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POPSArmy Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba says Bush & Rumsfeld knew about Abu Ghraib torture There was a lot of speculation as to whether or not the President and Rumsfeld were aware of the extent of the conditions at Abu Ghraib, but the discussion never seemed to go anywhere. This reopens the topic for discussion and I'd say it damn near concludes the issue in its indictment of Rumsfeld. At best, Taguba said, "Rumsfeld was in denial ... The photographs were available to him -- if he wanted to see them."
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POPSRice: "We can't give them a united Iraq" If the administration is now conceding that we can't unite Iraq - what the hell are we still doing there? Playing a minor support role? If this is a minor support role why have we committed all our troops? Why are we breaking the bank for a region we now admit we can't stabilize? If our benchmarks show that we're not succeeding, isn't that an admission that the challenges we face today are not how to win in Iraq, but rather how to recover from the strategic mistake of invading Iraq in the first place? Maybe someone should sit Bush down and explain the law of diminishing returns.
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POPSHow to control public opinion on the war MoJo interviews Rick Scavetta, an officer formerly working in Army media relations in Afghanistan, who talks about the ways the war is "marketed" to civilians (for example: no one's really looking for Osama any more).
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POPSBush admits to ignoring military intelligence. Bush is effectively saying Shinseki was right & Rumsfeld was wrong . This only goes to support Lt. Gen Paul Van Riper's take on the original civilian leadership , "You don't have to serve in the military to understand it, but if you haven't served, then you at least ought to school yourself. I don't believe either Mr. McNamara or Mr. Rumsfeld are professionally schooled. They're ignorant of military operations, of strategy and policy. The effect is normally they're disdainful of those they lead & then, as they begin to increase their power, they become arrogant, & they're unwilling to accept advice, even though they claim they are willing to accept the advice. But by their very actions, either relieving people or publicly humiliating people, you don't get the sort of push back you need to have the dialogue, the understanding, the debate out of which you will synthesize better ideas."
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POPSThe Stick Figure Guide to Winning in Iraq As described in the article, the creator of this humorous, optimistic cartoon, a young Captain Travis Patriquin, was killed by an improvised explosive device in Iraq just last Wednesday. His creation has been circulating among the troops and, lately, across the internet. PDF version of the presentation .
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POPSLt. Gen. Gregory Newbold: Replace Rumsfeld. So what is to be done? We need fresh ideas and fresh faces. That means, as a first step, replacing Rumsfeld and many others unwilling to fundamentally change their approach. The troops in the Middle East have performed their duty. Now we need people in Washington who can construct a unified strategy worthy of them. It is time to send a signal to our nation, our forces and the world that we are uncompromising on our security but are prepared to rethink how we achieve it. It is time for senior military leaders to discard caution in expressing their views and ensure that the President hears them clearly. And that we won't be fooled again. Slate said it best, "Newbold resigned his position in late 2002—quite a gesture, since he was widely regarded as a candidate for the next Marine Corps commandant. His fellow officers knew he resigned over the coming war in Iraq. The public and the president did not."( 1 )
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POPSLawrence Wilkerson (Powell's Chief of Staff) criticizes Iraq intelligence & planning for the war.
Here's what the plan was: The plan devised principally in Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith's office, and I have to believe, if Rumsfeld is the controller, the leader he says he is, that he was fully cognizant of this, and I don't think he would have been cognizant of it without the blessings of the vice president either. The plan was to put Jay Garner, General Jay Garner, in his organization, called ORHA, on the ground in Iraq for maybe 90 to 120 days, install Ahmed Chalabi and his INC colleagues, or some other look-alike, in control, and then leave, withdrawing most of the major military force in the process, if not all of it, in a very short period of time. This is ineptitude and incompetence of the first order. Ever since that plan failed, we've been in a pickup game and now we've transmogrified the mission from imminent threat and WMD into spreading democracy. The full transcript can be found here .
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POPSMaj. Gen. Paul Eaton: Iraq Plan Flawed. Mr. Rumsfeld came in to transform the US military. To turn the Army into a lighter, more lethal armed force. In fact, Rumsfeld's vision is a force designed to meet a Warsaw Pact type force more effectively - but we are not fighting the Warsaw Pact. We are fighting an insurgency: a distributed low-tech, high-concept war that demands greater numbers of ground forces, not fewer. Mr. Rumsfeld won't acknowledge this fact. And he has failed to adapt to the current situation. He has tried and continues to fight this war on the cheap. I wrote the op-ed piece in March of this year after I read the QDR. The QDR reads like a new more potent counter Warsaw pact force. It does not read like the force we need today to prosecute the foreign policy embarked upon by this administration. The President is not well served by this Secretary of Defense, a man history will not treat kindly. So what to do? Replace the Secretary of Defense with a proven leader who has a visi...
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POPSMaj. Gen. John R.S. Batiste rips Rumsfeld apart. Here's a transcript from the beginning of the speech, I left the military on principle on Nov 1, 2005, after more than 31 years of service. I walked away from promotion and a promising future serving our country. I hung up my uniform because I came to the gut wrenching realization that I could do more good for my soldiers and their families out of uniform. I'm a Westpoint graduate, the son and son-in-law of veteran career infantry soldiers, a two time combat veteran with extensive service in Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq and a life-long Republican. Bottom line, our nation is in peril. Our Defense Departments leadership is extraordinarily bad and our congress is only today, five years in to the war, beginning to exercise its oversight responsibilities. This is all about accountability and setting our nation up for victory. There is no substitute for victory, and I believe we must complete what we started in Iraq and Afghanistan. Donald Rumsfeld is not a competent war time leader." [
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POPSCol. Thomas Hammes calls for Rumsfeld to step down, in his testimony before the DPC Thomas Hammes was also responsible for managing bases, facilities & logistics supporting training & operations of the Iraqi army in 2004. His speech is highly critical of the civilian leadership and its lack of planning. At the end he says, And that brings me to my final point. There have been significant failures in leadership by both civilian and military leaders. None of the suggestions I've made will be carried out unless the leadership believes it needs to be done. To date senior military leaders have failed to speak out for their troops. The troops and their families are suffering for it. At a more senior level the Secretary of Defense has not acknowledged the numerous serious mistakes made to date. His refusal to see the problems means he cannot solve them. It is time for him to provide the nation the last in a long series of services and step down.
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POPSThis is What Waterboarding Looks Like. If the United States is going to continue to claim we're getting good intel using "torture-lite" techniques, maybe the President should declassify some of the findings to show us how it's actionably helped the war on terror.
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POPSUS intelligence Reports: Iraq War fuels global terror threat. At the end of the article the author reports, "McCain told CBS that the United States needs to prevail in Iraq, saying that failure in that country would only further complicate problems." In this instance, I agree. If we quit now I have little doubt that neighboring countries would openly and/or covertly vie for Iraqi controlled soil. The region is too resource rich to go uncontested. I just wish we had had the foresight to realize that invading Iraq would leave the United States militarily over-committed. Right now the President can’t outright threaten Iran or its nuclear program, because we don’t have the military might to oppose them. And what’s worse Iran knows it. In effect we’ve diminished our place at the bargaining table, because our military is stretched so thin that we could barely muster an effective counter-attack even in a worst-case scenario – like North Korea launching an ICBM.
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POPSBush doesn't answer why his administration invokes 9/11 as reason for invading Iraq. The closest Bush comes to answering the question, "I mean, there was a serious international effort to say to Saddamn Hussein, you're a threat. And the 9/11 attacks that threat, as far as I concerned." It almost sounds as though he's saying we invoke 9/11 as reason for invading Iraq because we saw Saddam Hussein as a threat and we see terrorists as a threat, and that's enough of a connection to consider the two one in the same. Scary indeed.
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