For days we have been hearing about this operation going on in Samarra but there have been no independent reports until now:

How Operation Swarmer Fizzled

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1174448,00.html

As Winston says, nobody that you or I will vote for can change things much in that area and that is why WHO we elect as Commander in Chief is most important. And that is why the flaws in our electoral system is so serious.

My fear is that we are gravitating more and more towards such sophisticated weaponry that we can and will fight wars from above that the public can tune out of completely because there will be few casualities on our side. In addition this and other military advantages inspire retaliation in the form of terror making us less safe and secure everywhere.

We already see promise of an inexhauistible supply of suicide bombers that even a beefed up “homeland security” that deprives us of our liberties and freedom of movement/ congregation cannot prevent. Twenty years of Iraqi occupation will be very uncomfortable indeed.

Nikos is absolutely right about the wrongful, unwise and indiscriminate use of military power.

To The Point “Iraq Insurgency Still Strong Three Years after US Invasion� @ http://www.kcrw.org/cgi-bin/db/kcrw.pl?tmplt_type=program&show_code=tp

and KUOW’s Weekday “Eman Ahmad Khammas – What is it live in Iraq right now? Eman Ahmad Khammas knows. She is an Iraqi journalist and women’s advocate visiting Seattle to share her first hand experience. What is her vision for the future of her country? What is it like to be a Iraqi citizen in the midst of war? Do Iraqi women have a different experience than the men? Is there way for peace to come to the region?â€?

@ http://www.kuow.org/weekday.asp

(After today, look for the ‘Recent Shows’ ‘Choose a date’ drop-down box option)

(I haven’t been awake yet today long enough to be lucid.)

Of course, I have major quibbles (surprise!) – not with your details – but with the premise underlying your sentiments. Your details are spot on, even though they strike me as an attempt to rationalize away the increasingly evident failure of the Iraq war’s initial goals.

It might surprise you to learn that military history has been one of my frequent fields of study – and of horrified fascination. (My undeceived awareness of its hideous realities informs my humanistic pacifism.)

My conclusion is that no matter how noble the cause, military force is only moral as a defense or, and better, as a deterrent, not as a tool for geopolitical manipulation.

Applying the rubric ‘national defense’ to the Iraq adventure is a shameful hoax, and an abuse of the military. (So much so that it damns the war-policy-makers to eventual legal action, in my opinion.)

But wait!

Applying the same rubric to the intervention in Afghanistan is not a hoax.

Afghanistan hosted an enemy that attacked this country.

Iraq did not.

Iraq was confined, and slowly (too slowly, but nevertheless) strangling under sanctions.

I dearly wished we’d dedicated our attentions to rebuilding and finishing the job in Afghanistan instead of toadying up to the Halliburtons and Exxons of today’s military-and-transnational-industrial-complex by sending our willing and patriotic children into Iraq. (Like sidewalker, you’ll never convince me that replacing Saddam with a de-Baathified republic was more important to the war-planners than the oil reserves underfoot. Oil, mind you, that the lack of enough troops has made damned difficult to ship abroad! Which adds an unmistakable layer of sadly hilarious incompetence to the moralistic folly of the whole tragic adventure!)

I’d love to know what John Keegan thinks of this. He’s the military historian I trust the most: dispassionately analyzing and explaining, while never excusing military activity or military establishments, and never glorifying. He’s very even-handed. He’s less well known in the USA since he’s a Brit.

I’m sure you know him, though, so if you have any links to his thoughts on American and British actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, please share them here.

Thanks.

The example is when Brendan gave my point to the guests that basically said that “the US will still be in Iraq in 20 years”. And I think that I could here the gasps of people, especially Chris, when one answered yes and the other no (but the no was really a “no not at today’s numbers”) because they simply have never thought that anyone can seriously consider that possility. Well they do, and are and I contend that it is more likely than not. And that is simply because thier biases don’t allow them to accept information and facts to build another model of the situation in thier mind.

And that brings up your comments above regarding the NYTs Burns and comments from military officers that the “mission never had the necessary amount of troops for the task”.

The problem with that is that, from a military point of view, the statement is abiguous and thus not useful.

I don’t know of any US military task statement (and they are as precise as legal docs) that would say “the mission is to conquer Iraq with no civilian casualities, no US casualities, no turmoil, etc etc”

Every one in the military knew, going in that there wasn’t enough troops to do what you and others want. There never is.

If you read the military press releases before the war the esitmates of time and US casualities ranged from 6 weeks and 5,000 to 6 months and 20,000. And guess what it was much less than both of those.

So when someone says “mission” I ask “what mission”?

If the mission was “to prevent all post war looting and seal all borders” then 500,000 to 700,000 would be about right. Anyone who says less is simply saying that they are willing to accept more looting and more porus borders.

The minute of how many where and what and how things would have been different is all in the same catagory of what would have happend in WWII if Eisenhower hadn’t taken a chance and got lucky with good weather for the Normandy Invasion of why the US was so stupid and lost so many men on Anzio Beach in Italy. There are litterally hundreds of website and military strategy games dedicated to re-fighting old battles and under “counter-factual” scenarios. Some people like it, I think that it is a waste of time but for all a I know these expert guests play them.

And, as my links above show that vast majority of people who know this war the best, the US military people don’t think that it is “mission impossible” becasue that think that it is a success so far and think that it will continue to be. And, don’t be shocked and try and argue back and forth becasue it is just like the case above – before this show many would never have guessed that the idea of the US being in Iraq in 20 plus years would be an idea seriously discussed by anyone other than crazy neo-con Winston. Yet is is, as the guests showed and they are not alone.

As I have told Brendan in the past and I will submit an idea for a show is that, the only real debate within the military community is the tradeoff between staffing the war with what everyone knows would / could be our max and having “just enough” to get the mission done while at the same time purseuing Rummy’s transformation.

As the cliche goes, the current effort to transform the US military while fighting to wars almost simultaneously is like trying the change the tires on your car while driving down the freeway.

Rumsfeld et al (most Neo-Cons are in this boat, including me) say that we must follow the 2nd option and use only the minimum amount of troops that anyone can hope will allow the end state to occur while simultaneously transforming. This option is risky in that it does not use all available resources to reach the end state, it endangers more US military lives as well as Iraqi civilians and it has with it, the greater rish that the end state will not be reached successfully. But the calculation is that it will be but we will “sacrifice” more in the short term to reach the long term goal of winning both current wars and then have the US military to fight the “Long War”.

The other side, led by McCain, is that we should sacrifice the “long term” and concentrate on short term goals. In order to do this you would ahve to increase the end strength of the US military and commit more numbers to Iraq.

What this does though is slow down or stop the transformation, build into the baseline end strength a larger number and makes it more expensive to transform later.

And it is a hard case to make. The strategy the Rummy has (and I reluctantly support) is to make the trade-off in the short run and build for the long term. That jepardizes both US military lives and possbly the mission but sets us up for the rest of the first half of the 20th century.

Just to tell you how much this kind of thinking is used, and I know that this is ancedotal but it illustrates the point, I was talking with a good friend of mine and someone that I shared a stateroom with in the 1st Gulf War, who is now a Commanding Officer of a Marine Helocpter Squadron in Hawaii. He has been to Iraq twice and just returned from his 2nd where he was CO.

After we talked for a few hours and he was finished explaining to me the many missions I replied “Wow, it sounds like you could have used 3 squadrons worth off assets to get the missions done”. And he said “No, we could have used 5 but we can only use 1 because we all knew that those other 4 will probably be needed sometime soon somewhere else and if they are not then they can be used in training until they are”.

You know the cliche that “some people play checkers while other play chess”?

Well, the prevailing thought in the US military is to play chess and when you here others talk about troop numbers you know that they are talking checkers.

Many, even taking into account Burns’ account above, feel that the end state will be accomplished, not with a minimum amount of lives lost / money spent, but with an acceptable amount lost and spent – its all about trade-offs.

If you want, we can go back to the Surviving the cold war thread and I can fill it with links to serious discussions on this subject – and not by amatuers like me an you. As the guests on this show illustrated there are poeple’s whose entire career and acedemic backgrounds are spent studying this. My first CO in a helo squadron was a Columbia PhD Lawyer who now works on simulation projects at a think tank that uses programs like SimCity to predict the breakdowns of societies under stresses like Iraq. He gave me a quick overview of some papers on the simulation of the current structure of the US military, the war and the transformation process.

If you listen to Rummy et al they keep talking about the Army’s transformation to the Brigade Structure and then there is this new bill to reorganize the Army and Guard. Well, as it turns out he/ the Pentagon are using these simulations to make sure that they can supply the needed troop strenght to Iraq. You hear many military pundits talk about how, at the end of 2006 the 40% of the troops in Iraq who are Reserve / Guardsmen will ahve to come home and that we will ahve to drasically reduce numbers? Well, that is based on a static model of the US military and the transformation is providing enough effeiciancies / flexibiltiy for them to be able to keep up to ~ 120k there ad infinitum. Not that anyone wants to be jsut the fact that we can gives us more options.

But the downside is that they can pull it off – jsut barely. According to the models , the transformation is running jsut barely ahaed of the requirements so any glithces and things no workee.

So also as I have said before, we can all ahve fun talking about this but it will all be decided in circles that we don’t run in and the election will not really matter except on the margins. Jimmy Carter made campaign promises to pull US troops out of Korea and once he got in he saw the realities and didn’t.

And no body that you and I will vote for that has a hope of winning in Pres or other elections, will change things much.

(inattentive typing…)

Consider it a nice supplement to ROS’s excellent and unflagging dedication to the issue.

(Also and interestingly, the Iraq segment is followed by a discreet, smaller one on the direction and fate of the media.)

Burns concludes that the American intervention was horribly mistake-ridden, but even without the glaring blunders, the goal might inevitably have been ‘mission impossible’.

And he paraphrases dozens of American military officers in saying that it’s now universally agreed that the mission never had the necessary amount of troops for the task.

PS to Winston. Humor is humor, and humor, even when ‘low’, can be a binding force for good will.

Luckily, having been to Greece five times and for lengthy stays in each instance, I can aver that the joke was funny — but baseless! (My sister may be an exceptionally lovely woman, but that’s pretty standard fare over there.)

And besides, the French tree planting joke was funnier by far!