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Originally Posted by jconnolly
Then this brings me back to my original question: What does Bush have to do with this? Your military would be just as incompetent under any President.
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I don't think this is an issue of military competence. The military is quite good at doing what they're trained to do, given adequate paramaters to act within. In fact, this failure and others had a lot to do with the decisions that President Bush made going in. You see, Rumsfeld thought it would be neat to knock over Iraq with only two divisions. It would scare a lot of people, and it worked; the army was able to do the job.
They started having problems once they got there. 150,000 troops are not enough to secure Iraq. They had to bring in guard and reserve units. Inevitably, those units and others wound up doing jobs that they weren't trained or prepared for. Just look at Abu Ghraib. Not only did they have troops doing a job they weren't prepared for, they failed to make sure our troops understood the geneva conventions, and they promoted a culture of intolerance and dehumanization towards the Iraqis. When you believe someone is evil, it's easy to do bad things to them.
We could have a whole other thread rehashing that fiasco, but I think it's relevant here, as this missing weapons cache is just another example of Bush's failed leadership in Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/19/in...n&pagewanted=2
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Thomas E. White, then the secretary of the Army, said he had received similar guidance from Mr. Rumsfeld's office. "Our working budgetary assumption was that 90 days after completion of the operation, we would withdraw the first 50,000 and then every 30 days we'd take out another 50,000 until everybody was back," he recalled. "The view was that whatever was left in Iraq would be de minimis."
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The limited number of United States troops, however, posed problems in policing the porous borders, establishing a significant presence in the resistant Sunni Triangle and imposing order in the capital.
"My position is that we lost momentum and that the insurgency was not inevitable," said James A. (Spider) Marks, a retired Army major general, who served as the chief intelligence officer for the land war command. "We had momentum going in and had Saddam's forces on the run.
"But we did not have enough troops," he continued. "First, we did not have enough troops to conduct combat patrols in sufficient numbers to gain solid intelligence and paint a good picture of the enemy on the ground. Secondly, we needed more troops to act on the intelligence we generated. They took advantage of our limited numbers."
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(it's a good article, and a worthwhile read, if a bit long)
The civilian and military leadership didn't even prepare for an insurgency. They figured everything would go quite well, and we wouldn't have problems. You see, if we talked about things going badly, that might undermine our case for war. Better preparation might have prevented 40 truckloads of explosives from being "liberated" from their bunker to arm our enemies. The IAEA knew where the stuff was. Why? Because RDX can be used to detonate nuclear weapons.
760,000 pounds of extremely high grade military explosives. The shit ain't firecrackers, and nobody knows where it is, or how many Americans have died because of it.