All amazing coincidences I'm sure.

"With the daily bombings, I bet the people would like to take back their votes."

They'd probably love to get back to the good old days under Saddam with all the kite flying and happy times. You can't be serious.

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"I learned from the example of my father that the manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing that must be endured"

http://myfirstironman.blogspot.com

Matt, arn't you an attorney? Claiming that the small print in a contract does not matter?

Surely another sign of the apocolypse.:-)

As for the U2, the military is a profession, why not give them a little credit for knowing their jobs? Like what assets to use for a particular job.

Casey, you can deny the connection that all of these major events all happened in that part of the world and all in the wake of taking down Iraq in three weeks all you want. You might just want to give some thought to who is delusional though.

"And how do I know what intellignece is being used??? A U2 spyplane crashed the other day coming back from Afghanistan, read a newspaper once in a while."

A plane crashes and suddenly you are privy to how the intelligence community is getting it's information? What info do you think we get from U2s anyway? Do you know how high they fly or what equipment the can carry or what types of intel they are capable of providing? And do you think that the use of a U2 precludes the use of any other number of intelligence gathering sources?

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

art, how about drawing the connection? you throw these events around as if the connection to iraq and the bush admin is self-evident, when that is hardly the case.

can you speak to casey's points regarding syria and lebanon?

what about that democratic revolution in uzbekistan? oh wait...

what about the mess that is iraq, despite what dick "baghdad bob" cheney would have us believe?

explain to me what georgia or the ukraine have to do with u.s. policies, and most specifically bush's policies. were we going to bomb russia if they weren't allowed to have democratic reforms?

you talk of bush's vision and all these great foreign policy successes, but as has been noted, there seems little connection between many of the events and iraq. moreover, the ones that can be connected are far, far, far from done deals. and in the case of iraq, there is strong evidence that the violence is escalating with no signs of slowing down, not to mention, as casey also pointed out, all there has been is an election with no real progress made towards lasting governance.

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f/k/a mclamb6

"Ones insanity is anothers genius" - Al P Duezz 2005

Thanks!

Fair questions. Too many to answer, but I will take a shot.

I believe that Casey's point about Lebanon was that Lebanon was acting in their own interest rather than our's. Well of course they are. Democracy is a messy process. There is no guarantee that a democratic country will instantly be a fast friend. The percentages say that democracies seldom go to war against their neighbors, and virtually never go to war against a democratic neighbor. Thus I much prefer the instability of a potentially unfriendly democracy to the stability of a friendly strongman. The reality is that a stable strongman is not really stable at all. Just look to the Shah for an example.

Assad's daddy would have had no problem going in and slaughtering as many thousands of people as necessary to impose his rule. He had a long track record of doing that successfully. With 150,000 US troops on his border, Assad could not do that. Suddenly, the invincible strongman looks vulnerable. Lebanon rebels since they know the US won't allow a mass slaughter. Assad has no option but to let the process play out, hoping to get control of it later. Hopefully, he will instead lose control of his own country as well.

The same process took place in Georgia and Ukraine. The invincible strongman looks not so strong with US troops in the area and a military less capable than Iraq's which crumbled in three weeks. The people realize that the emperor has no clothes. Daddy Russia, who historically would have invaded, found that option off the table and its ability to intimidate looking impotent as a result. They tried to control democracy in the Ukraine, but, like Marcos, found that elections can not always be stolen without consequence.

The same process is being attempted in the Uzbekistan, but as of right now, it is failing. We can hope for more success in the future.

There was only ever one really good reason for going into Iraq. Bush talked about it in virtually every speech. I have outlined this in previous threads. In one word, that reason was leverage. No one ever seemed to listen to the various iterations of his beautifully crafted arguments on that theme. So much for incisive news analysis. That leverage has played out more successfully than I ever dreamed. I pray that streak will continue.

We invade Iraq because that action has the potential to change the world. We don't invade Sudan, because there is no such leverage.

The earlier arguments about the rolling up of the A. Q. Khan network, the disarming of Libya, and the amazing transformation of both India and Pakistan into firm allies not being related to Iraq is just silly. Khadafi even said that he saw what Bush did in Iraq and he was afraid. It just doesn't get anymore clear than that.

couple thoughts:

i don't see pakistan and india becoming allies as having anything to do with bush policy and more that both countries saw a politically opportune moment to gain favor with the u.s.

second, you might prefer an unstable democracy to a stable strongman, but what about the citizens of the mid-east countries? unless iraq gets their ess together and starts stabilizing, the appeal of democracy is going to dwindle substantially. and the reason that iraq is still such a mess goes right back to bush's policies as he had no plan that had any grounding in reality as to how post-war occupation and re-building would take place.

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f/k/a mclamb6

If you were India or Pakistan or Turkey for that matter, and you were to conclude that you were going to have to align with China, Europe, or the United States, which would you pick? In the wake of Iraq, what was once a hard call becomes very easy.

I can not believe the changes in India, which has been a disaster of a country my entire lifetime. They are really getting it together.

Yes, it is extremely important that Iraq succeed. The ramifications of failure would be terrible.

Sorry, I can't help laughing at the complaints voiced in 2005 that the right "planning" or position paper wasn't done in 2001 or 2002. If someone were to at least offer such a paper now, two or three years after the fact, that outlined policies that would affect the facts on the ground over time, I might take it more seriously. This talking point gets more humorous every day.

Fixing Iraq is now and will continue to be a major problem. Despite the occasional sound bite to the contrary, no one with any insight expected otherwise.

are you really going to say with a straight face that the admin was accurate in their post-war occupation predictions or even in the ball park? this isn't about nipicking policies after the fact, it's about recognizing that the admin was woefully un-prepared and rightfully criticizing them for it.

pakistan cozied up to the u.s. well before iraq. political opportunism, not policy.

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f/k/a mclamb6

I don't remember that there were a lot of post war predictions apart from the occasional sound bite. To answer more directly, probably not. The situation was and remains unpredictable and difficult.

Agree or not with the reasons for going to war, the plain truth is that neither the military nor the administration planned appropriately for the termination phase of the conflict. I can tell you right now that there has been a lot of emphasis placed on teaching military officers how to plan for passing occupational control over to civilian agencies or local govts and how to transition from combat to peace without allowing the growth of insurgency in the various War Colleges over the last couple of years. There is also a lot of work going on trying to get the various civilian agencies on the same page when it comes to providing those services and being able to coordinate NGOs and handover of sovereignty. It's easy and fairly clear cut when you're planning offensive action, logistics, intelligence, etc. Planning the transition back to peace is not easy and is definitely not our strong point. the good nes is that we recognize that weakness, and we're working to overcome it.

Many of the problems we are experiencing now could have been avoided, in my opinion, by better pre-war planning and coordination.

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

You are way better educated in this area that I. I only hope we are doing whatever the textbooks say now. Americans typically know better than to keep making the same mistake. I pray that is true here.

Quite frankly, I don't know that there is a "textbook" answer for most of these problems, but we're definitely moving in the right direction. One thing a lot of people would like is for the U.S. to become the "break down the doors" entity, with the UN or NATO or individual nations bringing much of the transitional assets to the conflict. We have the military and money to do the big stuff, and lost of the other countries or organizations have abilities that we don't. One proposal is to increase foreign aid and training/mil to mil stuff to help other countries build some of those capabilities, so that it's not just a matter of us making a mess and then asking Europe to clean it up. We still obviously have a ways to go.

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

This is a pretty decent comment.

The problem I have (or maybe more accurately one of the problems I have) with this administration is that this was all well known beforehand. Wesley Clark was loud and clear during the buildup to war about the difference between military and police roles and how having military training is of no help for troops whose role is policing/peacekeeping (and vice versa). My father went to the Army War College in the late 60s and I practically grew up on dinner table rants along these lines 30 years ago. This stuff was very well known within the services amongst the officers who finished their careers ahead of and mentored the current leaders. Clark's experience in Kosovo confirmed it, and it was an example where the military got it right (from what I can tell, I'm not terribly knowledgeable about what went on there).

I'm encouraged to see discussion of the military/police distinction, but I don't really buy the "we're learning and improving as we go, doing our best" bit. It may be true at today's junior/mid levels but at the senior levels they already knew this and their opinion and input was trumped by political hacks. I mean, didn't Shinseki get cashiered for essentially saying the same thing? I hope what you're describing and involved in is a swing in the other direction, where pragmatism born of experience is now trumping ideology.

I have no problem with most of what you said, but where do you get the idea that we did anything right in Kosovo? We bombed mostly civilian infrastructure targets like the Yugo plant into the Stone Age. The country is a total disaster many years later with no hope for any improvement. We prevented ethnic cleansing of the Muslims so we got ethnic cleansing of the Christians instead.

We do have very few casualities, but from what I can see, we have accomplished nothing but harm. Correct me where I go wrong.