homes?
Gary82
Called Up to the Major Leagues
The majority of American voters wanted troops pulled out. They elected a president that said he would.
AerchAngel
<B>Secretary of Statistics</B>
We should never been there in the first place.
Cheney is a piece of shat and I despise that dick ass motherfvcker for getting my cousin killed on a stupid and senseless war for oil.
Fvck him and that noodle brain Bush.
Cheney is a piece of shat and I despise that dick ass motherfvcker for getting my cousin killed on a stupid and senseless war for oil.
Fvck him and that noodle brain Bush.
yeezus
It's OVER 5,000!
So all the terrible play calls leading up to this mean nothing. No, let's just blame Obama. Lazy and ignorant.
50PoundHead
Hessmania Forever
Yeah, Obama was on the aircraft carrier under the "Mission Accomplished" banner.
5,000 to 6,000 troops would have to be in active firefights on a daily basis to stop this crap.
goldfly
<B>if my thought dreams could be seen</B>
According to today's NYT the Pentagon initially wanted a 20K 'leave behind' force ... Biden insisted it be whittled down, and the number was eventually agreed to be somewhere between 5K-10K.
What ultimately prevented troops from staying in country was the issue of immunity for American soldiers. Maliki was willing to sign an executive order guaranteeing it, but that wasn't enough for Pentagon lawyers and there was no guarantee that the Iraqi Parliament would ratify any legislation that provided it. So we withdrew completely.
Julio3000
<B>A Chip Off the Old Rock</B>
Yeah, and there's an important distinction to be made between Korea and Iraq, which you've touched on tangentially. Regardless of some friction created by US troops in SK, the attitude of the people and the government of that country is distinctly different than in Iraq.
weso1
<B>Clique Leader</B>
I know that was the reported reason and I hear it bandied about often, but I really find that hard to believe. I think Obama admin could have worked out a deal in the end if they really wanted. My guess is that they gave it a half hearted effort. Probably for political reasons more than anything. Obama/Biden wanted out and in the end they got what they wanted.
Julio3000
<B>A Chip Off the Old Rock</B>
As was mentioned upthread, that opinion reflected the will of the electorate. It was essentially a campaign promise.
weso1
<B>Clique Leader</B>
Passing the buck to the will of the American people. News Flash Obama! We're idiots.
Julio3000
<B>A Chip Off the Old Rock</B>
Hmmm. Was that statement right or wrong, though?
Assuming we kept troops there, that means we have to keep our guys fighting there for an even longer period of time for any "sense" of stabilization.
Reality is most of that region is still in the stone age, and that no matter how much troops we keep, it isn't going to fix problems that have been going on for centuries, much like Crimea. It's really wishful thinking to think this problem would've been entirely avoided had we just kept troopers there. Once it was stable enough for us to theoretically leave anyways, the same cycle of violence would've likely happened.
South Korea doesn't necessarily need that many of our troops, but our troops are also there to help support Japan as well (yes we have troops in Japan also). It's NK and China that we're helping protect Japan and SK from. China could be a bigger threat than Russia.
Reality is most of that region is still in the stone age, and that no matter how much troops we keep, it isn't going to fix problems that have been going on for centuries, much like Crimea. It's really wishful thinking to think this problem would've been entirely avoided had we just kept troopers there. Once it was stable enough for us to theoretically leave anyways, the same cycle of violence would've likely happened.
South Korea doesn't necessarily need that many of our troops, but our troops are also there to help support Japan as well (yes we have troops in Japan also). It's NK and China that we're helping protect Japan and SK from. China could be a bigger threat than Russia.
weso1
<B>Clique Leader</B>
Now there's a question.
50PoundHead
Hessmania Forever
My point is if we were to play an active role here, the force would likely have to remain at about 100,000. I'm not a military planner, but I doubt 20,000 would do all that much in the current melee.
Here's my bottom line. I always thought the war part of this deal was going to be a walk in the park. Little more than a practice run with live ammo. It's the nation-building part that was going to be the difficult part of the equation. By his own admission during the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush expressed wanting no part of that type of exercise. But like General Powell has stated (and I paraphrase), in Iraq, it's "you broke it, you bought it."
Both ends of the war/peacekeeping equation were done on the cheap. It was dressed up as an anti-terrorism exercise, which is probably the biggest load of foreign policy crap that's been fed to the American people since Vietnam, but in the wake of 9/11 where terrorism is the new international communist threat, it was a scrumptious meal of revenge. I was galled by how many liberal intellectuals, including people like Michael Walzer (who I respect to my core), who contorted just war theory to justify the invasion. Saddam Hussein was a horrid and brutal dictator (to whom the US supplied aid during the Iran/Iraq war) who deserved to be ousted (and apprehended and put on trial for his egregious misdeeds toward the Iraqi people), but if the US was going to do that, it should have explained from the get-go what that was going to require.
The failed nation-building (let's call it what it was) began with the decision to not allow anyone who was a member of the Baathist party a role in the re-building of Iraq. Makes really good sense (I say sarcastically) to not allow a number of qualified people with expertise on "making the trains run on time" a role in the re-building of their country. I chuckle sardonically thinking that Operation Paper Clip brought a whole raft of Nazi scientists to the United States after WWII, but we can't let some low-level functionaries who likely owed their positions to being members of the Baathist party the opportunity to work for a state-operated power company (or something of that ilk). Same thing with the military. Let's take all of the officers that may have disagreed with Saddam and tell them, "Sorry. Guilt by association does you in." All that expertise just washed down the drain. And where are a bunch of those former Baathist military officials now; fighting with ISIL.
This whole exercise has been a dishonest tragicomedy of errors. I was against the invasion because I believed it would end something like this. I'm not prescient by any means, but post-Cold War American foreign policy has been short on the delivery side of the equation. War aims are a crucial part of any decision to go to war and, in this case, the sole aim appears in retrospect to be "get rid of Saddam Hussein." We're like gluttons at Old Country Buffet. We love to load up the plate again and again and wolf it all down, but we somehow think we're not going to feel like sh*t the next day.
PS--Biden, whose picture is next to the term "loose cannon" in the dictionary, advocated the three-state solution when he was running for President in 2008, so it's my guess that is what he is advocating while failing to use his "inside voice" right now. I don't know if that's a good solution or not. I think Kurdistan will stand on its own when all is said and done. What happens to the other portions currently in question remains to be seen.
PSS--Another irony (if it is indeed irony) is that the whole Shiite/Sunni thing found its way to the surface with Ayatollah Khomeini in the lead-up to the ousting of the Shah in 1979. I'm sure that the internal relations between the various sects of Islam weren't all sweetness and light (and Western history is full of wars between denominations of Christianity), but it appears that the modern flashpoint for these differences occurred then.
PSSS--One of my rules of thumb when viewing modern foreign policy is that when all other analysis fails, blame the British. This is another example of how British imperialism and the post-WWI partitioning of the Middle East as part of the Great Game has come to haunt the modern world. Add to that the outright betrayal of the Arabs by the British high command after T.E. Lawrence had made certain promises to them and you've got a century's worth of distrust fomenting. If this part of the world was truly part of the White Man's Burden, we probably should have been a bit more judicious in our approach to the region.
Julio3000
<B>A Chip Off the Old Rock</B>
Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote a really good book about the CPA and the failure of the nation-building mission, called Imperial Life in the Emerald City.
That enterprise was a disaster, and one that was undertaken with equal parts ignorance, arrogance, and cupidity. It was also easy to see coming, given the players involved.
That enterprise was a disaster, and one that was undertaken with equal parts ignorance, arrogance, and cupidity. It was also easy to see coming, given the players involved.
Metaphysicist
Not Actually Brian Hunter
To get back on topic, I'd never actually seen the "bullhorn" speech, so I just looked it up on youtube. It was pretty underwhelming... even at that crucial moment the douchy smugness is just leaking out of him. God that guy sucked.