I'MMA LET YOU FINISH
Blame? Or responsibility?
Good question, waymarsh.
Several years ago, while I was assigned to a tactical military intelligence battalion in Germany, our annual officer professional development project was a study of Operation Market-Garden, also the subject of the movie “A Bridge Too Far.” Being in an MI unit, we focused our research and presentations on the intelligence failures that mis-guided the staff planners. Anyway, the culmination of the project was a three-day staff ride of the battlefields in Holland.
In that operation, it wasn’t so much that the Allied leaders cherry-picked information to support a settled decision but that the intelligence analysts who had originally detected a massive collapse of the German Army in August refused to credit indicators that the Germans had reconstituted and reorganized by September. The operation failed and cost many lives. Still, the Allied soldiers and populations never lost faith in their leaders. In the case of Iraq I wonder what the effect will be on the US electorate when they discover the extent of the piss-poor planning and false assumptions that the neo-cons used to justify this war.
yankeedoodle - Didn't Montgomery and his ego have anything to do with the faulty assumptions re: Market-Garden? Or have I just read too much Anti-Monty agitprop?
IN FAIRNESS TO BUSH
HIS INTELLIGENSE FAILED
NTodd: General Officer ego is always a valid planning consideration. But Market-Garden was approved by Ike and the intelligence estimates were developed by the SHAPE staff. Had Monty launched Market garden in August XXX Corps would have gone through the Wehrmacht like shit through a goose.
Speaking about Syria.
The retired spook quoted towards the end, Pat Lang, is also quoted in Michelle Goldberg’s Salon article here.
And speaking about Wolfowitz, I’m bringing this link up from below.
IN FAIRNESS TO BUSH
HIS INTELLIGENSE FAILED
MITCH™ | 07.19.03 - 8:48 pm | #
Which is what many of us were saying in 2000 - but many were not listening.
Would you look at the faces of the soldiers on the left, please, and contrast and compare them with george and the Navy guys on the right.
Support the troops.
Asia Times is a great news organization.
I remember reading Ryan's book on Market-Garden. Montgomery was criticized for not seizing Antwerp early. After D-Day, the Germans held out in Caen, and supplies were being brought in from Normandy. There was little materiel available for multiple advances. There were Americans driving in the center and south fronts, and Montgomery was held up in the north. For political reasons, the supply stream was directed north, for Montgomery's drive to the Rhine. By that time, aerial photographs showed German armor units in place. An invasion based on meeting no resistance--and if there ever was one, this plan was it--should have been scrapped.
But I thought the consequences were severe and that Montgomery was set back as an Allied commander. I know he was admired and knighted, but cowed. If there are consequences here, it will at least be to slow down the next "liberation."
AP A-hole
Iraq's American-backed administration failed in its first week to choose a president, abandoning that mission in favor of a weak, three-man rotatingleadership. The top U.S. official in Iraq — who hand-picked the Governing Council — returned to Washington while an insurgency killed another American soldier Saturday.
OH, just cause they don't do everything Bush tells them too does mean it's "weak"...
Hey, they understand democracy better then Bush gives them credit for - and it's their country and if that is the way they want to do it well- you don't like then Fuck you Bush...
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has been getting some pretty awful complaints from Bush's mismanagement in Iraq.
UNITED NATIONS, July18 -- U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan urged the United States and Britain today to move more quickly to restore power to Iraqis and to set out a timetable for the end of U.S. military occupation in Iraq.
In his first major assessment of postwar developments in Iraq, Annan also cited Iraqi concerns that the United States has mistreated Iraqi prisoners of war and failed to improve living conditions in Baghdad and other major cities since it ousted Saddam Hussein's government.
Yeah, Bush just could wait to liberate Iraqis....from their oil that is.
John Kerry is right--if Bush doesn't go back to the UN for help than we need to get our troops out of Iraq... It's simply an oil issues for Junior so don't let your son/daughter die for a pipeline and LIE that cost you close to $2.00 a gallon at pump. Chevron isn't worth dying for or losing your son too.
Bill Moyers has been on top of this...for Christ's sake it was about oil after all...add in a huge dose of ego-mania, arrogance, cleverness without intelligence, manipulation of the masses, and the souless quest for power/re-election for a president that wasn't legally elected in the first place. impeach Osama Bin Bush and chickenhawk Cheney...then hang them on the Whitehouse lawn for treason. It won't bring back any of the soldiers or Iraqi children that died for Bush and the wing-nut's insanity, but I'll get a small amount of satisfaction seeing a little justice done.
The Sunday edition of the Washington Post has this article: "CIA Did Not OK White House Claim". The story regards the statement that Iraq "could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given."
The article also notes that an instance of the claim is still available on the White House web site. It can be found here: "The danger is grave and growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons and is rebuilding facilities to make more. It could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given. The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb -- and, with fissile material, could build one within a year."
the good reverend,
how about if you just paste the links without making them clickable.
Haloscan messes them up.
Here's another great quote from this older WP story, "Persistence on Iraq Pays Off for Bush:
The pattern goes something like this: Bush finds himself in a jam, with heavy opposition to the position he advocates. After a sometimes painful period of stumbling, he casts aside all other issues so that he can focus his administration's attention -- and the public's -- on just one topic. Then, he hammers away at the issue, using the bully pulpit with numbing repetition and marshaling all arguments to make his case. When one rationale doesn't sell, he drops it and adopts a new one. [...]
A Bush adviser concurred with that sequence. "You have a policy imperative, and then it becomes, how do we sell it," the adviser said. Once Bush settles on his rationale, "he starts drilling in on it."
They had a policy imperative: get into Iraq. How did they sell it? By hammering away on the vague suggestion that Saddam MIGHT have weapons and warping it into the regime actually having weapons and being able to launch them in less than an hour.
That's how a lot of political topics are handled. But instead of just overblowing the 'need' for tax cuts and neglecting to mention (or straight-up LYING about) who would benefit from them, they took peoples' LIVES, and Americans have never taken that lightly.
The Q and A is kind of interest.
Presenter: Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz Thursday, Jan. 23, 2003
Q: Thank you. I'd like to follow up also on Judge Webster's question. I think, Mr. Wolfowitz, your answer amounts to: "We can't tell you what we have of information, but trust us. It's there." Now, isn't the fundamental principle of a democratic free nation precisely not to trust government? Why should Americans trust their government? We've heard that before in Vietnam, we've heard it many times: "Trust us," and it turned out to be untrustworthy.
I don't see how this administration thinks it can build a policy for war, preventive war, that would be accepted by our allies and by American citizens on the basis of "We've got the info; we can't tell you how we got it or where we got it; we got it, trust us." And isn't that a foolish and ultimately self-destructive way for this administration to proceed?
Wolfowitz: In some cases, we can tell very clearly where we got information from. In some cases, you would put somebody's life at risk if you told how you got it. That's a fact of life; it's not something you can overcome.
I must say I sort of find it astonishing that the issue is whether you can trust the U.S. government. The real issue is, can you trust Saddam Hussein? And it seems to me the record is absolutely clear that you can't. And we're going to have to have some very powerful evidence that he has changed and that we can trust him, because otherwise, we are trusting our security in the hands of a man who makes ricin, who makes anthrax, who makes botulism toxin, who makes aflatoxin, and who has no compunctions whatsoever about consorting with terrorists. Who do you want to trust?
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/
...3_t0123cfr.html
My bad, hadenough. I seemed to recall Haloscan saying they had fixed their links, but I guess not.
Thus, here are the related links:
"CIA did not OK": http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp...ml?
nav=hptop_tb
White House official claim:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/r...0020926-
19.html
And, from my second post, old WP story:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?
pagename=article&node=&contentId=A41862-2002Sep19&
notFound=true
There's a difference between acting on bad intelligence, and launching a pre-emptive war based on bad intelligence that--had you acted with due dilligence--you should have (and probably have) known was bad.
More like this: "The British government has learned that Haloscan fixed their comment code so it wouldn't fuck up links with special characters in them."
Reagan and Bush Sr and The Right created Saddam, he was/is evil, then Bush Jr and The Right says you're not a patriot if you don't get rid of him....Republican leaders are manipulative sheep herders and the Republican rank and file are brainless sheep:
"High on the Bush administration's list of justifications for war against Iraq are President Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons, nuclear and biological programs, and his contacts with international terrorists. What U.S. officials rarely acknowledge is that these offenses date back to a period when Hussein was seen in Washington as a valued ally.
Among the people instrumental in tilting U.S. policy toward Baghdad during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was Donald H. Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, whose December 1983 meeting with Hussein as a special presidential envoy paved the way for normalization of U.S.-Iraqi relations. Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an "almost daily" basis in defiance of international conventions.
The story of U.S. involvement with Saddam Hussein in the years before his 1990 attack on Kuwait -- which included large-scale intelligence sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq's acquisition of chemical and biological precursors -- is a topical example of the underside of U.S. foreign policy. It is a world in which deals can be struck with dictators, human rights violations sometimes overlooked, and accommodations made with arms proliferators, all on the principle that the "enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Is this explicit enough for you?
>>
From White House web site.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/r...0020926-
19.html
Renewal in Iraq
Iraq: Special Report
Global Message
The security of our country is the commitment of both political parties, and the responsibility of both elected branches of government.
Elected officials are working for a strong Congressional resolution that sends a clear message: UN Security Council demands must be followed and the Iraqi dictator must be disarmed. These requirements will be met, or they will be enforced.
The danger is grave and growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons and is rebuilding facilities to make more. It could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given. The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb -- and, with fissile material, could build one within a year.
Iraq's regime has longstanding and continuing ties to terrorist groups -- there are al-Qaida terrorists inside Iraq. The regime also practices the rape of women and the torture of dissenters and their children as methods of intimidation.
The President has made it clear: we refuse to live in a future of fear. We are determined to build a future of security and peace for the world.
When planning wars that never end,
The facts on which they all depend
Are just what Bush will never say:
Who will fight, and who will pay?
yankeedoodle - thanks for the info re: Operation MG.
Bush on who should take the blame:
"Hey, don't look at me! Harry Truman is the guy with the sign on his desk!"
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