Personal Committment to Iraq War

Barbarian observes:
Incidentally, Clinton's military actions were generally successful. Bush's so far have been failures. Perhaps combat veterans are smarter than Bush thinks they are.

Hmm... Somalia cost us fewer men than a month in Iraq. BTW, it's instructive how Clinton handled that failure. His Sec. of Defense didn't provide adequate resources for the mission, and Clinton sacked him. Bush's Sec. of Defense did that in Iraq, and then lied to the troops about it. Bush just loves him. That's perhaps the most telling difference. Bush despises men and women willing to die for their county.

We never had a military action in Rwanda, chalk that one up to fantasy.

And yes, in Haiti, we got in, shut down the guys who had overturned the election, and got out. We weren't there to make Haiti a good place, just to restore a democratically-elected president. You see, there was a plan, and defined objectives. And it worked. Not because Clinton was a great general, but because he was bright enough to defer to great generals.

And of course, we absolutely flattened the opposition in the Balkans, with miniscule losses. A massive use of force, followed by intimidation worked wonders. The bad guys fell in Belgrade with no occupation, roadside bombs, etc.

Bosnia is free, peaceful, and the people there love us. Why not? We restored civilization to that part of the world.

We could have done that in Iraq, if we had competent people handling the situation. Clinton relied on his generals. Bush relied on Karl Rove. The results speak for themselves. Iraq is a nightmare of terrorism, violence, and corruption. The people of Iraq increasingly dislike us, and there is no end in sight.

We are bleeding lives and billions of dollars for nothing whatever.

Really? Do you have the latest casualty figures for Bosnia? Don't hear much about fighting there, nowadays. :laugh: How can you improve on no fighting, no enemies, and no casualties?

 

Barbarian observes:
BTW, Johnson had very little to do with "micromanagement" of the Vietnam war. It might have been better if he had intervened more directly.

Either you don't know what "micromanage" means, or you don't know anything about the Vietnam conflict. In fact, Johnson was never involved in the implementation of whatever strategy was in force. Indeed, Gen. Westmoreland was the author of the escalation policy, as Abrams was later the author of the "Vietnamization" policy.

In 1965, General William Westmoreland requested a large increase in the number of US Soldiers, which Johnson initially resisted, but later approved. At that point, the US took a direct role in fighting.

After the Tet Offensive, General Creighton Abrams convinced Johnson to scale back, and seek a negotiated peace.

Even the strategy wasn't really Johnson's.

 

:laugh:

Let's see what Johnson has to say about it:

http://www.meridianmagazine.com/editorial/021031jackprint.html

Yet, Jack saw Lyndon in a poignant moment too. President Johnson micro-managed the Vietnam war, once boasting to Jack, "They don't hit an outhouse without my approval."

While Johnson did, for the most part allow his generals to manage the ground war, he micromanaged the air war, completely ignoring the strategy and target selection priorities of his Air Force generals in favor of incrementalism.

Thousands of Young American men paid with their lives for his micromanagement.

One has to totally ignore historical fact to conclude that Johnson and his advisors did not micromanage the war.

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/...1/kamps.pdf#search="target selection vietnam"

http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache...cro+managed+vietnam&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=22

http://www.baas.ac.uk/resources/pamphlets/pamphdets.asp?id=22

http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript973.html

There are hundreds of others. If you're interested.

Which I suspect you aren't.

 

And history is still not through judging Bush he may be considered the worst President ever on so many aspects when compared to other past President, including L.B.J.
An excerpt from http://hnn.us/articles/5019.html, History News Network from an article entitled "Historians vs. George Bush" by Robert S. McElvaine
That abuse of the patriotism and trust of the American people is even worse than everything else this president has done and that fact alone might be sufficient to explain the depth of the hostility with which so many historians view George W. Bush. Contrary to the conservative stereotype of academics as anti-American, the reasons that many historians cited for seeing the Bush presidency as a disaster revolve around their perception that he is undermining traditional American practices and values. As one patriotic historian put it, “I think his presidency has been the worst disaster to hit the United States and is bringing our beloved country to financial, economic, and social disaster.”

And of course there are other sites out there that reflect some of the same views

 

According to the Dayton Accords, US troops in this operation were supposed to return home after one year, in 1996. In 1996, Clinton extended their stay for 2 more years. And as you know, they are still there. In Kosovo, 50,000 occupying troops have overseen the cleansing of 70,000 Serbs from their homes by the KLA.

Well that's just goofy.

 

Yes, because President Clinton pulled them out. A decision that Osama bin Laden said encouraged him to mount further attacks against the U.S. And look at Somalia now; No functioning government for the last 15 years, the capital has been taken over by Al Ittihad al Islami, and it may well become the next Afghanistan. A real success story.

 

In 1994 Clinton ousted dictator Raoul Cedras from power, installed Aristide as president and established a peacekeeping force. The military presence was supposed to foster democracy, and stabilize the economy. Instead, guerilla warfare and rigged elections continued. Aristide assassinated and arrested many of his political opponents, and none of the long-term objectives were met. Haiti remains one of the poorest countries on Earth, looting and violence persist. Now, I'm not saying Clinton is neccessarily to blame for that. The point is that things seldom turn out as planned. But some are so blinded by Bush-Derangment-Syndrome (or partisan politics) that they forget that simple fact.

 

"Those that forget history are doomed to repeat it" . . .

And they kill more Christians than ever . . .

 

If you research Johnson's Silver Star, you run a real risk of actually dying while laughing.

 

Hi Carpro,
I am having to post under the name of Petra-O IX formerly known as Rocko9 until I can maybe get some techanical problems solved. Thanks for the laughs you have never failed in providing enough. Johnson got a lot of things he didn't deserve including a ranch in Texas. Sad to say though I think Johnson must have been a role model for many of our modern day politicians both Dems. and Repubs.

 

(Barbarian cites historians who document that LBJ had little to do with the tactical side of the Vietnam war)

Ol' "Honest Lyndon", um?

Let's see... we have voluminous historical data and research showing even the strategy wasn't Johnson's, much less the tactics.

And on the other hand we have a second-hand anecdote about what Johnson was supposed to have said about it.

Umm....

Well, that's quite a retreat from your previous position, but it's still wrong.

Not surprisingly, the first person to take note of the problems of fighting a "war of the third kind" with air power, was Gen. Curtis LeMay. A number of officiers in the Air War College had studied the problem and come up with a "special operations" air warfare doctrine.

It was that doctrine that determined the use of air power in Vietnam. Ironically, the only shift from that doctrine was the "Rolling Thunder" campaign, which was advocated by Westmoreland, and was finally approved by Johnson.

That assertion is, as you see, delusional.

 

Barbarian observes:
Bosnia is free, peaceful, and the people there love us. Why not? We restored civilization to that part of the world.

So, if you offered the troops in Iraq the chance to serve in Bosnia instead, what do you think they'd do? Since Bush has refused to let the troops in Bosnia come home, naturally, you blame Clinton for that. Pretty much the neocon mindset "no matter who does it, it's Clinton's fault."

In fact, nothing like the ethnic cleansing that went on in Kosovo by the Serbs happened. The province, while historically Serb, had become predominantly Albanian. And the Serbs began systematically to kill or drive off the majority Albanian population.

But the US force that took over Kosovo, was so even-handed and fair in its performance that even the Serbian government had kind words for the general in charge.


Barbarian explains why Bush failed to provide our troops with adequate equipment and tried to cut their combat pay:
Bush depises men and women willing to die for their country.

Goofy? Pretty close to criminal in my book. It's not bad enough he couldn't serve honorably himself; treating our fighting men and women like that is despicable.

 

Right. Limited objectives. The stated objective was to overthrough the dictator, and restore a democratically-elected leader to power.

Sorry. Pure fantasy on your part. The military objective was to overthrow the dictatorship.

(discussion of other problems not addressed by the military)

Good, because he didn't set out to do anything about those things.

 

Barbarian observes:
Hmm... Somalia cost us fewer men than a month in Iraq.

Yep. Clinton was no fool. Seeing that the mission had little chance of success, he chose not to risk any more American lives. That was sufficiently important to him that he sacked his Sec. of Defense, who had made serious errors.

Bush, of course, also is mired in a war with little chance of success, but has little regard for the cost in tax dollars and lives. And when his Sec. of Defense bungled the operation, and then lied to the troops about it, Bush endorsed him. When one retired general after another called for Rummy's firing, Bush still loves him.

Because his friends mean more to him than American fighting men and women. That's just the way he is.

And he would have, but Clinton kept him on the run. Clinton bombed his facilities in Sudan,and ran him out of Africa. He kept track of Al Qaeda's finanacial dealings, and monitored Muslim extremists. Bush put an end to all that.

Too bad, we're busy fighting in Iraq; can't do anything about it.

Thank you, Mr. Bush. This is what comes of dreams of empire. We're so mired in Iraq, to no purpose, that we no longer have the resources to do what Clinton did to the terrorists.

 

Provide us with just a little of your "voluminous historical data" or do we just take your word for it?

As I suspected, you weren't really interested.

 

I was wondering when it was going to end. good thing my scroller works.:tongue3:

 

Johnson's decisive but restrained response to the Gulf of Tonkin incidents helped him win the 1964 election, but Saigon's prospects continued to decline. The president wanted to concentrate on his ambitious domestic program, the Great Society, but his political instincts told him that his leadership would be damaged fatally if America's client state in South Vietnam succumbed. Instability mounted in South Vietnam as rival military and civilian factions vied for power and as Vietcong strength grew. A consensus formed among Johnson's advisers that the United States would have to initiate air warfare against North Vietnam. Bombing could boost Saigon's morale and might persuade the North to cease its support of the insurgency. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) favored a massive bombing campaign, but civilians in the State and Defense Departments preferred a gradual escalation... To stave off defeat, the JCS endorsed Westmoreland's request for 150,000 U.S. troops to take the ground offensive in the South. When McNamara concurred, Johnson decided to commit the forces.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/vietnam/anderson.htm
Westmoreland was convinced that the Vietnamese communists could be destroyed by fighting a war of attrition that, theoretically, would render the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese unable to fight. His war strategy was marked by heavy use of artillery, airpower and attempts to engage the communists in large-unit battles. However, the NVA and the Viet Cong had a firm grasp on the battlefield initiative and so were able to dictate the pace of attrition to fit their own goals. Westmoreland repeatedly rebuffed or suppressed attempts by John Paul Vann, Victor Krulak and Lew Walt to shift to a "pacification" strategy.((Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann And America in Vietnam))
Westmoreland said about the US involvement in Vietnam: "It's not that we lost the war militarily. The fact is we as a nation did not make good our commitment to the South Vietnamese."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Westmoreland

It's not as though it were a secret. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the war knows this.

 

In every year since 2001, the rate at which current soldiers have re-enlisted has increased, including those who served in Iraq. Army recruits continue to enlist at higher rates as well. That pretty well speaks for itself.

Actually there are now only a couple hundred US troops remaining in Bosnia. Bush has done no such thing.

It's still a goofy comment. He despises his own father?

Oh really? Here is what Clinton had to say about the Haiti mission in March 1993 -

"I want to make it clear that the United States is committed strongly to a much more aggressive effort to restore Mr. Aristide to his presidency and to, over the long run, work with the people of Haiti to restore conditions of economic prosperity….I am prepared to commit the United States to its fair portion of a 5-year, multinational $1 billion effort to rebuild the Haitian economy. And we are going to begin on this project in earnest now."
Wasn't very successful was he.

Oh, you mean when he blew up an aspirin factory.

Yeah, the good old days, when Clinton was in charge of the military and things ran smooth as silk.

 

Good try.

But they don't reinforce your point at all.

As a matter of fact, they reinforce mine.:laugh: