At this point in Iraq, you do not have a central government -- so you don't have a legitimate authority running the country. You don't have a government with the power to establish or maintain order. What you have is a nominal government that can only stay in power because the Americans are there. The government is supposed to have derived legitimacy from the constitution and the elections. It is now almost three months after the elections and there is still no government... A government that takes over five months to form is not a government that is going to have very much legitimacy in the end. The country has already collapsed. Now the challenge is figuring out a way to deal with this fact..."The Country Has Already Collapsed"
"The Vietnam War experience can’t tell us anything about the war in Iraq – or so it is said. If you believe that, trying looking through this lens, and you may change your mind.[Nieman Watchdog | March 08, 2008]
...Only by getting out of Iraq can the United States possibly gain sufficient international support to design a new strategy for limiting the burgeoning growth of anti-Western forces it has unleashed in the Middle East and Southwest Asia."
70% of Republicans think civil war will break out in IraqYou're doin' a heckuva job, Bushie!
70% of Americans think US is on wrong track
37% approve of his job performance
36% approval rating on domestic affairs, down from 39% last month
43% approval on foreign policy and terrorism
40% approval on Iraq and economy
"– As of March 2005 — two years into the war — the Pentagon had still not developed a 'system to assess the readiness of Iraqi military and police forces so they [could] identify weaknesses and provide them with effective support.'posted by ericb at 12:36 PM on March 10, 2006
– U.S. advisors to Iraqi police units 'have been stretched thin' for 'much of the last three years.' The L.A. Times reported yesterday, 'By the end of 2005 there were only 700 U.S. police trainers for an Iraqi police force of more than 100,000.'
– As a result, U.S. advisors believe that the training of Iraqi forces 'have skewed toward weapons handling and battlefield tactics and not dealt enough with human rights, investigations and administration.'"
How can say they didn't know it would happen?
Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under the circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.-- President George H.W. Bush, A World Transformed, 1998.
Wasn't it Colin Powell who invoked the Crate & Barrel Rule -- 'You Break It, You Bought It?'
Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, said the situation in Iraq had evolved to the point where Sunni-Shiite violence was more of a threat to U.S. success there than the insurgency, which continues taking a deadly toll on Iraqi and American troops, and to impede efforts to stabilize the country.Things are going to get worse before they get any better.
Coalition Deaths in Iraq (DoD confirmed): 2,513 (U.S. -- 2307]"Theirs"
"A study by the Iraq Body Count (IBC) project suggests that 12,617 people have been killed over the past year....US-led invasion of March and April 2003...resulted in 7,312 civilian deaths and 17,298 injured in a mere 42 days." [Scotsman | March 08, 2006]posted by ericb at 4:25 PM on March 10, 2006
”…President Bush has said he thinks violence claimed at least 30,000 Iraqi dead as of December, while some researchers have cited numbers of 50,000, 75,000 or beyond. [MSNBC]posted by ericb at 5:23 PM on March 10, 2006
…Iraq Body Count puts its tally of Iraqi war dead at between [33,489] and [37, 589] as of [Mar. 10.], but that doesn’t include Iraqi soldiers or insurgents. It compiles its estimate of civilian deaths from news stories, corroborating each death through at least two reports. [IBC]
"A day after returning to the U.S., after another long term as bureau chief in Baghdad, John Burns of The New York Times said on Bill Maher's Friday night HBO program that he now feels, for the first time, that the American effort in Iraq will likely 'fail.'posted by ericb at 9:43 AM on March 11, 2006
Asked if a civil war was developing there, Burns said, 'It's always been a civil war,' adding that it's just a matter of extent. He said the current U.S. leaders there--military and diplomatic--were doing there best but sectarian differences would 'probably' doom the enterprise.
Burns said that he and others underestimated this problem, feeling for a long time that toppling Saddam Hussein would almost inevitably lead to something much better."
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - As if sabotage, killings and collapsing infrastructure were not enough, political uncertainty and the failure of Iraqi parties to form a government three months after an election is now dragging on Iraq's oil industry.Government delay pulls Iraq's oil sector down
Analysts and officials said Iraq risks losing entirely the confidence of the international market as a supplier. The Oil Ministry said a cash crunch could hit even domestic supplies if the limbo continues, something that could provoke public anger.
"With the political situation as it is, the only direction the oil sector is going is downwards," Saad Allah al-Fathi, a former official at Iraq's oil ministry, told Reuters.
"Former Nixon adviser Alexander Haig said Saturday military leaders in Iraq are repeating a mistake made in Vietnam by not applying the full force of the military to win the war.[Associated Press | March 11, 2006]
'Every asset of the nation must be applied to the conflict to bring about a quick and successful outcome, or don't do it,' Haig said. 'We're in the midst of another struggle where it appears to me we haven't learned very much.'
"When I got back from Iraq a little while ago, I went down to see the president, and I sat with the president, and he kept talking about terrorists. And I said, ‘Mr. President, if every single al-Qaeda personality, every single al-Qaeda operative or anyone like him tomorrow were blown away, you still have a war, Mr. President. This is well beyond terrorists.’ There’s an insurgency, Tim, a gigantic insurgency that has nothing to do with terrorists."posted by ericb at 8:57 PM on March 12, 2006
"Senior British diplomatic and military staff gave Tony Blair explicit warnings three years ago that the US was disastrously mishandling the occupation of Iraq, according to leaked memos."[Guardian Unlimited | March 14, 2006]
Only 3% of Americans believe Bush decided to go to war to free the Iraqis or promote democracy.posted by ericb at 3:04 PM on March 14, 2006
25% of Americans believe the Iraq war was worth the costs.
"March was supposed to be the month when the U.S. commander in Iraq made a recommendation to pull more troops out of Iraq. Instead, he has asked for more troops to be sent in."[CBS News | March 14, 2006]
« Older NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is due to arriv... | Democracy comes to the English... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by frogan at 11:54 AM on March 10, 2006