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POPSOne Surge Does Not Fit All producing the forces necessary to help hold difficult neighborhoods against the enemy. By 2007, the surge, for most Iraqis, could have an Iraqi face. And the political scene in Iraq had shifted. Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric, declared a cease-fire in February 2007. The best indication that timing is everything may be that there had been earlier surges without the same effect as the 2007 surge. In 2005, troop levels in Iraq were increased to numbers nearly equal to the 2007 surge — twice. But the effects were not as durable because large segments of the Sunni population were still providing sanctuary to insurgents, and Iraq’s security forces were not sufficiently capable or large enough. During my last weeks in office, I recommended to President Bush that he consider Gen. David Petraeus as commander of coalition forces in Iraq, as General Casey’s tour was coming to an end.
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POPSFrom The Department of "As If" Uncanny. Maybe I should go back and look through that victory speech for other tea leaves. And back in Iraq: Some military leaders remain wary of Obama's pledge to order a steady withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq, to be completed within 16 months -- an order advisers say Obama is likely to give in his first weeks in office. Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called a withdrawal timeline "dangerous." Others are distrustful of a new administration they see as unschooled in the counterinsurgency wars that have consumed the military for the past seven years. Gosh - a very public order to commence withdrawals followed by very quiet back-pedaling as conditions are evaluated and re-evaluated would be awfully cynical and manipulative, wouldn't it? On the other hand, Obama has said a million times that we must be as responsible in leaving Iraq as we were careless in entering, . .
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POPSObama’s Pentagon-in-Waiting ~ Center for a New American Security
“If they had, the saying in Washington is those who know, don’t say, and those who say, don’t know. I don’t fit in that category.” CNAS fellows and leaders declined to comment for this article. “We bring people together,” Floyd said, “not for a lowest-common-denominator bipartisanship, but for pragmatic solutions for problems we face.” CNAS papers are often vetted through an informal peer-review process, with experts at liberal, centrist and conservative think tanks. Still, some progressives have said that CNAS occasionally substitutes received wisdom for rigor. “I think CNAS’s work on Iraq, in particular, has been unduly tied to the conventional wisdom,” said Matthew Yglesias, a leading liberal blogger. Floyd contended that CNAS’s Iraq position has become the Washington consensus position. We were able to describe a responsible withdrawal,” he said, “and, in essence, the discussion is how to do that. It’s not if it will be done.”
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POPSMcCain's Real Petraeus Doctrine Wikileaks has obtained the "Petraeus doctrine" the Pentagon didn't want to show you." In 2005 a number of credible media reports suggested the Pentagon was intensely debating "the Salvador option" for Iraq.. According to the New York Times Magazine: The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, with which it has often been compared, but El Salvador. This is just evil. End the wars and shut down Gitmo!
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POPSWhich Hindsight Is 20-20? Hindsight isn't always 20-20, particularly in wartime, when early expectations of an easy rout can give way to an unexpectedly long and bloody grind - and when victory has so often been achieved only after persevering through strategic debacles, intelligence failures, and wrenching battlefield losses.
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POPSDefining “Victory” In Iraq Part of the problem here is that the war in Iraq is usually thought of as a single war in Iraq. But there have been at least three wars in Iraq since 2003 – the U.S.-led war against Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party regime, the civil war between Sunni and Shia militias, and the insurgencies against government and international forces waged by a constellation of guerrilla and terrorist groups. All three wars are distinct from each other, and two of the three are already over. The war against Saddam Hussein and his government ended when the regime was overthrown and what remained of its army was disbanded. You might say it didn’t officially end until he was captured in December of 2003, but he effectively lost when he was demoted from absolute dictator to fugitive. No matter what else might happen, Saddam Hussein will never be considered victorious.
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POPSTrue tests of leadership Continuing the clip: "Senator Obama made a different choice. He not only opposed the new strategy, but actually tried to prevent us from implementing it. He didn't just advocate defeat, he tried to legislate it. When his efforts failed, he continued to predict the failure of our troops. As our soldiers and Marines prepared to move into Baghdad neighborhoods and Anbari villages, Senator Obama predicted that their efforts would make the sectarian violence in Iraq worse, not better. Three weeks after Senator Obama voted to deny funding for our troops in the field, General Ray Odierno launched the first major combat operations of the surge. Senator Obama declared defeat one month later: "My assessment is that the surge has not worked and we will not see a different report eight weeks from now." His assessment was popular at the time. But it couldn't have been more wrong." And more telling... he always chooses the politically expedient answer.
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POPSAfghanistan: Obama Sees Problems; McCain Sees A solution The differences are not small ones, and reflect a distinction between the kind of staff-driven, laundry-list mush that sees the immensity of a problem and a leader-driven set of priorities that sees a solution. It is the distinction between Obama's opposition to the Iraq surge and McCain's support for it: not just the courage to make the tough choice, but the clarity to follow the right course. It's also the distinction between winning the war and simply ending it. Thomas Donnelly is the Resident Fellow in Foreign & Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
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POPSObama Scrubs website of surge criticism Yes, I'm always supportive of something that has been proven successful too. A little late though. Nice try Obama. After you trounced the efforts, the policy, the military...now that the surge has made significant progress, you want to slap them on the back and join the chorus of "Good job, guy!"
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POPSDarfur Crime Charges Sought Against Sudanese President The piece continues: Mr. Moreno-Ocampo says that for over five years, armed forces and the Janjaweed attacked and destroyed villages on Mr. Al-Bashir’s orders. They also uprooted millions of civilians from their lands, killed the men and raped the women. “I don’t have the luxury to look away. I have evidence,” the Prosecutor said.
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POPSOn Petraeus' Counterinsurgency Guidance That's all well and good, but it's just unfortunate that no such organization exists. I'm still not sure why we keep asking the Army and Marine Corps to do such a thing. Back before the insurgency in Iraq started, it was commonly known that the purpose of the Army was to "break things and kill people." Therefore, if that wasn't your intent (the thought went), then you shouldn't be utilizing the Army. As far as I'm concerned, that still should be a general rule. If we can't "kill our way out of this endeavor," then we need far less reliance on the military to fix Iraq. Because that's what the military does.
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POPSHRW accuse Ethiopia of War Crimes "We don't like to rank abuses in different parts of the world, but what is happening in the Ogaden is up there with the worst," said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. "We are talking about village elders being strangled, and women raped until the point of unconsciousness. And it is being done with complete impunity, and with a blind eye from the international community." A small-scale rebellion in the Ogaden region, populated mainly by ethnic Somalis, had been simmering for decades before the ONLF attacked an oil installation in April last year. More than 70 Chinese and Ethiopian workers were killed. ...Guardian
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POPSThe Iraqi Upturn This started out as a "good news" clip...and it is! But is the Washington Post suggesting that *President Obama* can take credit for the withdrawal?
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POPSAmerica Defeated: How Terrorists Turned a Superpower's Strengths Against Itself
President Bush announced this virtual war three days after September 11, 2001, in the National Cathedral in Washington, appropriately enough, when he told Americans that "our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." Astonishing words from a world leader -- declaring that he would "rid the world of evil." is National Security Strategy, issued a few months later, was careful to specify that "the enemy is not a single political regime or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism -- premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents." Again, a remarkable statement, as many commentators were quick to point out; for declaring war on "terrorism" -- a technique of war, not an identifiable group or target -- was simply unprecedented, and, indeed, bewildering in its implications. Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power.
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POPSThoughts on Nangarhar from an ex-Marine An interesting and nuanced perspective, combining an appreciation for the culture of the Marines (and its flaws), an awareness of the high strategic stakes involved in any civilian killings by U.S. troops, and a much-needed reminder that U.S. forces have generally respected the law much more rigorously than any previous occupying or counterinsurgency force in history.
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POPSObama, Clinton Will Keep Huge Military Indeed, Obama, who is often described in the corporate media as the anti-war candidate, went further and said: “I would call for an increase in our force structure, particularly around the Army and the Marines.” In fact, he wants the largest, most expensive military in the world expanded by 100,000 troops Dennis Kucinich who was excluded from the debate by MSNBC – which is owned by one of the largest weapons makers in the world, General Electric – was given a chance to respond by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! the next day. He said: “What you’ve heard here is a bunch of nuancing. They’re all saying the same thing, that they will keep troops in Iraq. The troops will be kept there to protect an embassy. The troops will be kept there for counterinsurgency and for training the Iraqi military.
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POPSDemocrats in Denial We are not arguing that one had to agree with the surge or the Bush decision to go into Iraq. Dissent is a deep tradition in U.S. politics, and this war has become a bitter subject. It is evident, though, that the opposition to Iraq after the Democrats won control of Congress in 2006 has put these candidates in a corner. For the past year, Democrats in both the Senate and House have enforced rock-solid party opposition to every jot and tittle of the Bush policy. They now have four candidates running for the U.S. Presidency who seem to believe it is to their political advantage to deny manifest reality.
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POPS The Real McCain Record Mark Levin NRO His supporters point to essentially one policy strength, McCain’s early support for a surge and counterinsurgency. It has now evolved into McCain taking credit for forcing the president to adopt General David Petreaus’s strategy. Where’s the evidence to support such a claim? McCain has repeatedly called for the immediate closing of Guantanamo Bay and the introduction of al-Qaeda terrorists into our own prisons — despite the legal rights they would immediately gain and the burdens of managing such a dangerous population. While McCain proudly and repeatedly points to his battles with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who had to rebuild the U.S. military and fight a complex war, where was McCain in the lead-up to the war — when the military was being dangerously downsized by the Clinton administration. Where was McCain when the CIA was in desperate need of attention? McCain was apparently in the dark about al-Qaeda like most of Washington, despite a decade of warnings.
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POPSIraq: the Fragility of Peace Interesting backgrounder on some factors to be considered on guessing the future of Iraq. One factor in the article is that Baghdad is now a walled city of separate factions, each a potential fortress - or ghetto?
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POPSRemember Gen.Batiste?Where's the Volume? Olbermann-Put this in the "countdown"! You loved the Gen.'s previous - and opposite - treasonous statements. Why is there so much disgusting behavior these days? Will it ever get better? Or get real?
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POPSHow to win in Iraq General Batiste is famous for being outspoken against the war and appearing in an anti-war ad for VoteVets.org. Lt. Hegseth is the executive director for Vets for Freedom. These two from opposite sides have come together to lay out the way forward if we want success in Iraq and the war on terror.
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