Yakk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1976587,00.html

It is interesting.

If Democrats vote down the money to send more troops, then Iraq is their fault. They would have won, if they had only given Bush the tools he needed!

If Democrats vote more money to send more troops, then Iraq is their fault. I mean, they increased troop deployments!

Lovely catch-22 -- it kind of reminds me of Vietnam, when luke-warm-to-the-war governments where voted in... they sent more troops over. The number grew at a rate not fast enough to deal with the rise in resistance, as more and more opponents mobalized for the war.

Can the Democrats afford to say "screw it, this is the Republicans many-times-over-screwed-up-war, we wash our hands of it" and pull out?

Can the Democrats afford to send the troop levels that would be needed to win the peace?

I'm not talking about a paultry +30,000 -- I'm talking a total force "boots on the ground" strength of 300,000 to 1 million or more, plus a like number of reserves to keep tours of duty down.

300,000 is one American troop for every 100 Iraqis.
1 million is one American troop for every 25 Iraqis.

At the end of WW2, Germany had 60 million people, 43 of which where in West Germany.

The Allied main army had 1,300,000 active men -- or one man for every 46 Germans, or one man for every 33 West Germans.

I don't have enough information on the occupation force used in Germany.

To match this ratio, the Americans would need 780,000 men in Iraq. They currently have about 100,000.

In addition, there was a massive shortage of people of active age in Germany at that time. Most of them had been killed in the war. Really, we should examine the ratio of occupation troops to "males between the ages of 16 to 35".

...

I suppose great strides could be made by cleaning out the corruption in the Iraqi reconstruction. But I'm not sure if it would work without a serious commitment to boots on the ground...

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Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.

The_Jazz

I'm not sure why you think the Democrats will take the blame for troop deployments. The President is the Commander in Chief, and he makes the ultimate decision on troop levels. He listens to his generals and then makes the decision. Congress has little to do with it and never has. Granted, they can try to cut funding, but there are ways around that. After Vietnam, it's become virtually impossible for Congress to control the military in any effective way.

I don't think that ANYONE (in power anyway) is talking about increasing the boots on the ground to 300,000, let along 1,000,000. The German comparision isn't apples-to-apples since they had just finished a protracted 7 year war that left German production capacity at virtually zero and munitions on hand not much above that. Iraq today is much closer to the Korea of the 50's or Vietnam of the 60's which still had working infrastructure although it was damaged, severely in some cases.

__________________
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin
"There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

docbungle

Well, Jazz, Bush has a habit of blaming his follies on others. That's why the Dems will take the blame. Because GW will put it on them. Just like he does most everything else.

__________________
Bad Luck City

florida0214

It really does not matter who Bush blames. It comes down to who the people blame. If you blame Dems then you Blames Dems. Its your right. I personally like to blame every brainwashed asshole who thinks its cool blow up Americans.

If you need somebody to blame then blame Bush. Somehing tells me he will not lose any sleep over the issue. You really can't compare World War 2 to the Gulf War Episode 2.
People were actually happy to fight Germans. Not the case in this war. Recruiting is suffering and patriotism IMO is at an all time low. There was no need for a draft in WW2, but one may be coming for the USA due to a lack of concern. Canadas population is going to triple and it is going to be filled with mostly useless Americans who cared very little about where they came from and even less about where they are. Good luck canada. Anyway back to topic.

The American people, like most humans, have the ability to choose who to blame. If you are influenced by Bush, which Most Americans are not, the you will not bother you who gets blamed by Bush. You will have come to your own conclusions and stuck with that.

__________________
"Two men: one thinks he can. One thinks he cannot. They are Both Right."

roachboy

this sad fact of the matter is that the bush administration has created for itself and for the u.s. more generally a strategic debacle of such amazing proportions in iraq as to almost boggle the mind.

there are no good options.

worse, it seems that the administration continues to see itself as boxed in by its own manly man rhetoric of resoluteness in a way that is a cross purposes with the military itself, at cross purposes with the strategic situation in the ground (so far as you can make it out from within the smokefilled room that is infotainment about what is happening in iraq) and at cross purposes with the recommendations of the baker commission (whose function it appears to be, as someone else said here before, to state the obvious)....

ramping up the number of troops--the surge as they call it--would seem to me a futile move in a futile campaign of face-saving. the question of who takes the politcal hit for it seems to me premature on the one hand and at best secondary on the other--what is the point of speculating about the damage to come from a strategic shift the character of which is not yet evident at all?

if the administration decides to pursue its manly "surge"--and when as a result the new and improved version of the iraq debacle reaches a point where the draft is required----the domestic political situation will no doubt explode: perhaps the right hopes in some twisted way for such an explosion as it will give renewed traction, in its fantasy world, for its version of identity politics.

or perhaps the administration is banking on the magnitude of the mess that it has made for itself overwhelming the tedious dynamics of politics-as-assignment-of-blame.

but what i would expect is happening--speculatively--is that the administration is scrambling for a tactical shift that it can present congress as something of a fait accompli when it enters its next session. in which case, the administration is more concerned about the illusion of momentum (as if the war in iraq was a football game and the commentators were watching an offensive drive take shape and begin speculating about a shift in the flow of the game) in domestic political terms than it is about doing anything coherent about or in iraq.


but none of this seems to me coherent.

it looks like we who watch are confronted with a spectacle of complete incoherence coupled with a media dynamic of necessary support for whomever is in power that prevents the acknowledgement of incoherence.
so it repeats.

i have no idea what the outcome of all this will be, but i cannot see anything good coming of it.

ho ho ho.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Willravel

Everything in your post was so somber and honest and such, then I got to this and I couldn't help but laugh out loud.

We don't have the man power, and a draft would cause a civil war that I'd gladly join. It's really as simple as we have to bend over and take it for a while while we withdraw troops over the next year and the whole world gets to say, "We told you so." We will probably lose a lot of the oil interests the government was shooting for, to the detriment of the president and CEO of our great country along with the board of directors (Cheney, Rummy, etc.).

I wa recently sent a picture of President Bush visiting a close friend to my family in a hospital. My friend, Chuck, had his leg removed in combat in Iraq during an attack. The president came in and had a discussion with Chuck about how things were. Chuck is an army officer and a very loyal American, so he was very glad to see the president. I did have to wonder how many times the president would visit the rooms of the soldiers that continue to return severely injured, or to visit the families of those who have lost a loved one. Shouldn't that effect him in some way? Even in his bubble, can't he see the damage he is doing? The simple answer is no. With the suggestion that we send more troops, which is one of the biggest mistakes we can make, the president has shown that our cries for reason fall on deaf ears and that he will not listen to anyone so long as he has the power to run this war as he sees fit. So many generals and admirals have stepped forward now to voice their concern, these are career military officers that know more about military strategy in their little fingers that the entire Bush family could ever hope to comprehend. This whole thing has really made me wonder if the office of president has too much power. Maybe there should be an admiralty at the head of the executive branch, as there are committees at the heads of the other two branches. We vote on generals and admirals to represent the military in the office that enforces laws and protects our country. I suspect we might be better off. I'm rambling now, everyone enjoy their Saturday.

roachboy

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1978177,00.html

of course, this would only be a test.

can you say "trial balloon?" let's just float this on out there and see what happens. whaddya think, guys? what do we have to loose?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Ch'i

In fact, that's, in fact, the problem.

roachboy

you see the lunacy behind the bush/rice argument, yes? because lots of people--americans and Others (who are always necessarily less than americans in the pathetic discourse of selling war)--have died in a pointless, ill-considered, unjustified debacle, it is necessary that even more die in a pointless, ill-considered, unjustified debacle.

another way:

in bushworld, the americans cannot consider changing strategic direction because the previous direction has cost lives--therefore to change direction is to undervalue the lives lost in the context of the previous direction.

it seems to me that this lunacy follows from the direction outlined above--which is compounded by the administration's apparent repression of the absolute lack of justification for this colonial adventure in the first place--so you have a kind of return of the repressed in displaced form via the "reasoning" that rice has been trotting out over the past few days: the justification lay in the action previous, which now floats independent of anything else. so at the level of political discourse, it appears that bushworld has come unhinged. and because of the structure of american "democracy" there is nothing to be done about it.

in the thread about the third party option, folk seem to be concerned about an increase of "instability" that a third option would engender: the present state of affairs engendered by the pathologies of bushworld seems to me a strong argument FOR a more "unstable" form of government: there really ought to be a way to bring down a government from the inside entirely, through something on the order of a vote of no confidence---the actions of the bush administration are the strongest imaginable argument for that.

there is no reason that the united states should have to have two more years of damage inflicted on itself as a result of the wholly irrational politics of this administration and the bankrupt reactionary ideology for which it stands. except thems the rules and at this point it seems that people are so afraid of anything like change that they are willing to put up with it not because the rules are functional, but because they exist.

it seems to me that we are living in a huge socio-political formation that dances further and further out over an abyss, the main characteristic of which is that everyone refuses to look at the facts of the matter, preferring to endorse what is because it is and otherwise to run away, to live to the greatest possible extent within a fantasy of coherence. maybe this explains the popularity of stuff like second life.

maybe it also has something to do with the strangeness of this christmas season---like the headline i saw a few days ago said, americans buy while iraq burns.

reality is hard.
why bother with it if you dont have to?
maybe if we practice long enough, hard enough, when the shit hits the fan we wont see anything. maybe there wont be anything. maybe there is nothing to this "reality" business in any event. or maybe there is. i suppose we'll find out, sooner or later.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Elphaba

If you begin with the belief that the Iraqi oil fields were in the cross-hairs of this administration long before 9-11, you can find a coherent explanation as to why Bush initiated a preemptive war and will never concede defeat or withdraw from Iraq. If a "surge" of troups is the last remaining option to buy time to meet the original objective, then the inexplicable begins to make sense.

I grant you that I set out years ago to find the data points to support my belief, which constitutes a weak theory at best. None the less, the data points have been numerous and compelling. The most recent one is this:

Hosted Link

The_Jazz

To reiterate my point, anyone here have any reason as to why the "surge" isn't a sound military strategy? Politics and whether we should be there or not are irrelevant if it's the guys on the ground that are asking for the extra manpower.

The two great lessons of the Vietnam War are that military matters are best left to chain of command and that if the chain of command doesn't have any idea how to win the war, everybody's fucked. We're still trying to maneuver around the first part, although I have to say it's looking more and more like part two is coming to pass.

__________________
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin
"There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

Nimetic

I think that they're caught in a complex situation - and they're trying to deal with it using relatively simple thinking. More troops, less troops. Most likely they'll be stuffed either way.

The world is complex. Somehow I get the impression that our politicians lack the strategic ability to win a game of football (of whichever type) let alone this military-political struggle.

Elphaba

I'm not sure that it is wise or even possible to separate the reason we are there and whether the "surge" is a sound military strategy.

If the reason is to bring democracy to the Middle East, a military surge would further inflame the region.

If the reason is to gain control of the oil fields, a military surge is our last remaining option for the short term and withdrawing is not an option.

As Nimetic wisely points out, it is an extremely complex situation.

dksuddeth

how odd, that earlier when some people were demanding more troops be sent, that democrats and liberals were calling us 'insane' that we should send more troops in to danger.

__________________
"no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."

Willravel

You can start by asking that same question to the Generals and Admirals that have voiced their concerns about our current and possible future plans in Iraq. As was pointed out earlier, without a draft we won't have the manpower to control Iraq. We'd need somewhere in the neighborhood of 800,000 troops. That's not going to happen becuase 1) enlistment is down and 2) the draft would die on the floor of the Senate. The "guys on the ground" serving their third tour in a row probably would rather go home than stay in a country that doesn't want us there fighting a war we started. We can't help there, so we have to start making sure that they're able to help themselves. Our exodus is taking waaay too long (we should have been out by mid 2005 according to many militarty analysts), and things are going from bad to worse. A few thousand more troops are not going to turn the tide. It's a waste of lives.

Elphaba

dk, I'm curious/confused by your post. I have not seen the debate on troop levels to be consistently partisan. Rumsfeld and Bush are on record for refusing to add additional troops early on, but that has now been reversed. The military command before the war wanted more troops, then no additional troops, and now a very recent turnaround of requesting more troops. The American people are weary of the war now, but supported it early on. It would be difficult to find any consistent position at this point, yes?

dksuddeth

you are right, I have never seen partisan arguments on more troops. I simply don't have a clue what to call the supposed conservatives who argued that more troops weren't necessary, because they bought Bush's lies that we were doing fine. I could call them traitors, but that might be a bit too much.

__________________
"no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."

Elphaba

Only a bit, perhaps, and I would add both parties to the list of the culpable.

pan6467

Now that the Dems have Congress, I look for Bush to institute a draft and trying to blame the Dems and the GOP congresspeoples that voice out against the war. He'll do this by saying, in order to exit we need to build troop protection.

And since it takes government forever to accomplish the things they really don't feel are important, this will last through the next presidency.

So I see Bush leaving a very fucked up office for his successor and a fucked over country.

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

The_Jazz

First, the 800,000 number was created out of thin air. Compairing Iraq to post WWII Germany just doesn't work because of the losses of manpower and level of destruction visited on the German people during 7 years of war. The main problem with most of the Iraqi infrastructure and production facilities is that most of it simply hasn't been maintained. Of course bombings are causing some damage, but the majority of the problem comes from the fact that the previous regime didn't or couldn't maintain the electrical grid, roads, etc. properly.

Second, the generals on the ground are not asking for 800,000 troops. They're asking for 30,000. They're getting it. Will, I'm only singling you out for convenience, but what experience do you have in strategic and tactical deployment of soldiers in an urban combat situation? Let's remember that these are career officers that not only have trained for this for their entire adult lives (generally speaking ), but they've also been on the ground for the better part of 3 years. Unless you can give me military reasons why this is a bad idea, I think that all the political rhetoric is just a bunch of gum flapping.

At this point, you either accept that the experts know what they're doing or not. I will certainly grant you that it's entirely possible that they don't know what they're doing (as per my last post), but I'm not quite ready to accept that yet. General Westmoreland certainly had no earthly idea how to win in Vietnam, and I think that Abizaid probably has similar issues. We'll see who the new boss is and what ideas they're going to bring to the table.

I agree that a draft is pretty much impossible right now without some sort of appeal directly to the American people by the military, which just isn't going to happen. In my opinion, which is obviously one of someone who's never been there, the real influx of American manpower needs to be civilian. We need folks from the Department of Agriculture, HUD, Education, etc. there to rebuild and educate. Soldiers are not trained to win hearts and minds, they're trained to shoot them. This is a war prosecuted solely by the Department of Defense at this point - it's time for the rest of the government to do their parts.

__________________
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin
"There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

dksuddeth

The executive branch has no power to institute the draft. How could Bush do this and then blame a democrat controlled congress?

__________________
"no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."

roachboy

the_jazz: what is YOUR assessment of the military situation on the ground? it sounds like you have reliable information...where'd you get it? certainly not in the press, where the "battle for hearts and minds" still goes on, where the expansive understanding of "compromising security" is still in force.
the arguments against the "surge"--and tracks of the political arm twisting that has resulted in the reversal of this position--are outlined in this nytimes article:

the arguments against the "surge" seem to be on one level "deepening iraqi dependency on the u.s."---reducing options, in other words.
it is also self-evidently a problem in political terms as it teeters very close to the "escalation as a means of withdrawing" that served the us so well in vietnam.

powell's comments of last week address the problem with this issue as you frame it: there is no actual plan for what to do with the troops.

and the rest of the article bears out my contention that the move is about building "momentum" around iraq in the face of the incoming congress, which appears to be the Problem insofar as the administration is concerned.

so, to my horror, it looks from this like the interpretation i have been developing here is close to accurate...but if you've got other information, please post it.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

pan6467

But how is he going to get more troops without it? Plus Rangel and some Dems (maybe enough) would support a draft.

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

Willravel

The OP wasn't thin air, and the left over Nazi soldiers could be considered coimparable to to insurgency, as there were attakcs after the surrender in Germany (thought they were MUCH less frequent due to the high number of Allied soldiers). Your comment about the roads and power being bad under Saddam's regime is an interesting point but it's somewhat misleadning. You suggest that the previous regime was responsible for the poor conditions in Iraq, when evidence is clear that the UN sanctions are responsible. The regime probably would have been okay if the UN simply maintained an arms sanction instead of economic sanctions. That has to be clear by now.
And it would be easy to dismiss me at that if it weren't for the fact that I am deeply emersed in military culture. My grandfather, unclue, cousins and other family members are all military officers, and love to talk about the many facets of the military, including experience on the ground (exclusing, of course, things that they're not allowed to tell me). Because I developed an interest in such things at a young age, whe I reached college level, I took every game theory class that was offered, while I was getting through my GE classes before reaching my AA. I excelled at game theory, including but not limited to the application of game theory to military operations that spanned the past 1000 years.

I'll try to break this down so as not to take up too much time. The most simple idea to war are to succede in defending points and taking points at the least cost. The succesful war is an efficient war (morality aside for the purpouses of this exercise). The idea is to use the least manpower, resources, time, and political sacrafics as possible. By all counts, the Second Gulf War is a failure of epic proportions. What should have been done was to determine the tactical options for all 'sides' in this, which should have included a possible insurgency after we were welcomed (and also should have considered action taken by other forces in the region). While it seems obvious that the administration came to the conclusion that there would be little to no resistence, that simply can't be true. There was a great deal of risk of an insurgency because 1) we've been building animosity for decades among the people, many of whom did actively hate us and 2) there were rebelions against Saddam, but those areas still showed a great deal of anti-US sentiment, such as Fallujah (they were the home of the resistence against Saddam before the invasion in 2003, but there are archived pictures from Fallujah dating back as far as 1991 and as recent as 2001 with burning US flags and protests in the streets). I suspect that, again, the intelligence community believed that a rebelion was not only possible but probable and warned Bushco. accordingly. They were simply ignored...to our substantial detriment.

Fast forward to today, we actually have an out that gives us back some of the political standing we lost with the international community, it allows the extreemist resistence to have less to hate (in game theory, we're taught that removing one miltary force from a multi-player game can serve to break the focus of one's adversary and weaken their resolve, so long as they don't view it as a victory). What should happen is consolidation of troops. We need to have our ground troops in easily defendable positions where fatalities are much less likely. No more of this 4 basic troops out in the open bullshit where they have the advantage. Large convoys with more of whatever they're moving, but a lot more troops, for example. This will reduce coalition fatalities (except for the accedental deaths thing which is symptomatic of extremely low morale).

The generals are not asking for 30,000 more troops (at least most of them). They are asking for a real change in direction, and they want a direction that either leads to a real victory or to a real withdrawl. Either way, 30,000 troops isn't going to appease them.


Ah, but the experts ae being ignored again and again and again. The experts were the ones that said there is no evidence of WMDs. The experts were the ones that warned that we would be in Iraq for years, not just months. It's the idiots that are in charge that continue to ignore the experts and do what they want in what they feel is a consequence free environment. The problem is that they are insulated from the consequences.

The_Jazz

Will,

The OP DID conjure the 800,000 number out of thin air by directly comparing Germany to Iraq and using the ratios that were necessary then. That's how he got to 780,000, which we've shortened to 800,000 (which I'm fine with). As I've said throughout, it's not a fair comparison.

As far as infrastructure and the responsibility for its upkeep, I am 100% sure that the UN absolutely never takes responsibility for maintenance on roads, etc., especially when they aren't acting as an occupying force. Saying that the sanctions were the direct cause of the deterioration is a big red herring. Sactions certainly CONTRIBUTED, but the Saddam regime certainly could have spent the money if they chose. Granted, they would have had to take money from other causes (military, etc.), which realistically never would have (and didn't) happen, but the fact remains that the UN contributes $0 in 0 countries for infrastructure maintenance. They will, on occassion, contribute to one-off projects, but maintenance is a completely separate interest and is the sole responibility of a sovereign state.

The fact remains that the Iraqi infrastructure is substantially better than that which was left over at the end of WWII. Highways, railroads, factories, water, etc. are all in much better shape than the urban areas of the remains of Nazi Germany. There are no masses of displaced people, there are no bombed out cities, and frankly, the standard of living in Iraq is better than that of the average German in 1945 (granted 60 years of progress certainly effected that fact).

I also come from a longtime military family going back to a several-great-grandfather that served under Jackson at New Orleans and culminating in my father who graduated from West Point. I'm one of only 3 firstborn sons in the last 150 years to NOT serve, but I was a candidate for the Naval Academy and opted not to attend 2 weeks out for various reasons (one big one was that their XC coach resigned shortly before). My information is coming through my dad who has friends that are either still in command or recently retired. It's entirely possible that what I'm hearing is skewed because of the small sampling size, but my dad has told me that all of his friends collectively think that the surge is necessary and was requested. Personally, I see no political advantage to the surge and lots of political pitfalls, but this administration has made some of the most counterintuitive decisions I've ever seen in the past, so I'll easily grant that anything's possible.

Experts at one thing are typically not experts in another. In other words, the intelligence folks aren't the ones we want making tactical decisions, just like the military didn't know shit about WMD pre-invasion. It's just not their job to know. Unfortunately, I'm starting to slowly come to the viewpoint that the "experts" on military action in Iraq and how to win don't know what they're doing. As I hinted at in my second post. Your suggestion sound workable, but as soon as we make something attack-proof, someone's going to invent a better attack. It's the way of the world.

__________________
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin
"There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

Willravel

Ah, but that's not exactly true. Saddam DID take money from military to fund things like roads, but it simply wasn't enough. The fact is, the UN knew what would happen if they imposed sanctions, everything from starvation to disease to the general degredation of all state run programs, including roads. They know that the Iraqi economy was already unstable, and simply pulled the last jenga piece out. Of course the place fell apart. The blame lies with Saddam, the UN, the US, and many other factors. The UN wasn't the only cause, but to discount them is irresponsible. The Saddam regime did try to maintain the state, but it couldn't.
Yes, but that does have to be taken into account. Had Saddam not ben sanctioned, it's probable that he would have done everything in his power to bring trade to his country, and that is done by taking similar steps as Germany after WWI.
Ah, but escelation takes time, and we're talking about starting the withdrawl as soon as we impliment the new strategy. We need to leave as soon as possible. We need to get out oil elsewhere. We need to have Bush and Cheney publicly hung for ignoring inteligence that has directly lead to the deaths of thousands of our own soldiers and the deaths of countless (I say countless because everyone loves to skew the numbers) of Iraqis. We were and are not liberators. We are invaders and we've paid a terrible price.

Elphaba

From Post 13:

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/01/08/iraq-oil.html


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010807A.shtml

It has always been about the oil. The US dependence on foreign oil has been known since the '70's. Genuine efforts to reduce our dependence have been routinely undermined by Big Oil. It is inevitable that we will need to find alternative energy sources. I can't support another soldier's death for cheap gas to fill our SUV's.

pai mei

http://energybulletin.net/12125.html



The same story was told by senator Ron Paul from Texas here :

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...382&q=ron+paul



The ideea is this : if oil exporting countries start selling oil for euros, not dollars ,then the dollar will lose it's value. That is the reason for the war in Iraq ,and for the threats against Iran

aKula

Then why the initial support for the Iraq war from the Italian and Spanish governments? You could argue that they were duped as well and were over eager to play along. But there is, I believe, a simpler explanation.

The Bush administration always wanted to go after Iraq. I don't think that such a large gamble for the prospect of cheaper oil and energy security would be undertaken. The risks were too large for the rewards it offered. Furthermore the current US executive is not even interested in maintaining fiscal discipline let alone some complex conspirancy to ensure the long term strength of the US dollar. The simplest reason is the correct one. The administration saw Saddam as "the enemy", who was yet to be defeated. It was a fixation, an obsession even.

This, coupled with the lack of planning after the war; the absence of experience in the civil service established by the USA after the invasion of Iraq, led to the current situation.

__________________
"I am the wrath of God. The earth I pass will see me and tremble." -Klaus Kinski as Don Lope de Aguirre

desal75

If we follow this line of logic then we would have needed to hang JFK and LBJ also.

__________________
The Man in Black fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed.

The_Jazz

Not to mention Polk, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt and several others.

__________________
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin
"There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

Willravel

Not hang, but impeach yes. If presidents are not heald accountable for their actions, they will behave badly. Most people behave in that way. Presidents have to be responsible for their actions. When innocent people die so the presidnent can make money, that persident is no longer serving the greater good.

desal75

The saddest thing is that I don't think the US has sent troops overseas to fight for a worthy cause since WW2.

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The Man in Black fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed.

Willravel

Agreed whole heartedly.