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Banned
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This report helps to calm my reaction to your posted nytimes article, roachboy:
Quote:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/ea..._id=1002157326
John Burns, Back from Baghdad: U.S. Effort In Iraq Will Likely Fail
By E&P Staff
Published: March 10, 2006 12:15 AM ET
NEW YORK A day after returning to the U.S., after another long term as bureau chief in Baghdad, John F. Burns of The New York Times said on Bill Maher's live Friday night HBO program that he now feels, for the first time, that the American effort in Iraq will likely "fail."
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 their 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. He called the Abu Ghraib abuse the worst of many mistakes the U.S. made but <b>said that even without so many mistakes the sectarian conflict would have gotten out of hand.</b>
Speaking from Cambridge, Mass., where he was speaking at a conference on the Vietnam war, <b>Burns observed that he had been on the ground for 24 hours and, of all the people he had interacted with so far, "no one supports this war."</b>....
<b>.......Burns, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was one of the few Americans journalists who stayed in Baghdad during the U.S. attack on Iraq in March 2003, and has spent most of his time there since.</b>
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Can any supporters of the Bush Iraq policy offer an opinion as to why the "liberal" press....even John Burns own newspaper, has not covered the "story" that Burns; an expert who was not embedded during the invasion, a journalist who is an accomplished and respected authority on Iraq who has "spent most of his time there, not leaving, even during the invasion...has changed his mind. He now recongnizes that, even without the mistakes made by the US, <b>"the sectarian conflict would have gotten out of hand".</b>.
Wouldn't a "liberal press", lead with a story like this?
This is also a signifigant change:
Quote:
http://www.nationalreview.com/buckle...0602241451.asp
February 24, 2006, 2:51 p.m.
<b>It Didn’t Work</b>
William F. Buckley Jr.
.....One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed......
....Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.
The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren't on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors....
......A problem for American policymakers — for President Bush, ultimately — is to cope with the postulates and decide how to proceed.
One of these postulates, from the beginning, was that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom.
The accompanying postulate was that the invading American army would succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymkers to cope with insurgents bent on violence.
This last did not happen. And the administration has, now, to cope with failure. It can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the postulates. After all, they govern our policies in Latin America, in Africa, and in much of Asia. The failure in Iraq does not force us to generalize that violence and antidemocratic movements always prevail. It does call on us to adjust to the question, What do we do when we see that the postulates do not prevail — in the absence of interventionist measures (we used these against Hirohito and Hitler) which we simply are not prepared to take? It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn't work. The alternative would be to abandon the postulates. To do that would be to register a kind of philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.
Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing basic commitments in foreign policy.
He will certainly face the current development as military leaders are expected to do: They are called upon to acknowledge a tactical setback, but to insist on the survival of strategic policies.
Yes, but within their own counsels, different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.
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roachboy, from your nytimes article above...(bty...couldn't you just link to it, instead of posting it in it's entirety? I am aware that the article gets archived by nytimes in just 7 days, but who wants to read it, anyway? OP's and replies with lengthy, referenced content, posted on these threads, don't incite a flurry of responses. Folks avoid putting in the time that it would take to read your last post to "get up to speed" before posting an "informed" response, so they don't. I know that you know this....and that you and I are only "talking" to each other here...... For proof, just look at the "chit chat" on the threads that you have weighed in on to point out the "simplistic" flaws in their OP's.
Observe the "veteran" members who mostly confine their replies to brief, contentless "one liners" and "zingers". They continue to command the respect of about half the participants here, as they take their strategy right to the "edge", time after time. <b>We might as well filter them out and do this in an exchange of PM's.</b>)
I think that you'll agree that ironically, and quite sadly, the general who was quoted saying the following, in the article that you posted, is the fellow who is recognized by the misled majority as the "patriot", (back in 2004..) as the "supporter of our troops", while the film maker who put the narrated excerpt below in his film, has been the target of hostility that has run the gambit of accusations that he is on the "fringe" to "he's a traitor". Being right about the legality and the "fixing of intelligence to match the policy" to justify the invasion of Iraq will not be enough. Damn the facts, <b>"they feel"</b> that invading Iraq was "absolutely necessary", even though the reasons why, were continually "revised".
Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/in...13command.html
One of the most critical moments of the meeting came when <b>General Franks indicated he did not want to be slowed by overly cautious generals concerned about holding casualties to a minimum, though no one had raised the issue of casualties.</b> To dramatize his point, according to one participant, General Franks put his hand to his mouth and made a yawning motion.
After the session, General McKiernan approached Maj. Gen. Albert Whitley, his top British deputy. "That conversation never happened," General McKiernan said, according to military officials who learned of the exchange. By April 2, American forces were closing in on the capital. Even before the war, Mr. Rumsfeld saw the deployment of United States forces more in terms of what was needed to win the war than to secure the peace............
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Quote:
http://www.eppc.org/printVersion/pri...asp?pubID=2195
I've always been amazed that the very people forced to live in the worst parts of town, go to the worst schools, and who have it the hardest are always the first to step up, to defend us. They serve so that we don't have to. They offer to give up their lives so that we can be free. It is, remarkably, their gift to us. And all they ask for in return is that we never send them into harm�s way unless it�s absolutely necessary. Will they ever trust us again?�
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