8 posts tagged “iraq”
From Vice President Cheney at CPAC:
In these circumstances it's worth reminding ourselves that, like it or not, the enemy we face in the war on terror has made Iraq the primary front in that war. To use a popular phrase, this is an inconvenient truth. (Laughter and applause.) In bin Laden's words, and I quote, "Success in Baghdad will be success for the United States. Failure in Iraq is the failure of the United States. Their defeat in Iraq will mean defeat in all their wars." End quote. That makes one thing, above all, very clear: If you support the war on terror, then it only makes sense to support it where the terrorists are fighting us.
I know we have quite a broad strata of political opinions in this group. I'd really like to get some feedback on this statement made by Cheney.
Ground rules: Play nice, coherent arguments only.
Am I allowed to copy and paste a whole article? Not really sure the legality of such things. But this is from Rich Lowry over at The Corner. Original link is here.
Bombings and Iraq [Rich Lowry]
My “Pentagon intel guy” writes in an e-mail:
Since my job at the Pentagon is to follow and report these kinds of things- there are several trends we are seeing lately.
1) Definite and measurable decrease in number of sectarian killings within Baghdad: From nearly 1,400 to 680 in the last two months.
2) We are killing and capturing increasing numbers of Sunni insurgents and Al Qaeda fighters. And when I say "we"- I mean Multi-National Forces Iraq as well as the Iraqi Army, the Iraqi Police Commando, and the newer "National Guard"/Territorial Forces in Anbar.
3) The recent bombings in ANBAR demonstrate red on red kinetic operations. Something which has been rare until the last few months. More and more Sunni tribes are pledging fealty to the Iraqi government and the Coalition and turning their back on the insurgents/AQI. This has caused them to be targeted.
We have seen the enemy bomb police recruitment drives, and now mosques of "apostate" Imams and Sheikhs who have sided with the Americans. This has happened twice in the last week. While the mainstream media considers this more proof of failure- it is actually a sign of the precarious position the terrorists are in. They need the Sunni population to protect them and shelter them. If they are now butchering them like everyone else- this could be a turning point in the relationship. This is crucial to watch. We need to protect the tribal leaders who have come over to us- and AQI knows that it is a death sentence for them if they can't stop it.
For those of you interested in the Iraq debate, what do recommend when it comes to Muqtada al Sadr?
I've heard two sides. One to take him on as a conventional enemy. The second, which Christopher Hitchens proposes, is to try and integrate him into the Democratic process.
I can see both sides. On one hand, this man's deathsquads and militia are responsible for thousands of dead Iraqi's and he needs to be stopped. On the other hand, he has a broad base of support and has influence in the Maliki government. If he could be disarmed and brought into line with official government, it could save a lot of bloodshed.
Thoughts?
His basic thesis as to why Iran is fostering violence in Iraq:
"Because Iraq is not about Iraq. It’s about America."
Read it.
I love Victor Davis Hanson.
I found this blog duel, of sorts, linked on Hugh Hewitts page. It's two guys talking Iraq policy and strategy, and there's some sober assessments and good ideas.
One of my favorite segments, by VDH.
Here is what I think happened in Iraq after April 2003. Bolstered by a 70-percent approval rating, and still smarting from all the prewar hysteria from the Left, the Bush administration felt that it could run out the clock, so to speak.
Thus, each time a challenge arose—looting, the Fallujah outbreak, the Sadr uprising—their idea was to finesse the crisis as much as possible. They were afraid to squander the capital of hard-won public support through (unneeded?) escalation, escalation that would increase casualties and only encourage further domestic and international condemnation of the war.
As a result of this policy, public support vanished anyway, in dribs and drabs, each time we did not react strongly and decisively enough to a provocation. The administration thought, apparently, that using more aggressive tactics would only further incite the growing anti-war movement and that the good news of progress in reconstruction would only continue to be ignored by a biased media.
And so with a whimper rather than a bang, our complacency and over-sensitive attention to perceived public opinion made us ever less aggressive and ever more attuned to “force protection”—at precisely the time more and more offensive operations were needed to break the insurgency and win back public opinion.
Enjoyable all around.
The bad news is that some Republican’s are getting in on the corporate ass-covering. I can see their motivation; if I were running for re-election in ’08 it would be awfully tempting to distance myself from the war. But that doesn’t make it the right thing to do.
The new General in charge of our operations in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus, is on the record saying that a non-binding resolution like this can have no positive effect and will in fact, “encourage the enemy”. Now this guy was just confirmed for this position by the Democrat controlled Senate, so even they think he’s the best qualified for this job.
So to recap what the Dem’s are doing – the guy that they just put in charge of this operation says that their resolution will encourage the enemy, and somehow they think they should pass it anyways. And some Republican’s are going along for the ride.
This is despicable and cannot stand.
When you’re in a war, you don’t talk about how to get out of it, or how to manage loss, or whatever the phrase of the day is. Like the poster I posted yesterday says, “Losing is for losers, loser.” The only way out of a war is winning.
As Mark Steyn said yesterday on Hugh Hewitt’s program,
“I never feel more foreign than when we have these slightly surreal debates that are going on at the moment, because a lot of it is retroactive. You know, that fellow who gave the response to the State of the Union, Senator Webb from down in Virginia, who everyone told me he’s a new kind of Democrat, moderate Democrat, and he may very well be. But he spent most of his address whining about what might have been if they’d only listened to him in 2003, essentially. It’s not 2003 now, it’s 2007. And the idea that as a kind of intellectual exercise, you can debate whether or not to wage a war, whether to wage it ineffectually and all the rest of it, no, you can’t. You’re in it, and you have to win it, and you can have an argument about how to win it, but if you’re not even interested in victory, as most of these Democrats, and pathetic people like Susan Collins(...)are not, then really, you can’t be part of that conversation.” (Emphasis mine.)
Indeed the Democrats’ overwhelming desire to lose (to anyone) is mind-boggling. But the bottom line is that the man that they approved for the job, says he wants this plan carried out. Serious strategists think it has a good chance of working, bringing us one step closer to victory. Give General Petraeus the chance and forget about defeat, because it’s not an option.
There. Now you have background on the surge, now you can start to see the cowards in Congress for what they truly are.
The Democrats are, predictably, trying to undercut this effort mainly because the President suggested it. A month or two ago the big line with the Dem’s was that we didn’t have enough troops on the ground to get the job done and we needed to bulk up or get out. As soon as President Bush announced that he would be taking a troop increase seriously in his new strategy, they changed their tune.
Of course, they Democrats, even in a majority, can’t restrict the President from sending more troops. What they could do, however, is restrict the funding. Now they may not like the war, and may want to pull the troops out, but there’s no way they’d vote to not fund the surge. This would reveal the truth that they don’t actually support the troops. So what can they do?
Draft up a non-binding resolution. Translation: Fold their arms and say, “Just for the record, we’re not happy about sending more troops.” They think this is an effective political smoke-screen, but the truth of the matter is the average, thoughtful American citizen see’s this for what it is – fence riding.
You see, if the strategy fails (as they secretly hope it will), then they could say that they didn’t support it from the beginning. They can maintain that they never undercut the President’s plan out of respect, but now it’s time for us to get out; whether a genocide on the scale of Rwanda occurs or not, it doesn’t seem to phase the Dem’s in the least. If it were to happen, they just say that we never should have been there in the first place.
But what if the plan succeeds and Baghdad is pacified, the Maliki government gains total control without Sadr’s dirty seats in the Iraqi Parlaiment, al Qaeda abandons Iraq, the Baathists are destroyed and the bomb and insurgent smugglers in Syria and Iran back off? Well then the Dem’s can say that they didn’t want to hurt the troops so they made the resolution to voice their dissent without cutting funding.
Here's a post that I wrote today that is too long for a single posting. So I'm going to post this section first and then one in the morning tomorrow and one in the afternoon. Enjoy.
For those of you who have tuned out the news of late, listen in for a moment.
Last week the President outlined his new strategy for victory in Iraq. Referred to widely as “the surge”, the plan calls for an increase of 21,500 troops and came after a series of military appointments and reappointments.
One quick thing to note that the mainstream media won’t tell you is that the entire 21,500 troops we’re sending in will be sent to Baghdad itself, more than doubling our current troop strength.
The city has been subdivided into several segments. Each segment will have battlegroups assigned to it, each one composed of 2,000 Iraqi Army soldiers and 600 US soldiers.
Their objective will be to take and hold each segment until the whole city is under Iraqi and Coalition control. The plan also calls for a shifting in troops to the violent, insurgent strongholds in al Albar province to the West of Baghdad.
There is a broad consensus amongst serious military strategists that this is the right way to go about bringing security to the capital and the country as a whole.
In fact, the announcement of this plan has already had three distinct effects.
- al Qaeda in Iraq forces are preparing to redeploy to the northeast, out of Baghdad to prevent capture.
- The radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr has instructed his Mahdi Army militia’s to change out of their uniforms and hide their weapons so as to avoid being taken out.
- The Prime Minister of Iraq, Nouri al Maliki has begun his crackdown on the Mahdi Army, over 600 of them have been arrested in the past few days.
These are very significant developments that would have been impossible without this change of strategy.
Tune in tomorrow for Part 2.
