"If we leave he says all hell breaks loose"
Wrong. If we stay, all hell will break loose. If we leave, who knows?
Mission accomplished? What a bunch of fuck-ups. And in 10 years, we'll be saying we can't leave because it would dishonor the 10,000 American dead. Didn't fuckin' Vietnam teach anybody anything?
US intel report: Iraq's Anbar province 'politically lost'
Chief Marine analyst says region's political vacuum being filled by Al Qaeda.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
In a report that some have said is the most negative yet filed by a senior military officer in Iraq, the chief of intelligence for the US Marine Corps in Iraq concluded that the possibilities of the US and Iraqi governments securing the troubled western Iraqi province of Anbar are remote.
The Washington Post reports that Col. Pete Devlin's assessment, written in mid-August, also says that "there is almost nothing the US military can do to improve the political and social situation there."
One Army officer summarized it as arguing that in Anbar province, "We haven't been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically – and that's where wars are won and lost." The "very pessimistic" statement, as one Marine officer called it, was dated Aug. 16 and sent to Washington shortly after that, and has been discussed across the Pentagon and elsewhere in national security circles. "I don't know if it is a shock wave, but it's made people uncomfortable," said a Defense Department official who has read the report. ...
Devlin reports that there are no functioning Iraqi government institutions in Anbar, leaving a vacuum that has been filled by the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq, which has become the province's most significant political force, said the Army officer, who has read the report. Another person familiar with the report said it describes Anbar as beyond repair; a third said it concludes that the United States has lost in Anbar.
The Post reports that Colonel Devlin offers several reasons for this situation: a lack of US and Iraqi troops in the province, the collapse of local governments, and a weak central government with almost no presence in the region.
News of Devlin's comments about Iraq come only a few days after the Canadian Defense Minister Gordon O'Connor said it was impossible to militarily eliminate the Taliban in Afghanistan. NATO military leaders there also complained about a lack of troops to fight that country's growing insurgency. The Times of London also reports that one of Britain's top soldiers in Afghanistan quit the Army last month because he was so frustrated with the situation in that country. Captain Leo Docherty of the Scots Guards said the campaign in the southern province of Helmand province has become "a textbook case of how to [mess up] a counter-insurgency".
In an opinion piece in The Washington Post, Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and the author of "Taliban" and "Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia," writes that "the tactics and strategy of Islamic extremists fighting US or NATO forces have improved dramatically." Al Qaeda and its allies are "winning by not losing."
If this is indeed a long war, as the Bush administration says, then the United States has almost certainly lost the first phase. Guerrillas are learning faster than Western armies, and the West makes appalling strategic mistakes while the extremists make brilliant tactical moves.
As Al Qaeda and its allies prepare to spread their global jihad to Central Asia, the Caucasus and other parts of the Middle East, they will carry with them the accumulated experience and lessons of the past five years. The West and its regional allies are not prepared to match them.
In an interview with Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press, US Vice President Dick Cheney painted a more optimistic picture of what was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vice President Cheney said that adversaries of the US cannot beat it in a "stand-up fight," but were trying to see if they could "break the will" of the American people. Cheney also hinted that people who questioned the Bush administration's strategy on the war on terror actually "validate the strategy of the terrorists."
In the Meet the Press interview, Cheney did admit that he had been wrong when he said the insurgency was in its "final throes" last year, but defended the decision to invade Iraq. Cheney repeated his often expressed point that there was a "decade long" connection between former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
However, Bloomberg News reports that on Friday the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that said there was no evidence of any kind of a connection between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda, and that Hussein "didn't trust Al Qaeda and refused to support it."
"Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qaeda and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime,' one of the reports said. Hussein refused all requests from al-Qaeda to provide material or operational support, said the report issued in Washington today by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
A second committee report said that Iraq Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress told US officials that Iraq possessed nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, information that later proved inaccurate.
Vice President Cheney said Sunday he has not yet read the Senate report.
csmonitor.com |
