And if I convince the Ts that the Great Satan believes it has successfully accomplished its mission in Iraq – that would be demoralizing for them. But even moreso, they would be highly encouraged if we quit and left them a victory on the battlefield. You may think we are creating tons of Ts in Iraq now (I don’t, but to each his own) but just wait till we hand them a huge victory in Iraq. Contributions and recruitment will pour in.

And guys, it isn’t a matter of “seeing what happens” in Iraq. It’s happening right now. It’s out of control and no one has a plan to bring it back under control. Period. All the right has is a political cudgel to weild on anyone who would suggest that they blew it, which, indeed, they have.

It’s a failure in terms of a PR campaign. I’m for properly applied military action, but we’ve definitely bungled the post war strategy by not planning for a strong insurgency. I think we felt we’d meet with resistence, but not on a large scale.

If you’re going to go in, good. Kick ass, topple the government and then impose martial law. Enforce it with an iron fist.

We don’t have the stomach anymore to do that, unfortunately. America has gotten soft because of the PCization of our society. People would just get sick and curl up in a ball if we actually did what is proper military theory.

Basically, when you conquer a nation, you have to break the will of the population. You are still an enemy until every last combatant is dead. You can’t go in as friends and liberators if you weren’t asked to, so it has to be maintained as a war until all the enemies are dead. Then you sort out who’s a friend and help rebuild the country. We did it in WWII, and the countries we conquered are now allies and trading partners.

The problem of ‘taking the war’ to the terrorists is the same as combating NVA. When they are scattered about the world and hidden amongst villages and municipalities, there’s no one venue to deploy your military.

The solution will come from small strike forces and good intelligence.

When Bush said ’smoke them out’ that’s exactly the tactic I thought he meant. But you don’t smoke out terrorists from caves and safe houses by rolling over an entire nation, because they’re not all there. You hit them strategically, where they hide, by surprise, then gather up all the body parts and computer parts and assemble the next phase of the attack.

Now that I just violated my main concept by arguing a hypothetical history, I’ll say this. Now that we are there, basic laws of Terrorism PR dictate that no matter how or when we pull out, terrorists will shuttle a Betamax over to Al Jazeera and claim victory. Those nuts will lose 10,000 people, but because we didn’t kill the 10,0001th they defeated the Western Imperialist Crusaders.

And to make sure I get pummelled from both sides, Frame, the Conservatives failed in the Iraq policy, but we have no way of knowing if the Democrats would have had any more success. I’m sure you take solice that the Dems would have crushed terrorism in a week, but I think this is a minefield for whomever had the unenviable task of responding to terrorism after 9/11. If we want to really make an argument, I understand ABC’s docudrama about 9/11 specifically puts blame on the Clinton administration and Sandy Berger for responding to the growing threat of terrorism ineffectively that led up to 9/11. Berger was specifically involved with letting Osama go in Sudan.

So, no, I think its way to simplistic to say the Democrats would have crushed terrorism when they were the ones who allowed conditions for escalation. My point this whole thread is that its almost unwinnable from a PR standpoint, no matter who is in power.

If things continue apace, as they no doubt will, your response is nothing more substantial than “We’ll still pull out but make up a really good bullshit reason why.” And yet you insist that it’s liberals, who have a real plan for putting pressure on the Iraqi government to step up, who want to surrender. That’s why you’re an idiot hack, Dugs.

You always write the most words and you’re always wrong the most times.

I did not say that the assumed ’slow drawdown” theoretical scenario was a victory – I said, in that event, I would declare victory.

And my definiton of victory would be a cessation of hostilities by the Ts and insurgents and establishment of a modern democratic Mideastern state – other than Israel – in Iraq. Should that (IMO ) unlikely event happen, NEOCONS would be supreme.

In your fevered brain leaving Iraq quietly in a “slow, unnanounced drawdown” is a victory for us but leaving according to an announced timetable is to “hand the Ts a victory.” WTF is the difference if Iraq is still a charnal house in both instances?

Following Bush administration rhetoric straight down the line you have set no other definition of victory other than staying long enough to declare victory. The American people are catching on to the hollowness of this “plan” which is why you’ll see considerable Democratic wins in November.

Bush and the conservatives have failed.

And I will reiterate my reiteration. When the time comes, the loony anti-war left, the Sheenhan and Lamont supporters, will get screwed by adult Democrats, who will not hand the Ts a victory, and it will be 1968 and LBJ all over again. The Great Dugger is saying it first. It will happen!

No offense intended, but this is bullshit. The Ts are indifferent to how it appears. There’s no changing that our leaving will be spun by them as a victory. But the thing is, we’ve already lost, so it’s inevitable. We can still reduce the butcher’s bill now, though.

Dugger you’ve consumed so much Kool Aid you don’t know your head from your ass. We’re to exit on the QT with an “unannounced drawdown” and then, when we’re all gone and no one has noticed, we’re going to declare victory? Brilliant. Nothing says ‘We’ve accomplished all of our goals’ like slippping out the backdoor when no one is looking.

The fact of the matter is your “plan” is just more bullshit. How exactly does one manage a “slow, unannounced drawdown”? Are we going to start handing soldiers civilian clothes and dark sunglasses and send them to the aiport one at a time? Are the Iraqis going to wake up one morning and wonder where all the Americans went all of a sudden? The second we start pulling troops out at any rate the world is going to know what’s going on and we’re going to have to tell them why: ‘Hey, we’ve won on our own terms.’ But if that doesn’t include real security for the Iraqi people, you’re right back where you started.
And if we haven’t been able to accomplish that in three years how are we going to get to that point with the same number of increasingly weary troops?

And how exactly do we make it looke to the Ts of the world that we haven’t just chosen some arbitrary milestone on which to hang our vicotry hat? We have already missed opportunity after opportunity to declare victory and start leaving: The capture of Baghdad, the capture of Hussein, the handover to an Iraqi government, every one of the elections. At every point when people on the left said, ‘Hey, now’s our chance to declare victory and begin a draw down’ they were met with
the same bullshit from asshats like yourself: To leave now would be surrender.

So what’s the next obvious milestone on the calendar to democracy, bright boy? We’re pretty much stcuk with the training of Iraqi soldiers. Great. How’s that been going?

According to the military the effort to raise and train a 10 division Iraqi army is 85 percent complete. Fantastic. But last month was the deadliest month in Iraq since the beginning of the invasion. If we’ve got 85 percent of the Iraqi troops trained and the violence is still getting worse, tell me what good the remaing 20 percent are going to do, especially after we start “secretly” exiting stage left? Then again, if the Iraqi Army is 85 percent trained why haven’t we seen a comensurate drawdown of US troops? Why, indeed, are the Marines now calling up 2,500 troops from the Ready Reserve? Something doesn’t jibe. But then again nothing ever does with this administration.

If we want the Iraqis to take us seriously, we have to give them a timetable for getting their own asses in gear. Otherwise, what’s the rush? Although maybe we could just whisper to them that we’re really, really, really serious this time.

If we announce a timetable set to improvements in Iraqi troop training (John Kerry’s plan by the way) who cares what the insurgents think? When we reach the end of the timetable the Iraqi army will be able to take over so it won’t make any difference, right? The whole argument that the terrorists will just wait us out if we set a condition-based timetable is bullshit because it assumes that the Iraqi troops won’t be able to do the job. Well, if that’s the case WTF are training them for then?

The bottom line is that what you consider a “serious” plan is nothing more than smoke and mirrors to save face for the conservative idiots, such as yourself, who supported this war from the beginning and fucked up its planning at every stage. You’re right that this isn’t Day One, Dugs. But it doesn’t hurt to remember who was right and who was wrong on that day. We were right and you were wrong. You’re wrong now and the hollowness of your response only proves it.

First. I seriously doubt we ‘knew’ where he was. I believe that is urban legend. We may have suspected he was within a certain region, but thats about it. You have to be a little wacko (and I don’t think you are) to think Bush was told by his military commanders that they could capture OBL and he said no.

Secondly, I think the terrorists hate us for what we are, they did before Iraq and do after Iraq. Who we are IS all the encouragement they need – not what we are doing in Iraq – or elsewhere.
(9/11, many incidents well before Iraq, Bush, etc). I believe the WOT is predicated on religion, ideology, culture and maybe race. Those things don’t go away with Iraq.

And I knew of the one division situation and the apparent retrogression – if it was/is that. And, yeah, that concerns the hell out of me. I wish I knew a better alternative. I don’t think quitting is the right thing to do.

Quaker,

“So tell us Dugs, do you support escalation of our presence in Iraq?”

Honest answer. No. And that doesn’t mean I have a better answer. I guess if I were Bush I would be telling my commanders (and I bet he has) that we must push the Iraqi training very hard – that the Iraqis must understand that we can’t stay forever. And if the Iraqis show no sign of progress and our military says its hopeless? Probably start a slow, unannounced, drawdown of US forces and then,declare victory, leaving a few well defended enclaves in more secure areas. In short, I would do everything possible to make it look to the Ts of the world that we are leaving per our own internal criteria.

If this were day one, I probably would not have gone in. Bu this ain’t day one. we have to deal with reality.

We all may be against the war, I am, but we are there, and the damage is done. To further prevent Iraq from becoming an all out, hellfire mess -worse than what it already is- a sensible handover plan has to be in effect.

Nobody wants another Bay of Pigs or Kurdish uprising on our hands. We went in there and it was the wrong answer. As unpalatable as that reality is, there is no sense arguing alternate histories. We live in a world where Iraq is occupied by US troops, and we’re caught in the crossfire. So argue what we should have done, or how another party would have handled it better or what we could have done to avoid it is meaningless outside of learning from our mistakes.

I suspect people who says things like this of idiocy too, Dugs.

The funny things is Dugger, low-grade insugencies have a solid record of thwarting Western powers for nigh on a century now. That’s why Bush’s lack of post invasion planning is so astonishing. They should have known this would happen. To suddenly think we can turn things around now without a radical change of course is pure fantasy.

So tell us Dugs, do you support escalation of our presence in Iraq?

Yeah, that’s soooo much more embarrassing than announcing to the world that Iraq has WMD, or that we’ll be welcomed as liberators, or that freedom is on the march, or that the insurgency is in its last throes.

Having a plan for getting out would be waaay worse.