Dean says we cant win in Iraq

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Where does he say that?

 

 

Read the quotes in Controlled Chaos's article.

[Heads22]

Read the quotes in Controlled Chaos's article.

 

 

I see a quote from al-Zarqawi, but nothing from bin Laden.

 

I'd be a little surprised to hear bin Laden say the same thing.

[YASNY]

This depends on what we call victory. We haven't been able to stop crime in our country. Gangs terrorize neighborhoods, drive by shooting, innocent person tied to fence post and killed because he was gay, dragged behind a pick up because he was black, beaten because he dared teach an anti-religious view of our origins. So if we are trying to wipe all crime from Iraq, we can't. And much of this is criminal, we aren't fighting an army.

 

We removed Hussein, that was a victory. But removing all the terrorist gangs? We can't.

 

YASNY, you are right, if someone doesn't know about Viet Nam, how could they know about Iraq? Misquoting the death numbers is just plane stupid and sloppy. That's why I thought Kerry had a better handle on what to do in Iraq. He fought in Viet Nam, He had people shooting at him. Bush stayed stateside, occasionally flying a plane. Who had the better clue?

 

I wasn't talking about Bush or Kerry. I was talking about Dean. Stay on the subject matter at hand.

[Rex Kickass]

Hey again, we're arguing two different things. The war in Iraq is different than the war on terror. Always has been.

 

And for all the people here saying that Dean is a clueless asshat, nobody here has said what victory in the Iraq war at this point would even mean.

 

Maybe it's because that has never been defined. And if you don't define victory, you can't achieve it.

[kapkomet]

VICTORY is a fully functioning government elected by the people of Iraq. That elected government will have control of the armies of Iraq, which will need to be strong enough to fight off the terrorists who will wish to bring that government down.

 

When these objectives are met, the troops will come home.

 

Pretty clear, if I can come up with it.

 

Go ahead, s*** away about how I'm wrong.

[Texsox]

I wasn't talking about Bush or Kerry.  I was talking about Dean.  Stay on the subject matter at hand.

 

So if Dean doesn't know how many US servicemen were killed in Vietnam, he doesn't have a clue about Iraq. This only applies to Dean. I get it.

[YASNY]

So if Dean doesn't know how many US servicemen were killed in Vietnam, he doesn't have a clue about Iraq. This only applies to Dean. I get it.

 

Well he certainly didn't have a clue about Nam, and he lived through that era.

[Mercy!]

From the looks of things in this thread, no one actually bothered to listen to the interview with Howard Dean, am I right? So aside from the usual depressing name-calling - which, by the way, always seems to come from one side in these “discussions” - you seemed to have picked up one sentence as the whole take-away message – “The idea that we are going to win this war is an idea that is unfortunately just plain wrong.”

 

Well, will everyone who believes that the present Iraq situation will be solved militarily by the United States please raise their hands. Remember, even the Bush Administration does not make this claim. So what has Howard Dean said that makes him worthy of all the bad mouthing going on here?

 

Here’s some of what I heard. Dean explained that his plan and that of Rep. Murtha relied on the analysis of an Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration, Lawrence Korb, whose report was recently published. I don’t know if Dean got all the troop figures exactly right, but he described:

 

-A strategic redeployment over a period of two years

-Bringing the National Guard home within 6 months.

-Redeploying troops to Afghanistan or someplace else nearby where they actually want us

-He said that President Bush got rid of Saddam Hussein and that was a great thing. But it could have been done in a very different way

-He said that Bush has a permanent commitment to a failed strategy. Duh.

 

Oh, and he also said:

 

I remember going through this in Viet Nam.  Everybody kept saying, “Oh just another year.  Yeah, we’re going to have a victory.”  Well, we didn’t have a victory then.  And it cost us 25000 more American troops because people were too stubborn to be truthful about what was happening.

When he ended the interview, Dean again mentioned the 25000 which was an obvious reference back to his earlier statement. It is well known that our leaders knew the Viet Nam war was not winnable for many years before they admitted as much. It is commonly accepted that tens of thousands of the 58000 Americans who died there did so after our leaders knew the cause was lost.

 

So can you tell me what about that makes him, or Rep. Murtha, or me, or the millions of Americans who agree with some or all of this position pieces of s***, or assholes? But if you can't reply without profanity or vulgar names or a few facts, please don't bother.

[Texsox]

Well he certainly didn't have a clue about Nam, and he lived through that era.

 

BTW, 58,000 is a closer number. And close to 2,000,000 Vietnam civillians. So I guess I'm better able to speak about Iraq than Dean or anyone else that doesn't know the death toll in that "conflict".

 

But what does that have to do with Iraq war?

[Balta1701]

Howard Dean.  What a joke.  This guy had the nerve to compare it to Viet Nam as an unwinnable war.  He's certainly an expert on history and the Viet Nam War.  He said something along the lines of 25000 young Americans lost their lives in Nam.  Considering the number was closer to 50000 tells you this dips*** doesn't have a clue about the Viet Nam War, and therefore probably knows jacks*** about Iraq.

Back during the first year of the Iraq mess, Assistant SecDef Paul Wolfowitz was asked in front of Congress what the current casualty count was in Iraq. He was off by something pretty close to a factor of two also.

[Balta1701]

Juan Cole on this topic.

 

Speaking in San Antonio on Monday, Democratic National Committee head Howard Dean said that the US cannot win in Iraq. The link just given, to WOAI, allows you to listen to the interview. He called for bringing the national guards home from Iraq immediately. Excerpts:

 

 

    ' "I've seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."

 

    Dean says the Democrat position on the war is 'coalescing,' and is likely to include several proposals.

 

    "I think we need a strategic redeployment over a period of two years," Dean said. "Bring the 80,000 National Guard and Reserve troops home immediately. They don't belong in a conflict like this anyway. We ought to have a redeployment to Afghanistan of 20,000 troops, we don't have enough troops to do the job there and its a place where we are welcome. And we need a force in the Middle East, not in Iraq but in a friendly neighboring country to fight (terrorist leader Musab) Zarqawi, who came to Iraq after this invasion. We've got to get the target off the backs of American troops. '

 

 

 

I'm going to blog the interview as I listen to it:

 

Dean compared the skewing of intelligence on Iraq in the build-up to the war to Watergate, which he pointed out also occurred in Nixon's first term and only hit him in the second.

 

Dean said neither he nor Murtha wanted a withdrawal from Iraq (i.e. just pick up stakes and come back across the Atlantic), but rather a redeployment. Dean suggested an over-the-horizon US military force be stationed in a nearby friendly Arab country to deal with any problems of terrorism that remained in the wake of the redeployment. Dean said there should be a 2-year timetable for draw-down of troops from Iraq itself.

 

He said Bush wanted a permanent commitment to a failed policy in Iraq.

 

Dean said that 80 percent of Iraqis want the US and coalition troops out. (This was a British military poll done in Iraq that got leaked).

 

Dean criticized "Vietnamization" as a failed policy in Vietnam, and implied that keeping a big US military force on the ground in Iraq while attempts were made to "Iraqize" military operations would likewise fail.

 

He also accused Bush of deliberately suppressing intelligence reports from the CIA that raised doubts about his allegations concerning Iraq, and of not allowing Congress to see them at the time.

 

Bush and Cheney insisted on staying their course.

 

Actually, this debate is not about winning or losing. The maximalist goals of the Bush administration in Iraq have not been achieved and never will be achieved. Despite what Paul Bremer said, the US is not going to "impose its will on the Iraqis," and despite (probably) Irving Lewis Libby's silly allegation, the US is not manufacturing reality in Iraq (or at least not a very nice one--see the next item).

 

The debate is just about disengagement strategy. Bush wants to keep a large US military force in Iraq for as long as it takes to build up a new Iraqi military and government under US tutelage, so as to avoid the disaster of a collapse of Iraq when the US comes out (when, not if). Bush's plan probably envisions a significant US troop presence for a good five years (how long it will really take to train an Iraqi army, if it can be done at all).

 

Dean wants to bring home the National Guards in 2006, and in 2007 to redeploy US army fighting divisions to bases in the region (probably Kuwait and Turkey, though he was diplomatic enough not to say so.) He also wants to avoid the disaster of a total collapse in Iraq. He is just convinced that long-term heavy US troop presence actually makes such a collapse more likely, and wants to deal with the problem differently.

 

So they are really just arguing over 2 years versus 5 years, and over direct US presence in that period versus an over-the-horizon capability to intervene against building threats to the US (i.e. if Zarqawi took over Anbar province and started up training camps for September 11 Part Deux--the Cheney nightmare scenario).

 

Dean apparently wants to know why you couldn't take out any terrorist training camps that grew up with surgical strikes and special ops, rather than by garrisoning Anbar with 10,000 Marines who keep emptying out its cities and making the inhabitants refugees.

 

Dean's remarks will, predictably, be twisted so that he is depicted as urging isolationism and complete withdrawal ("surrender", the Right will call it.)

 

Let me just suggest to him and others who are pushing this sensible plan that we call it "Winning smart in Iraq" rather than "can't win." What can possibly be won is the avoidance of a hot civil war or a regional guerrilla war that plunges the world into economic crisis. Winning that is in the best interests of everyone, Iraqis and Americans alike.

 

As for Bush's "winning" in Iraq, what did he want?

 

*He wanted to weaken al-Qaeda, which he said he believed received Iraqi state support. He was completely wrong about that, if he really did believe it and wasn't just lying. In fact, Bush has enormously strengthened al-Qaeda, and he has not captured its top leadership. The London July 7 bombers explicitly were taking revenge for what they saw as US and British atrocities in Iraq. Zawahiri was able to recruit them because Bush's actions in Iraq created such rage.

 

*He wanted to destroy Arab socialism and make Iraq a free market economy. In fact, Iraq's economy is a basket case and the likelihood is that the petroleum industry, the major source of wealthy, will remain in federal or provincial government hands. A good 50 percent of Iraq's economy will be in the public sector for a long time to come. Sounds like Socialism to me.

 

*He wanted to open Iraq up to unrestricted US corporate investment (Paul Bremer's 100 laws, which Naomi Klein has written about). US corporations, however, are not interested in failed states, and are giving Iraq a pass. In the meantime, Canadian and Norwegian companies are getting a look-over by the Iraqi provincial authorities.

 

*He wanted a place to put bases in Iraq at the head of the Oil Gulf so as to be able to withdraw from Saudi Arabia's Prince Sultan airbase. In fact, no elected Iraqi government is going to lease long-term military bases to the United States. 80 percent of Iraqis want the US troops out completely, yesterday. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani will at some point give a fatwa to that effect, and then it will be all over (as it was in the Philippines when its parliament asked the US to leave).

 

*He wanted to use Iraq as a springboard to undermine the regime of the mullahs in Iran, the other member of the "axis of evil." In fact, the emergence of a politically mobilized Shiite majority in Iraq has given Iran new geopolitical advantages.

 

*He says he wanted to make Iraq a model of liberal democracy and human rights for the Greater Middle East. In fact, the Iraqi constitution says that Islam is the religion of state, that the civil parliament cannot pass legislation that contradicts the laws of Islam; and it allows ayatollahs to be put on court benches, etc., etc. So is Iraq going to have freedom of speech, or will blasphemy be a hanging offense? I bet on the latter. Bush implied to his evangelical supporters that they would have a free mission field in Iraq (which they wanted to use then to evangelize the rest of the Muslim world). Any evangelical missionary who shows up in Iraq today may as well just go straight to the studio to record his hostage tape.

 

So, Bush hasn't won and won't win the things he and his officials said they wanted.

 

We have to win smart. That means giving the Iraqis their independence ASAP while acting responsibly to avert potential crises if necessary.

 

The looney left is attacking me now because I say I think the US does have the responsibility to forestall massive hot civil war in Iraq if it can, of the sort that could leave 2.5 million people dead and 5 million displaced abroad. That is what happened in Afghanistan from 1979. The US helped destabilize it(the Soviets contributed more to the actual destabilzaiont)in the 1980s and then, under Bush senior, just walked away completely. The American far left never complained about what was going on in Afghanistan in the 1990s, because for them the only source of evil in the world is US imperialism, and since the US had largely left Afghanistan, all was well. No matter if hundreds of thousands of Afghans were maimed as the US turned its back. Somehow they don't complain so loudly about US-led NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia, which certainly saved hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives. They don't actually care about Bosnians or Afghans or Iraqis, just about hating the US. The US has done horrible things. It has also done noble things. I am hoping that it finally does the noble thing in Iraq, and wins smart, for the Iraqis and for the Americans. Dean gets that. Bush doesn't.

[Rex Kickass]

VICTORY is a fully functioning government elected by the people of Iraq.  That elected government will have control of the armies of Iraq, which will need to be strong enough to fight off the terrorists who will wish to bring that government down. 

 

When these objectives are met, the troops will come home.

 

Pretty clear, if I can come up with it.

 

Go ahead, s*** away about how I'm wrong.

 

Kind of a catch 22 isn't it? How do we know for certain that the government of Iraq is fully functioning without us there to prop it up?

 

And if that is our government's definition of victory, how does the military reach that goal?

 

Kap, I think you nailed on the head what a "victory" in Iraq would be. The problem is you can't shoot your way to a stable government. Self-determination involves the determination of the Iraqi people to want stability. We can offer some help militarily, but the bulk of our solution at this point is economic and diplomatic - it seems to me at least.

 

We need to renew our commitment as a nation to Iraq. We need to change our approach in its reconstruction, politically and structurally. That's been where our problem has been the whole time since the fall of Saddam Hussein. For all the people that like to trumpet the fraud and corruption of the UN's Oil for Food program, the amount of waste and fraud that's taken place in our administration of the reconstruction makes OFF pale in comparison. Correct me if I'm wrong but I seem to recall reading that less than 1 in 5 reconstruction dollars seems to actually go to reconstruction in Iraq. We need to take steps to ensure that Sunnis are not further marginalized politically because doing so only feeds the insurgency. We need to take better steps in reaching out to former Baathists who aren't under trial for crimes against humanity and include them in the new Iraq as long as they are willing to be honest brokers.

 

Because even the bad guys who ruled Iraq are still guys in Iraq - and if we want to build a model for democracy in the region - they have to have a say, even if we don't want to.

[SoCalSouthSider59]

Howard Dean.  What a joke.  This guy had the nerve to compare it to Viet Nam as an unwinnable war.  He's certainly an expert on history and the Viet Nam War.  He said something along the lines of 25000 young Americans lost their lives in Nam.  Considering the number was closer to 50000 tells you this dips*** doesn't have a clue about the Viet Nam War, and therefore probably knows jacks*** about Iraq.

 

58,000, and i agree with YASNY.......I know of two of them whose names are on The Wall too, they belong to my brave Uncles who fought and died in 'Nam.........I take that asshole Dean's comments very personally, and i'll say to him again, :finger !!!

 

 

[Balta1701]

58,000, and i agree with YASNY.......I know of two of them whose names are on The Wall too, they belong to my brave Uncles who fought and died in 'Nam.........I take that asshole Dean's comments very personally, and i'll say to him again, :finger !!! 

 

   

 

Ok, so yeah, go read Dean's statement, he was clearly saying not that 25,000 people died in 'Nam, but that 25,000 additional ones died after the point at which we should have gotten out of there - shortly after Tet, 1968, when Johnson basically had a peace treaty brokered which would have let us get out of there (it was basically killed by Nixon's people, who wanted to stay the course and had a "secret plan" for victory there too.)

 

"I've seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."

Edited December 7, 2005 by Balta1701

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

We could have won Vietnam in 6 months if LBJ wasn't a moron.

 

 

His mismanagement of the war cost us a ton of lives and allowed the North to win.

[SoCalSouthSider59]

I stand by my views and opinions, and i'll say again :

 

 

i'm done here, politics suck anyway......... :headshake

[NorthSideSox72]

We could have won Vietnam in 6 months if LBJ wasn't a moron.

His mismanagement of the war cost us a ton of lives and allowed the North to win.

 

We didn't lose Nam because LBJ was a moron. We lost because our military tactics were out-of-date and entirely useless in that type of war. We failed to adapt (until after Nam, anyway).

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

We didn't lose Nam because LBJ was a moron.  We lost because our military tactics were out-of-date and entirely useless in that type of war.  We failed to adapt (until after Nam, anyway).

 

 

I beg to differ. Johnson placed large swaths of North Vietnam off limits to US bombing. This allowed the North to build what was regarded as the worlds most formidable air defense network which cost the lives of hundreds of US pilots. Air Force commanders literally begged Johnson to allow them to take out those missile sites before they became operational but he refused.

 

Additionally, North Vietnamese ports were also placed off limits to bombing and mining by the Navy. This allowed the North unrestricted access to the raw materials and weapons from the Soviet Union to wage war with. When Nixon finally allowed ports in the north to be mined they were at the bargaining table within 6 months because, simply, they ran out of what they needed to keep fighting.

 

 

EDIT: You are right though about outdated tactics being a problem there. Too many Generals were trying to re-fight WW2.

Edited December 7, 2005 by NUKE_CLEVELAND

[Balta1701]

Oh goodie, now we've got a Vietnam tactics debate. This should be fun.

 

The problem with bombing as a tactic is that in North Vietnam, there really wasn't all that much available to bomb. Yes, we lost a ton of airmen because of the rules of engagement there, but think about this...in N.V., there were virtually no Industries during the war. Nothing in the way of factories, munitions plants, or even psychological targets that could be hit with bombing.

 

If we flew planes over Vietnam, we were spending tens of thousands of dollars on fuel, munitions, and lost planes, in order to bomb a few hundred dollars worth of a target.

 

(anecdote from History of Vietnam War class @ Indiana:) At one point during that war, the military claimed it had destroyed something like a billion dollars worth of North Vietnamese equipment through bombing; at the time, the estimated net worth of every piece of industry, equipment, buildings, etc., in all of North Vietnam was something like an order of magnitude less than that.

 

The only solution to that war through bombing was going to be to bomb that entire nation into the ground, killing literally tens of millions. You simply cannot bomb away an opponent when the opponent is fabricating half his munitions from your unexploded bombs.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Oh goodie, now we've got a Vietnam tactics debate.  This should be fun.

 

The problem with bombing as a tactic is that in North Vietnam, there really wasn't all that much available to bomb.  Yes, we lost a ton of airmen because of the rules of engagement there, but think about this...in N.V., there were virtually no Industries during the war.  Nothing in the way of factories, munitions plants, or even psychological targets that could be hit with bombing. 

 

If we flew planes over Vietnam, we were spending tens of thousands of dollars on fuel, munitions, and lost planes, in order to bomb a few hundred dollars worth of a target.

 

(anecdote from History of Vietnam War class @ Indiana:) At one point during that war, the military claimed it had destroyed something like a billion dollars worth of North Vietnamese equipment through bombing; at the time, the estimated net worth of every piece of industry, equipment, buildings, etc., in all of North Vietnam was something like an order of magnitude less than that.

 

The only solution to that war through bombing was going to be to bomb that entire nation into the ground, killing literally tens of millions.  You simply cannot bomb away an opponent when the opponent is fabricating half his munitions from your unexploded bombs.

 

 

I wont debate you that we dropped a lot of bombs and wasted a lot of gas bombing. We did. Problem was that we dropped bombs on all the wrong targets.

[Texsox]

We could have won Vietnam in 6 months if LBJ wasn't a moron.

His mismanagement of the war cost us a ton of lives and allowed the North to win.

 

Nuke, it was a conflict. We never declared war on Vietnam.

So Nuke's opinion on Iraq doesn't count.

[Balta1701]

I wont debate you that we dropped a lot of bombs and wasted a lot of gas bombing.  We did.  Problem was that we dropped bombs on all the wrong targets.

I would counter by saying that there weren't enough right targets. Even if we had gone after their defense network before it was up, it wouldn't have broken them. That nation endured terror campaigns just as bad as any bombing campaign we could have launched when the French first attempted to recolonize the country after WWII - people starving, torture, indiscriminate killings, occupation of cities, the whole works.

 

When the "Christmas bombing" happened in 72 (I think it was that year, correct me if I'm off by 1), it basically had almost no effect on North Vietnamese morale, because the people had both been through worse, and they'd been expecting terror bombings of their cities since the U.S. first intervened.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

I would counter by saying that there weren't enough right targets.  Even if we had gone after their defense network before it was up, it wouldn't have broken them.  That nation endured terror campaigns just as bad as any bombing campaign we could have launched when the French first attempted to recolonize the country after WWII - people starving, torture, indiscriminate killings, occupation of cities, the whole works.

 

When the "Christmas bombing" happened in 72 (I think it was that year, correct me if I'm off by 1), it basically had almost no effect on North Vietnamese morale, because the people had both been through worse, and they'd been expecting terror bombings of their cities since the U.S. first intervened.

 

 

The right targets were air defense and their ports. Air defense protected the ports which is where they got all of what they needed to wage war. Without raw materials and weapons they cant function. Any competent military commander knows that you have to deprive your enemy of its ability to wage war but we allowed them free access to what they needed for years.

 

 

BTW. I havent even gotten started on how we allowed them to use Laos and Cambodia as staging areas for years unmolested.

[Balta1701]

So would you contend that the death of any of the Soviet advisors, or the widening of the conflict to directly include Cambodia or Laos, would have had no consequences with regards to the actions of the Soviets or the Chinese?

[Balta1701]

Oh, and furthermore...I'm not sure "Unmolested" is an accurate description of how we treated Cambodia and Laos...first of all, those areas were bombed heavily. In fact, some interesting tactics were used to try to place the bombings - sensors were developed to detect people in quite a few ways so that we could try to find where they were. Furthermore, Laos itself was actually even used as a site from which the U.S. ran operations- the CIA ran an "airline" which set up facilities for radar and covert operations out of Laos.