Thank you Veterans

[fitfool]

To all who have donned the uniform of our country,
Thank you for your service and sacrifice. I wish you could be at home with the ones you love.

Comments

[snarkactual.livejournal.com]

I don't really think it would have been possible to have gotten more support for enforcing the treaty of Safwan. There was too much bribe money and too many economic interests in Europe that were profiting by trade with Iraq. At the same time Saddam Hussein had been becoming increasingly provocative. He'd even begun "lighting up" our aircraft with targeting radar and by February 2003 (a month before the war) had fired on our aircraft with both guns and missiles a couple of times. All of this, counted heavily in the Middle East toward making his claims that we were weak and indecisive and that he would ultimately win his war with us increasingly credible. Which given our attempts to secure agreements with Yemen, Muscat, Oman, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and other countries in and around the region to allow us to operate against al Qaida in those countries less and less likely,
The main thing is, that regardless of how we got there, we are there, we overthrew a government and to my way of thinking it is not right at so many levels for us to leave until we have a viable government in place in Iraq. Now my personal preference is that the government of Iraq be a Federation of states with representative rule. I feel that it would be criminal for us to do anything less than to at the very least be sure that there is a viable government in Iraq.
To do that, the Soldiers will need to be there until that can happen. It won't happen on any timetable (in fact I think we've rushed the job). It took time (almost 20 years) to do what we're doing for Iraq in Germany and Japan in the aftermath of WWII. The majority of Soldiers serving in Iraq see this and understand it. The fact of the matter is, that the fact that the insurgents must terrorize the people who should be sympathetic to them in order to secure their cooperation shows that they have little popular support which in turn means in terms of guerrilla warfare they're losing. Where they're winning is here in the US where if we abandon Iraq now will cause us to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

[fitfool.livejournal.com]

I agree that now that we're in there, we're stuck there for the long haul (another reason I wish we'd cultivated more allies to share the occupation/rebuilding burden). I'm glad a lot of the soldiers there understand it's not going to be some lightning operation. I'm not sure if the same could be said of the folks back home. I feel like we're still being told that any day now we'll be able to hand things over to the Iraqis to sort out. I wish they would just give a more realistic timeline. Then again, if they were to say up front that it'll take 10+ years at the current spending levels, I wonder if popular support for the war would decrease or if people would hunker down and adjust expectations accordingly.

[snarkactual.livejournal.com]

I recall at least two speeches by the President both prior to the interim government's elections where he told the American public that we'd be there for several years and has usually talked about "staying the course" and the "long haul". I think no one pays attention and if they do it's considered a "bad thing" to have to commit forces to a multi-year mission. This has resulted in a rush to turn over the security mission to hastily formed, poorly vetted, and less than thoroughly trained Iraqi forces. And while they're certainly taking a heavy load, I worry that too little time for training in not just tactics but in dealing with the civilian populace especially among the non-Kurdish Sunnis in the country which may lead to abuses that could result in something similar to the "Vietnamization" of that war where the local forces collapsed before a highly trained and experienced enemy. One of the things about an insurgency, is that it is very fluid. Right now, we're way on top of them and forcing them to be defensive and to have to resort to terrorizing the local populace in order to maintain even a subsistence level of support. But that could change tomorrow should something come up that increases popular support for the enemy. So timelines are meaningless and there is no linear or geometric progression. This is why this kind of warfare is often referred to as being "asymetric" by tacticians.