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Politics : New FADG. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: unclewest who wrote (834)	5/24/2007 9:19:34 AM
From: michael97123	Respond to of 4152

The guy who wrote the book blackhawk down was on with Cramer this morning. He said that the sunnis know who the terrorists among them are and unlike other places they couldnt hide among the population. He went on to say that the US is viewed as the enemy and once we left and/or an oil/autonomy deal was struck they would quickly take care of the foreigner/al quaeda problem

To: unclewest who wrote (834)	5/24/2007 10:23:49 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 4152

What I find particularly pathetic is these units can no longer be tasked to provide direct support to combat deployed SF ODAs. Can there possibly be a better place to practise PSYOPS and Civil Affairs than with the people we are trying to liberate? Absolutely!! This is stupid. CA has to operate where the "rubber hits the road", and if they aren't able to do that, what's their purpose? They just wind up "hydroplaning" and losing their ability to effect influence over the population in combatting the enemy. But part of the problem, IMO, was MNF-I leadership permitting Iraqis to create and hold the belief that the Americans would solve all their problems for them. This set us up for tremendous failure when the expectations the Iraqi held fell through. That's where the Vietnam analogy certainly holds true. From the very beginning, we should have had an extensive IO campaign that ONLY the Iraqi people can create positive change via both reconciliation and national unity. I just didn't see that happen. Over and over again, I would speak with Iraqis working on our base who would question me as to why the US wasn't doing "this or that" for the Iraqis. I certainly did my part to convey to them that we were only there to faciliate the Iraqis resolving their own problems, not to do it for them. But it shouldn't have been left to folks like me to take on this task. It should have been Bremer and MNF-I who did it on a national scale. Now, I can see the need for making sure that CA/PO supports conventional units, since that's who they normally train with, despite having been subordinated to SOCOM. But my view is that CA/OP should be supporting EVERYONE, no matter who they are. I just despise these continuous turf battles our military leadership seems to be engaged in. Btw, here's an interesting article I found on the internal struggle and rivalry within SOCOM between the "white" SF side and the "dark" (direct action) advocates. usnews.com Hawk

To: unclewest who wrote (834)	5/24/2007 11:53:50 AM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4152

"The why is obvious. Our PSYOPS and Civil Affairs units have been under constant reorganization for over two years including two major shifts in command structure." I wish it was as simple as bureaucratic ineptitude but I'm afraid the problem lies much deeper. Along with the problem of placing unnuanced, westernized thinkers in charge of such operations, we have the major, virtually insurmountable, problem that the people we're selling to are not buying what we're selling. And it's not the way we wrap the message, it's the message itself that they're rejecting. Another major problem is that we long ago oversold the "good" we were offering and the "bad" the other side offered, thus losing an immense amount of credibility. One of the news articles last month referenced one of our "good news for Iraq" articles that was published. It had a picture of Iraqi soldiers manning a checkpoint in a Sunni neighborhood. The intent of the publication was to imply that the Iraqi army was protecting the Sunni population. Unfortunately, the Iraqi army soldiers had graffitied their checkpoint with the name of the ancient Shiite religious cleric who had incited the centuries long conflict between the Shiite sect and the Sunni sect. The message was clear; Shiite Iraqi army soldiers were thumbing their noses at the Sunnis they were supposedly "protecting" from sectarian violence. I thought that illustrated the dual levels of the problem we're facing. First, we were too stupid to recognize that our message conveyed the opposite of what we intended to convey. That was particularly ignorant since the main issue they were addressing was Sunni/Shiite strife. The bigger problem, however, was that the reality wasn't that the primarily Shiite Iraqi army wasn't seen as adequately protecting the Sunnis, the main problem was the the Iraqi/Shiite forces WERE NOT adequately protecting the Sunnis. You can't paper over that problem with "good news" propaganda. It's the same principle as waging a campaign to deny global warming, or claiming that victory is just around the corner in places like Iraq or Vietnam, or claiming to be winning the "war on terror," or pledging to "stay the course until we win." I agree that our efforts have been dismal but even effective propaganda must have it's genesis in reality and truth or it will fail. And when it fails it will destroy what truth it held as well as exposing the many falsehoods. You can't paint a car with a bad engine and expect it to get you from here to there. And that's why you sometimes need to junk that car. Ed