[Grovenet] Is This Why The "Support Our Troops" SignsDissappeared

Sat Dec 23 11:12:48 PST 2006

Ron said:
> Now our troops are caught in the middle. All they can do is conduct war, so
> they're asking for the tools to do it with the effectiveness we did in
> WWII. I'm not surprised. And they have a point. Don't the Iraqi people
> deserve the stability they had before we invaded? Don't their children,
> wives and husbands deserve the ability to work, go to school and live with
> electricity, running water, working sewers like they had before?

While I agree with 99% of what you say, I don't think our troops want to wage 
"total war" in Iraq. They believe their commanders, they believe in their 
mission, but that mission is impossible. Do you remember "shock and awe?" 
These analogies to WWII have been repeated often enough, but they all miss 
the mark: Japan and Germany were coherent countries that had relatively 
stable social structures. Iraq, like Yugoslavia, was a bundle of warring 
tribes held together by a ruthless strongman. In Yugoslavia, Pandora's box 
was opened by the death of Tito. We played the role of the grim reaper in 
Iraq, with no idea of how to close the Pandora's box that we opened.

Our problem in Iraq is that we can't see the enemy. Even if we had "enough 
troops that there's a solder on virtually every street" we wouldn't succeed. 
One of the reasons we've lost the support of most Iraqis is because we've 
tried to complete your sentence: " ... who immediately kills anyone who 
merely looks suspicious." But to us, everyone looks suspicious.

Consider this statement from a soldier who was stationed at Abu Ghraib: "... 
we had a policy of random sweeps. Every time the base would come under fire 
from outside, we would send soldiers into the surrounding area to sweep up 
all the men on the street and bring them to Abu Ghraib for questioning. If 
they found out they were innocent, they'd be slated for release. But the 
release process was so bureaucratic that it would take six months to get 
prisoners released.... Coalition military intelligence officers told the 
International Red Cross that in their estimate, between 70 and 90 percent of 
the persons who had been deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested 
by mistake." He goes on to say that "When people ask me, 'Why are the Iraqis 
so ungrateful for what we're doing for them?', I say 'Some Iraqi family had a 
loved one, a husband, father, brother, son, at Abu Ghraib, who in all 
probability had committed no offense, and he never came out again. Either he 
died from disease, or was shot by the guards, or was killed by mortar 
bombardment from the outside [described elsewhere in the article]. That's why 
they hate us."

If more troops could help separate the "suspicious" from the ordinary, perhaps 
we could "succeed." I see no evidence that that is a real expectation. I see 
it more as a way to postpone the inevitable until after the next election. 
I'm sure Mr. Rove is hard at work trying to plot how to pin that outcome on 
the Democrats, just as the Dems are trying to figure out how to avoid that, 
with the likely result that they will go along with what the President wants. 
And we'll get more of the same.

On Saturday 23 December 2006 11:01, Ron D'Eau Claire wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: grovenet-bounces at rdrop.com [mailto:grovenet-bounces at rdrop.com] On
> Behalf Of Meredith Bliss
> Sent: Saturday, December 23, 2006 8:48 AM
> To: Forest Grove local interests list
> Subject: Re: [Grovenet] Is This Why The "Support Our Troops"
> SignsDissappeared
>
>
> Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the strategy in Iraq seems to be based
> on
> the notion that having a lot of soldiers patrolling the streets of Baghdad
> (and elsewhere) will intimidate the "insurgents" sufficiently so that they
> will go into hiding. If you subscribe to this notion, then the idea of
> sending more troops to be even more intimidating makes perfect sense.
>
> On the other hand, we learned long ago in this country that random police
> patrols were a waste of resources: unless you have a patrol car going by
> every location in the city every five minutes, the intensity of patrol has
> little or no impact on crime rates. And of course, no one would want to
> foot
>
> the bill for that sort of police presence. What does work to some extent is
> targeted patrol and interdiction, and all of the strategies of
> problem-oriented / community policing.
>
> What we have in Iraq seems to be an unlearning of those lessons, and most
> of
>
> what is accomplished by the troops is just providing a target for the
> "insurgents," much as the Redcoats provided targets for Colonists in this
> country 230 years ago. What's that expression about learning from history?
>
> Meanwhile, little to no effort has gone into training Iraqi police forces
> which have become little more than tools of the various tribal factions.
>
> Six years ago, we were unknowing participants in a political "paradigm
> shift"
> when a new contingent of folks came into power with the mantra that we do
> not
> respond to reality, we create our own reality. We are now living through
> the
>
> fruits of that terrible fallacy, as an attempt to force our reality upon an
> unreceptive world is nearing collapse. No one in Washington has a
> "solution"
>
> to the mess we've created in Iraq, but the consequences of this catastrophe
> will be far reaching. I don't see how anyone can believe that more of the
> same will create anything but more of the same. The Administration may just
>
> be hoping that enough more of the same will stave off the final collapse
> until after November, 2008.
>
> Proving once again that "may you live in interesting times" is a curse, not
> a
> blessing.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>-
>
>
> I think that strategy would work. That's how we do "war" according to our
> own experience in successful wars. (The last one of those we were in was
> WWII). But we haven't chosen to do that.
>
> We start out by killing. Like we did in WWII, slaughter half a million (or
> more) non-combatant men, women and children in a single night like we did
> in Germany. Do that several times in several places and be sure the word
> gets out about what happened and who did it. That gets their attention.
> Then we invade with enough troops that there's a solder on virtually every
> street who immediately kills anyone who merely looks suspicious. And then
> you occupy and control everything that happens in the country for decades,
> if necessary.
>
> That's what the USA did in Japan and Germany in WWII. It's how we won the
> wars there.
>
> There's nothing nice, nothing "Christian", nothing even human about war,
> even the way America wages war. That is, unless we lose the war like we're
> doing this one in Iraq.
>
> Saddam understood that. It's how he did it when some faction stood up and
> challenged his position. It's why Iraqis could go about their lives
> peacefully and safely under his administration, unless they were suspected
> of undermining that administration.
>
> Saddam learned from us.
>
> >From its inception the UN has said that such unrestricted war involving
> > mass
>
> murder such as we've fought in the past and which the allies won in 1945 is
> not an acceptable way to control renegade countries. President Bush said
> that we could not afford to let the UN work its way, slowly and painfully,
> toward what we might consider a workable situation in Iraq, whatever that
> might be. The President announced that Saddam was about to attack America
> and Americans with weapons of mass destruction. He openly encouraged
> visions of horrible biological plagues or nuclear clouds over American
> cities.
>
> We went to war to prevent that. We went to WAR, to slaughter by the
> millions, if necessary, just like we did in Germany and Japan.
>
> We didn't do that. We decapitated the government and turned loose all the
> thugs and private militia in the middle east to rape Iraq. Then we told the
> remnants of civilized people there to form a government and repel the
> insurgents. Not only did they lack the resources and the training, many of
> them thought that repelling the invaders, America and England, should be
> the first step.
>
> Now our troops are caught in the middle. All they can do is conduct war, so
> they're asking for the tools to do it with the effectiveness we did in
> WWII. I'm not surprised. And they have a point. Don't the Iraqi people
> deserve the stability they had before we invaded? Don't their children,
> wives and husbands deserve the ability to work, go to school and live with
> electricity, running water, working sewers like they had before?
>
> I agree, Bud. Doing it the quick and obvious way with war that murders more
> millions is not the desirable choice. And I agree that we might well look
> at our own society and implement a structure in Iraq that has at least the
> basic features of effective police protection we enjoy.
>
> However, one of the great disappointments to me about American culture is
> our short attention span. If we, as a nation, can't do it in less than a
> decade, better in a span of less than 4 years, we tend to lose interest and
> simply walk away to go find something else to play with.
>
> Other nations have learned that about America. It's why they don't take any
> long-term plans we promote seriously. Since WWII we've not followed
> through, even once. (JFK was really stretching our attention span by
> committing us to a 9 year program to go to the moon, and the minute the
> first mission returned the cries began to shut down the program and throw
> away all that we gained beyond winning a sophomoric race.)
>
> Other nations don't expect America to follow through now. Neither do I.
>
> I believe that Iraq will fall into civil war and chaos. We Americans used
> to laugh at the Soviets with their constant claims to greatness when they
> were clearly stumbling and failing. Now we emulate them. Once again America
> will leave it to others to fix for us. That's the bad news.
>
> The good news is that other nations have great abilities to do just that.
> Look at Vietnam today. Look at China. They are testaments to the fact that
> people can survive and thrive and even beat us at our own game, even after
> they were "helped" by the USA.
>
> Ron D'Eau Claire
>
>
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-- 
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Just happy to be here, but speaking 
only for myself!
Meredith Bliss --- www.rdrop.com/~mbliss
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