Hi Neocon; Re: "Hold on to that erroneous premise, and we will have a walk in 2004."
It's human nature to whistle while walking past the graveyard, especially when one is very, very, very sick, LOL. This is what you were saying before we got dragged into the quagmire. It made sense, except that it was impossible, LOL:
Neocon, September 13, 2002
I may be mistaken about this, but my guess is that the Administration does not intend a major war or occupation of the country, but instead hopes to have a swift incursion that neutralizes retaliatory capacity, encircles loyalist elements (ie, the Revolutionary Guard), and terminates or incarcerates Saddam and his entourage. Then, we will install a transitional regime from among Iraqi dissidents resident in the West, and stay long enough for them to become entrenched, and for us to seek and destroy the WMD infrastructure. The presumption is that the populace is hungry for normalization, that there is a high degree of professionalism in national administration, and that Saddam does not have a large, ideologically committed following, but mostly survives through the use of carrots and sticks. #reply-17987695
-- Carl
P.S. More Jewels:
Neocon, June 25, 2002
The US could have kept South Vietnam intact if it had had the will, instead of taking an incrementalist approach. #reply-17647857
And now here we are in Iraq, taking an incrementalist approach. Bush tried to wage war cheaply, just like we did in Vietnam. He's already ignored Bremer's request for 50,000 more troops. Instead, he's holding the military to the troops they already have. And month by month, the attacks grow stronger.
Neocon, June 28, 2002
The reason it was a bad idea to get involved in Vietnam is that we were not prepared for a protracted and indecisive war, which we assured ourselves of getting. The reason it was indecisive was that we did not go on the offensive and crush the regime in Hanoi.
... #reply-17671276
Okay, now you've "crushed" the regime in Baghdad and what do you have? That's right, another "protracted and indecisive war". The plan was to get the troops down to 30,000 by the end of the year. The pre war study was that the place would become uncontrollable if US troops were still present in quantity a year later. And the result? The administration is no longer even talking about drawing down US troops for the "forseeable" future. This is something that they apparently didn't foresee, but that was obvious to anyone who ran the force ratio figures.
Also, this one is kind of funny, given that the Israelis have now signed a peace agreement but are still losing citizens to terror attacks:
Neocon, June 30, 2002
However, they [the Israelis] will not tolerate this pace of terror bombing indefinitely. I do not think they will massacre Palestinians, but I do think that they may empty out the refugee camps and insist that other countries deal with that problem, thus cutting the population in the Territories severely. #reply-17675494 |
