Elroy,
1- Coalition troops speaking Arabic - you say they also didn't speak the languages following WW2. So what? Perhaps you didn't get the point (spending a year training coalition policemen to speak Arabic for a year and then invading might have been a good idea - otherwise policing and gathering intelligence is close to impossible for the majority of coalition policemen)...
...Since the timing of the invastion was 100% at George's discretion, why was it better to go in with virtually zero Arabic speakers as opposed to more Arabic speakers? Answer - they didn't plan appropriately for the post-war situation.
Under your scenario, Taliban and Saddam would still be in power, since the plan would always fall short of perfection.
And the axis countries in WW2 were COMPLETELY DESTROYED by the war. The Fog of War documentary indicates fire bombing in Japan killed 30%-50% of the civilian population of EVERY major city. That's a completely different situation than Iraq where the enemy army basically gave up.
That's a very good point, BTW.
2- Regarding closing all border crossings - you say it was too difficuly logistically. Nonsense! 4 weeks after the start of the invasion (or even less) I find it hard to believe that the coalition couldn't put 30-40 troop members at every known road that goes into the country from a neighbor cuontry. That would have basically closed the country down to outside interference. Jihadis that want to come in have to do a 3 day trek through the desert carrying their own RPG. Not perfect, but quite easy to implement and a vast improvement over the open border situation which allows anyone that wants to kill coalition troops to drive in and fire away.
LOL. You probably have never seen the Iron Curtain. It had thousands, if not 100s of thousands of troops, barriers, towers. People trying to cross it were much less willing to die trying, and 100s of thousands still made it, one way or another. I made it too, BTW.
3 - Lack of pro-coalition media campaign - sounds like you basically agree with this deficiency. I would remember point 1 above, because its pretty tough to have a good pro-coalition media campaign when you can't speak the local language.
You hire the locals. Radio Free Europe was much more effective than Voice of America, IMO. But as I said, the US needs to do more in this area, and not only in Iraq. In the whole ME.
4- Al Aribiya and their peers anti-US campaign. Well ok, you can't stop them from broadcasting, but you can kick all their reporters out of the coutry until it is stabilized, and then put your own talking heads on their shows (in Arabic) pointing out how the anti-western inflammatory programming is likely to contribute to chaos in Iraq, and is harmfulto Iraqis and the region.
I am not sure I agree. Freedom of press and speech is one of the things that Iraqis appreciate the most about the post Saddam era.
As for Churchill and FDR, I think they were both out of office (lost election or died) within a year of the end or before the end of WW2. As the Iraq "war" is over, they aren't really useful comparisons for George.
I think we are in very early early stage of the war with the Jihadists. Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor time.
And answer this - Do you think the Bush administration has done a good job in the post Major Combat Operations time in Iraq? If so, why (what could have gone worse??)?
I would give them a B+ in Afghanistan and B- in Iraq.
Joe |
