Saddam chose war not Bush.

I’d say it was mutual.

But the U.N., NATO, and every bed-wetter in Congress had warned the President not to chase the Iraqis more than two miles beyond their border, after they finally agreed to support our rescue of Kuwait. The U.N. even produced a resolution defining the limits of U.S./coalition aggression.

Given that Bush Sr. is a globalist, he couldn’t possibly have done otherwise.

One can only imagine how much different things would be now if he had loosed Stormin’ Norman’s leash 15 years ago.

“Listen to the children of the night, what beautiful music they make”

Going off topic for just a moment, a few minutes ago I installed Firefox 2.0, the new Mozilla browser, and it makes everything sweeter, including automatic spell check in online forums such as this. Check it out, friends.

I do have his sign in my yard and only wish I seen more in my area. Get the word out Minnesota, we need Mark Kennedy in office not Amy Klobuchar. Minnesota, VOTE MARK KENNEDY on November 7th. Nothing wrong with the truth, it’s good and “they” need to hear it and listen to it.

In Germany and Japan, once we conquered those countries, we didn’t ask local mayors is it okay if we arrest said SS official or militarist official. We went where we wanted and, having sufferred massive military and civillian casualties, the Germans and Japanese understood fully that resisting was the path to their and their families’ death.

This was the right approach.

Christoph on October 25, 2006 at 1:50 AM

Christoph, that paragraph, that post, and all of your posts on this thread are so dead on it hurts.

Does anyone here really doubt that had we unleashed the full fury of our military forces that we could have completely pacified Iraq in a month’s time?

Instead, we pussyfooted around, placing the prevention of civilian casualties at a higher priorty than winning … and have accomplished neither. This is what always happens when you subordinate winning to any other objective.

There have been so many opportunities where we could have been harder on our enemies in Iraq, and we have passed up virtually every one of them. It has won neither hearts nor minds, nor has it prevented us from making new enemies over there.

Someone else invoked Sherman in this thread, and he had it right when he said:

“War is cruelty. There’s no use trying to reform it, the crueler it is the sooner it will be over.”

Yeah, a lot of good being Mr. Nice Guy did us.

I searched his site extensively and finally had to google him to find out he was, indeed, GOP.

Is this not oddball? I have not visited that many candidate web sites… is this common?

He’s addressing Iraq.
Along with this Mark Kennedy ad in Minnesota, is this a signal of a bolder move to politically face the Iraq issue head-on? In the past, whenever Bush has spoken frankly about Iraq in successive speeches, his numbers have……

One could argue that the mistake was not taking Baghdad in 1991.

Yes I totally agree. But Bush I loved his coalition so he didn’t go in. I think part of the problem we face is that Iraqi’s distrust us, cuz we promised to liberate them in 1991, but did not. Now we have a whole party (and some in the second) that wants to let them down again. Astonishing.

lorien1973
the mistake was going too fast to baghdad. we bypassed a lot of the iraqi brigades, hoping that they’d give up when Saddam was gone

Go with Kadnine

Good Christ! Saddam was deposed within days, captured within months

With a hyper dictator like Saddam who controlled every decision, it was smart to go straight for the head. That way, the defense was without any worthwhile guidance. Like Hitler, Saddam had a practice of killing off any general whom he thought might be disloyal. Remember that scene in Battle of the Bulge when the German commanders are asking permission to move troops, but Hilter was asleep and his entourage was afraid to wake him up?
How could it have better to be slugging it out city by city with Saddam screaming orders to all his flunkies to get those chemical shells loaded and fired?

I hear that a lot, but short of killing Muqtada al-Sadr two years ago, I’ve never understood what it meant in concrete terms.

After the Blackwater massacre, Fallujah should not have been allowed to remain standing. Getting hard in Iraq means sealing the Syrian and Iranian borders, and cleaning out the Sunni triangle, by siege and carpet bombing if necessary.

For that, however, you would have had to keep the Iraqi army intact, and would have needed overwhelming numbers of U.S. forces.

the mistake was going too fast to baghdad.

One could argue that the mistake was not taking Baghdad in 1991.

But you won’t see this happen in our military because nobody up top is willing to stand up for warfare as it should be performed.

And that is because the American population would not be very tolerant of 50,000 of our troops dying.

I agree with Christoph’s post. very well written.

But you won’t see this happen in our military because nobody up top is willing to stand up for warfare as it should be performed. Press conferences should go something like this: “Haditha? Yeah, sure was bloody. How about that? Next question.”

Beginning in Vietnam we began to fear bad press more than we fear losing to the enemy, and we’ve been unable to achieve total victory ever since.

That perfect press conference will never happen because we’ve been conditioned to not hate our enemies with sensitivity, cultural, and PC training. (As part of the tail as opposed to the tooth, nobody’s counting on me as a trigger-puller in the traditional sense, but still, I get more of that kind of training than the kind that sends rounds downrange.) This gives us the mindset that in return our enemies shouldn’t hate us and we should do everything in our power to avoid pissing off the people we’re trying to kill. It’s madness. Why should a foreign power avoid fighting a war with the US if our technological advantage makes fighting a war with the US more palatable for them?

Well, Saddam didn’t want a rematch, but he sure was askin’ for it. Now he’s in prison, scatching marks into the wall to track his number of days inside his new ‘palace’.

As mentioned before, hindsight is 20/20. I would’ve liked us to have had more troops on the ground, the 4th ID coming in from Turkey and more asses kicked along the way, but Tommy Franks has FORGOTTEN more about combat then I have yet to learn so I won’t second guess him. But if I had it my way we would’ve either gone in a lot heavier, but Franks wanted light and fast in order to take the capital city faster which makes sense, however we needed troops behind to mop up along the way. We should’ve done it the ild fashioned way, send the Marines in to kick ass and the Army to hold territory.

Too bad we didn’t have an Iraqi version of the Northern Alliance like we had in Afghanistan, then we could’ve done it with Air Force Combat Controllers calling in air strikes. We still did both wars in about 3 weeks. I want our liberal friends to name another war done that fast. I can only name one, the “6 Day War”.

I hear that a lot, but short of killing Muqtada al-Sadr two years ago, I’ve never understood what it meant in concrete terms.

Fallujah. We showed our unwillingness to drop the hammer. We swept through, we cleaned it up a bit, and then we turned it right back over to people who like it being a terrorist swamp. Even when we went back and did it again, we were nice about it.

When your policy is to not wipe your enemy out, they have eternal hope.

As I stated:

Allah, I like your writing. Especially on politics.

… I value your political knowledge. It far exceeds mine.

And there isn’t a single nation on this planet that could have stopped us, had we chosed to apply our full military power, either.

We chose to fight a “conventional war.” We chose to put troops on the ground and take Baghdad the “hard way.” And we did it in 3 weeks! Christoph is correct that it was done exactly the way it was in order to minimize civilian casualties.

The US military is the most lethal on the planet, and don’t think that our enemies are not aware of it. It is why Libya gave up their WMD program after we conquered Iraq.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said in the article linked to above:

…the United States has enormous untapped air and naval power available, as well as ground forces already in theater, if war were to break out on the Korean peninsula.

The left and the Democrats (including the 5th Columnist media) are all wrapped up in applying the “Vietnam Quagmire Template” to Iraq. They are either fools or liars for attempting to do so, because these two wars are not even remotely similar.

They have no idea of the raw military power that the USA has at its disposal.

The main point, however, I’m sure you can see. My point is that the amount of death and destruction meted out to enemies should make a good man squeamish. Because it should do that or much worse to your enemies’ (intestinal) constitution including their families’.

Then you rebuild. The U.S. only half-assed did the first part, which makes the second part much harder. It was still tough after WW2 and the Nazis were largely destroyed. If you had not destroyed them and cowed the German population, but used precision weapons with the intention of avoiding enemy deaths, collateral damage, and negative media publicity, your ability to control Germany would have been much less and perhaps fatally weakened.

As you’ll see, there was more that could be done than killing this one man… and yes, he should have been killed too.