I don't know, you can try and blame the chain of command or the big brass, or whoever, but the fact remains, that to all intents and purposes this operation is a failure, and the buck has to stop somewhere, right?

Unless, of course, the whole purpose of Iraqi Freedom was to make sure the oil in Iraq stays in the ground, in which case it has been pretty successful! That oil stays off the market and the major oil companies can watch their coffers fill up as the price of a barrel soars.

All I know is that I joined the military to defend the constitution, not the interests of some oil companies.

Americans today are so easily duped. It was not always this way. America had to be dragged kicking and screaming into World War I and II. Now some idiot goes on TV and tells people the boogy man is gonna get em, and everyone just signs on the dotted line.

Posted by: Claude at June 15, 2006 10:07 AM

For the record, Patrick Fitzgerald is a Republican and not a liberal by any stretch of the imagination. Most career prosecutors aren't.

What distinguishes him is that he is an relatively incorruptible public servant, rather than a pure politician, unlike many senior civilian prosecutors. He was appointed for his experience in public corruption cases (most notably Governor Ryan of Illinois, a case in which he recently won a conviction). Public corruption cases almost always involve whichever party happens to be in power, because legislators in the minority don't have any favors to trade. You may as well try to bribe a corporal in an effort to get aircraft procurement contract.

Posted by: ohwilleke at June 14, 2006 1:49 PM

Claude,

This is bound to piss you off so I'll get to the point.
Shineseki was fired for not following an order. There has been an ongoing "Pentagon War" between Rummy and the US Army regarding how to wage war. Rummy has told ALL the services to operate in a way that is light, lean, and lethal because WW2 tactics are ineffective in today's world where our enemy is not contained within one nation's borders. We are fighting a global war and cannot have ALL of our assets tied up in one geographical location. The Army was told to modify their war plans to follow this new fourth generation warfare concept that Rummy and Cheney have embraced (read Boyd by Robert Coram for more info) and instead of picking and choosing what they would integrate and what didn't make sense they stood their ground and demanded like a petulant child to "do it our way, the Army way, or no way at all". Guess what? After they did that, they lost. Shinseki got sacked, a retiree was put in charge of the Army and Rummy got his way anyway. Then the fight raged on where the Army kept trying to trump Rummy's authority. Rummy told them that they needed to cut costs because the Army was too bloated from different acquisition programs that were wasting money. He told them to find ways to save money or he would be forced to cut a program. Again, senior folks in the Army did not make a choice and assumed that if they didn't give something up then they would be allowed to keep them all. Lo and behold, a few months later Crusader is cancelled to save more money. Well, they're still not making any gestures towards streamlining their operations...now the Army is 530 MILLION dollars in the hole for this fiscal year. Guys at Ft Huachuca are bringing in their own toilet paper. Civilians are being told to stay at home. Medics in Iraq are buying and stealing the bandages they need.

The fight about how many soldiers were needed had absolutely NOTHING to do with strategy. It had to do with a bureaucratic organization refuses to update their sorely inefficient business processes. Compare the logistics involved in deploying Marines versus the Army, or the Seabees versus the Army...it takes four Army guys to do the job of one person from another service. Rummy told them to only send this many people because he knows that each person should be able to perform more than one task. If the Marines, the Navy, the Air Force can all deploy with a "right-sized" force then why the hell can't the Army? Rummy knows that we cannot wage a WW2 occupation of a country because a.) it bears too strong of a scent of the imperialism that the Middle East already accuses us of and b.) the American people would never stand to have that many people in theater at one time...if Americans don't have the stomach for 2,000 deaths then how would they feel about 500,000 people in theater instead of 100,000??

As for mistakes made early on...I put that on the idiotic attempt with Coalition Provisional Authority...it made the lines of responsibility and authority very unclear to both the US military and Iraqi civilians as to who was running the show...was it the US military or was it our state department and they countermanded each other constantly...and then the CPA made the LARGEST blunder of all...they stopped paying the Iraqi military in Nov 2003...our troops were using the opportunity of paycheck retrieval with civilians to uncover hidden insurgents...if that Iraqi military member wanted his paycheck it was in his best interests to tell our guys where to find the insurgents...when we disbanded and stopped paying the Iraqi military in Nov 2003 our small problem soon blossomed...the attacks suddenly became coordinated, there was now leadership behind the pot shots and random bombings, the enemy became organized overnight...

Everybody, flame away and tell me how wrong I am...but this is just my two cent opinion from here...

Posted by: Janiz98 at June 14, 2006 8:34 AM

Hey curtis...

To roughly quote Office Space..."I have five bosses!!!"

That's gotta be an AF thing...when I was a Captain I actually worked directly for three Lt Col's and three full birds (lone comm/aq officer in a PMO full of fliers)...worked out quite nicely when I needed top cover in a joint environment, (this one place-this one time) and I could whip out my portfolio of "daddys" from my home base...

It could have been hell on earth had they not been a great bunch of guys to work for...

Posted by: Janiz98 at June 14, 2006 8:02 AM

The fact was that at Nuremburg, the top Nazis were found to be guilty for all of the criminal actions of ordinary Nazi foot soldiers, and of course everyone up the chain of command all the way to Hitler. Sorry I have not yet read the article. The problem right now, in my eyes, is that the ordinary soldier has been put in an untenable situation on the ground. These guys were sent in with a mission to knock out the defenses and militarily defeat the old regime there.

They were not sent in as a long term occupation force. This whole operation was very badly planned. The guys at the top who flipped the switch setting it in motion, were convinced that our soldiers would be met with flowers and smiles, by ordinary Iraqis overwhelmed with gratitude for being liberated from a horrible dicatatorship.

It is my understanding that a secret deal was cut with the Baath party membership to allow us to walk in virtually unopposed. When Bremer later started to hunt down the Baath leadership in his de-Baathification plan, these guys had a pretty tough choice, stand and fight, with the resistance, or turn themselves in. Which would you do?

Anyway, things did not go according to plan, and now we are fighting what is essentially a rear guide action over there. We cannot effectively occupy the country, for two reasons. The first is that we are not outfitted for the operation. Shinseki was fired for saying, it would take, what, a half a million men to occupy Iraq? That is the first problem. The second problem is that you cannot occupy a country without some kind of support from the, what should we call them, occupiees?

Hitler was able to occupy all of France while fighting a two front war, for Christs sake. Imagine if the French had resisted at the level the Iraqis are. This military operation has been one of the greatest military failures in history.

Anyway, diverging from the original point a little. The fact is that our troops are in an untenable situation. Whether someone commits this or that war crime is not the issue. According to the principles enumerated by American judges at Nuremburg, the very top of the Nazi leadership was forced to take full responsibility for every war crime committed by anyone under them. They were executed for that.

According to Nuremburg rules, our civilian leadership, those who started this unprovoked war are the ones responsiible, not those soldiers in Abu Ghraib or Haditha. They were following orders, or making bad choices, but in my mind, the fact that they are taking the punishment and not the top leaders who set this whole bungled mess in motion, is the real injustice here.

This thing of chasing lower ranking soldiers and making them scape goats is sickening. The problem is that the voters in the States neither know enough or care enough about this war to do anything about it. Good luck if you are active duty right now!

Posted by: Claude Batmanghelidj at June 14, 2006 3:13 AM