simplicity

bush is a liar

he's drained our treasury

his lies are deadly

yet you remain clueless

can't tell when you've been robbed

Can't even maintain a line of thought...we were discussing your deductictive skills.

since when?

Since I mentioned that they run a close second to pos tho les.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20041024/D85TSFPG0.html

50 Iraq Soldiers Apparent Ambush Victims

Oct 24, 11:18 AM (ET)

By TINI TRAN

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - The bodies of about 50 unarmed Iraqi soldiers - many killed execution style with gunshots to the back of the head

snip

The nature of that attack suggested an increased boldness and organization by insurgents, who, until now, have mainly used roadside bombs and suicide car bombs in their attacks on the Iraqi military and police.

Diyala province's deputy governor Aqil Hamid al-Adili told Al-Arabiya TV he believed the ambush was an inside job.

"There was probably collusion among the soldiers or other groups. Otherwise, the gunmen would not have gotten the information about the soldiers' departure from their training camp and that they were unarmed," he said.

"In the future we will try to be more careful when the soldiers leave their camps. We will provide them with protected cars that can escort them home."

Gen. Walid al-Azzawi, commander of the Diyala provincial police, said the bodies were laid out in four rows each, with 12 bodies in each row.

"a safer Iraq"

bush and his followers are morons

If you can't beat him join him.

Bub, do you really see nothing alarming in, well, in the Iraqi police and army needing to be "protected", even in large groups?

Nothing wrong with this picture?

at least fly his family to safety and substitute Saddam as the enemy

I'm more alarmed by your deductive processes...why would you assume I would see nothing wrong?

"a safer, more secure Iraq"

[quote=Repub_Bub,Oct 24 2004, 03:50 PM]
I'm more alarmed by your deductive processes...why would you assume I would see nothing wrong?


Judy are you laughing as hard as I am at that one?

Judy's way too smart to laugh.

you should be alarmed by bush's deductive processes

Because you appear to see, or at least make no comments, on Bush's continuing on the present, failing course of action. All the time, of course, remaining resolute and optimistic.

I'm not hearing YOU call for bringing in enough more troops to clean out Fallujah and other terrorist strongholds, nor for Bush to reverse his decision and accept the offer of European countries to help us with a "training of trainers", nor making any other suggestions on how the deteriorating situation can be reversed.

bush is a chevy mechanic

we need a rocket scientist

My Dad is a rocket scientist and he's voting for Bush. At any rate muleface is no rocket scientist, just another gigolo lawyer. Apart from saying "I can do it better" Kerry has no record of doing anything but marrying rich "better".

It's amazing...if I said I liked the color green then you would conclude that I hated red.

I don't know that Bush has a failed policy...and neither do you.
I don't know that Bush needs more troops to clean out Falluja...and neither do you.
I don't know yada yada yada ... and neither do you.

We can sit here all day and sift through the negative reports and assume that absolutely nothing positive is going on in Iraq. We are not in a position to know what really goes on in the Oval Office and are only qualified to make silly observations and suggestions...

Why would you think that Bush, or anyone else might check the ol' C-Span board to gauge the pulse of American Intellectualism? The mere notion that you actually believe that your position has some useful merit to be gobbled up by the masses and executed in some whimsy of public opinion ; while mine, as if you really knew what it may be, is faulty because I don't scream...is ridiculous.

But you are naturally free to believe anything ya like....

The ritual execution of 50 Iraqi trainees is bothersome.

Judy, how do you define, "clean out Fallujah?"

And you accuse ME of making simple things complicated?

Let's see. We, or rather Allawi's government, control less territory now than 5 months ago. Attacks have increased to dozens a day. A year and a half later, there's still less electricity than under Saddam. The schools are indeed open, as Bush keeps pointing out. However, he fails to take note that most of the students have quit attending because it's too dangerous.

The terrorists are carrying out successful bombings inside the closest thing we have to a safe area, the Green Zone. Reporters will no longer venture out unless heavily guarded, due to the steady stream of kidnappings and beheadings. And meanwhile, the Poles that Bush was so quick to point out as an ally just two-and-a-half weeks ago have announced their plans to begin withdrawing forces.

It really should be "simple", even for you: What we're doing is NOT working.



I've never said nothing positive is going on. But do tell, what DO you think is going on there that's "positive" enough to offset all of the above? Perhaps the dawning Chalabi-al Sistani faction that's gaining popular support for the upcoming elections?



That's silly, of course I don't think anyone checks this board. On the other hand, this is sort of a 'dress rehearsal' for letters to the editor and the get-out-the-vote calls I'll be making next weekend.

Tell me, Bub, is this passive faith that those in authority are taking the wisest, and never a stupid, course of action part of that code you speak of? (And no, that's not a frivolous question. I've heard people, no kidding, tell me that the Bible instructs them to obey their rulers, and that therefore criticizing the prez is against God's will.)

You won't like it, because there's going to be high casualties, but...

Cordon it off, search refugees and direct them into a contained camp where they can be screened before release (so that fighters can filter out with the refugees as so many times before) and then take the city, street by street if necessary.

It would cost us dearly, not just in casualties but also in popular support, and would further weaken Allawi's failing government, but the alternative is to let the precedent of armed secession stand.

We should have done it the first time, after the four contractors were killed, once we'd vowed to do so. Backing down was a huge mistake that's ended up costing more lives on all sides.

As I attempted to indicate....we are not in a position to know the full implications of the Iraq situation. Doesn't mean we can't form opinions based on what we glean from news sources...but it does mean that we have to be very careful in sifting the facts.

I'm aware that, even on Fox news, the situation is getting worse. That in no way means that counter actions are not in place. We have all kinds of examples of the difficulties with wartime occupations and none of them were resolved as quickly as you, or anyone, would prefer.

Unfortunately, we have such a rapid dissemination of information today that it often hamstrings govt policy. You might, for example, call for more troops to recapture towns quickly...I might favor the Iraqi training program allbeit slower. The point is that we become polarized too quickly by subjective reporting which impacts an administration responsive to public opinion.

Regarding God's will in criticizing the prez...go for it. I have, and will again. The Bible instructs us that our leaders are "in place by God's will" but we are also admonished to use our brains.

How can we determine who is or isn't a fighter? Realistically, you are describing the process of allowing women, children and elderly to enter concentration camps before we kill their male relatives. Of course, that assumes the fighters haven't already left Fallujah for another city, having received advance notice of the timetable due to operational security leaks. In which case, our troops get a street by street tour of booby traps.

So far, the methods of choice in Fallujah have been ground artillery and aerial bombardment. I predict more of those.

I was going to let any males who claim to be civilians out with the women and children, after searching them. And yes it IS a temporary concentration camp--probably not all that temp, six months or so.



This is what's wrong with Bush's "Iraqi-ization" plan. Over and over (and over, and over, as in today's slaughter which obviously had inside help), and over yet again, our troops and Iraqi troops are being betrayed into ambushes.



Yes. Alas, I have no better ideas. Do you?



I predict more of those, too. Bush and Rummy (and the Israelis) appear to have a magical belief in air power and stand-off bombardment, despite never having had a success with defeating (or even discouraging) terrorists by this means.

We eventually impressed the Japanese leadership by means of aerial bombardment. Given the brutality and spritual dedication of Arab fighters, I'm not sure the comparison isn't appropriate.

So what, you think we need to nuke Fallujah or something?

No, but I think we should expect this to turn into the French-Algerian conflict, with us playing the French, unless we fight by Arab rules. I fear Abu Gharib will look like child's play before we are done.

I don't think "we" the American public have the stomach for that.

Though Bush apparently may have.

FriendJudy, et al,

In the days ruled by the might of Rome, Marcus Cato, a Roman Senator, often ended his commentary on the floor of the Senate with the phrase: "Carthago delenda est!" ('Carthage must be destroyed').



(COMMENT)

In the days that followed the brutal slaying of the three Blackwater Security Officers in Fallujah, there was a call by many – heard far and wide:

'Fallujah delenda est!' ('Fallujah must be destroyed').

We all know that the current security situation we now observe in Iraq is not limited to a few thousand extremist holdovers of the old regime, as once claimed by the military commanders, the Pentagon and the White House national security team. And we know that it cannot be the case that the “foreign fighters” in Fallujah are responsible for the execution style elimination of 50 (some) newly trained Iraqi soldiers on a remote road outside the town of Mandali. Fallujah is under siege and totally surrounded. These new recruits were taken from their convoy at a fake checkpoint - northeast of Baghdad, near the Iranian border in restive Diyala Province; which is a long way from Fallujah. Nor can the mortar attack on the “the US Base at BIA,” (AKA: Camp Victory) which claimed the life of Deputy RSO, Edward Seitz, be attributed to the foreign fighters under siege in Fallujah. Similarly, the suicide car bomb attack in Baghdad, which left 16 Iraqi police officers dead and more than 40 were wounded could not have been conducted by the Fallujah foreign fighters.

The current situation was predicted by many and dismissed as a risk under the national security and military decision making processes used in the Pentagon and the White House. Whether the decisions were divinely inspired or otherwise are really not at issue. However derived, we now have to live with the consequences. The issue then becomes, do we want to continue with the same team that has made these decisions – or – do we want to induce change in the decision making process? It is a matter of satisfaction in the strategies implemented since May of 2003 and the results that have they have yielded to date.

Most Respectfully,

Kerry woulda, coulda, shoulda

Typical Kerry




http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...anguage=printer


In August, I was talking with Kerry's scheduler about possible dates. On Sept. 1, Kerry began his intense criticism of Bush's decisions in the Iraq war, saying "I would've done almost everything differently." A few days later, I provided the Kerry campaign with a list of 22 possible questions based entirely on Bush's actions leading up to the war and how Kerry might have responded in the same situations. The senator and his campaign have since decided not to do the interview, though his advisers say Kerry would have strong and compelling answers.

Because the interview did not occur, it is not possible to do the side-by-side comparison of Bush's record and Kerry's answers that I had envisioned. But it seems to me that the questions themselves offer a useful framework for thinking about the role of a president who must decide whether to go to war.


He even got to have the questions in advance

I don't think their numbers were as large then as they are now, and they seem to be growing rapidly.

What would you suggest we do at this juncture, bearing in mind that we as occupiers have a duty under international law to maintain good order in the occupied territories?

(Unless, of course, you're Bush and hide behind the fig leaf of the Allawi government, claiming that maintaining order is their problem, not ours.)

FriendJudy, et al,

The list of things that could be done is long and much more expensive now than it would have been in May of w003.



(COMMENT)

Much of the insurgency is driven by "unemployment." If the employment levels were high, we would begin to dry-up the availability of human resources that form the basis of the insurgency.

We should discontinue most of the conventional offensive military operations, but begin and intensive campaign in the unconventional warfare arena, fourth generation warfare projects, and devote a new level of heavy emphasis in offensive CI/CT operations against the insurgents and flooding them with recruits that actually work for the Coalition.

This would be a 180 degree shift in direction from the current program which is driven be forced feed conventional military utilization and city siege/urban warfare mentality.

Most Respectfully,

Ain't it always like that with government work?

That makes a lot of sense. I think there's an old saying about "Idle Hands"

Could you elaborate on "fourth generation warfare"?

And re employment, I've always thought that one of the biggest mistakes of the war was to disassemble Iraq's socialized industry, selling off the various parts and dis-employing much of the population.

I don't think we really did too much of that - I know the neos had big plans for "privatization", but I thought they put off implementation.

Whoa! You're right, the quietly shelved that during my September 2003 "vacation".

Googling around, I see they dealt with the problem of state-run enterprises being unable to operate due to lack of water/electricity/security by *boggle* closing operations but continuing to pay the employees their salaries for not working.

RR,

'The list of things that could be done is long and much more expensive now than it would have been in May of w003.'

Add one more to the list - likely undoable now:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/internat...artner=homepage

"BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 24 - The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year...."

Oopsie.

"...American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings.

The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the same type of material, and larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people.

The explosives could also be used to trigger a nuclear weapon, which was why international nuclear inspectors had kept a watch on the material, and even sealed and locked some of it. The other components of an atom bomb - the design and the radioactive fuel - are more difficult to obtain...."

SpaceCowboy, FriendJudy, et al,

Yes, in some regards, major portions of the post-War "nation building" components were not implemented. But that does not resolved the problem nor provide cover for the implementation relative to the desired outcomes.

QUOTE (SpaceCowboy @ Oct 25 2004, 01:12 AM)
I don't think we really did too much of that - I know the neos had big plans for "privatization", but I thought they put off implementation.

(COMMENT)

Anytime you have a nation with more than 50% unemployment, you have great discontent. And in that discontent, you have the makings of an insurgency (what we have today).

In the first approximation of what a post-War Iraq would look like, "unemployment" was a mjaor issue. It was briefly discussed in the thread Iraq Discussions in the six months prior to the openning of hostilities. I raised three great themes back then:

Smorgasbord Effect: Where the US uses the vast sums of appropriated fund to generate business for major business entities; but, not using it to generate business for indigenous entities. This contributes to the continuation of “unemployment.”

Public Works Programs and Trading Partner Agreements: The need to provide funding for major PW so that all sectors of the Iraqi community can participate in the rebuilding of their own nation and have a vested interest in protecting their work. It would have been a great help if the US had established Grant Programs and Business Start-up programs.

Civil Service: It was not necessary for the US to totally disassemble the entire government. In fact, this contributed to the unemployment rate and the number of people that needed direct assistance.

The principle characteristic of Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) is that one side transcends established government (non-state actors) and outside the established protocols of governments. We refer to them generically (ie "terrorists," "extremists," or "former regime loyalists") and attempt to suppress them using strong armed tactics (ie “conventional military force” and “police tactics”) without addressing the systemic root causes of unrest and discontent.

In Iraq, the Coalition fights 4GW aggressors using air strikes, artillery, tanks and overwhelming force in terms of the volume of fire and level of violence (infantry armed to the teeth); or as Bill Lind says (the foremost authority on 4GW): "putting steel on the target." This is “Second Generation Warfare; with some “Third Generation Warfare” techniques sprinkled in the mix. Again, Bill Lind describes 3GW as: “Third Generation military seeks to get into the enemy's rear and collapse him from the rear forward: instead of "close with and destroy," the motto is "bypass and collapse."

The inability of the White House and the Pentagon to adapt (employment of 3GW and 4GW techniques) is a demonstration of the problems within the National Security and Military Decision Making Processes (NSDMPs + MDMPs) that have hampered successes in Iraq the entire time. It is an unwillingness on the part of the White House to admit that they did not achieve the goals identified at the outset, and an unwillingness on the part of the Army to admit that the tactical planning for the Army of the 21st Century was all wrong and totally inadequate to meet the real-world challenges of today.

Most Respectfully,

RR,

'The inability of the White House and the Pentagon to adapt (employment of 3GW and 4GW techniques) is a demonstration of the problems within the National Security and Military Decision Making Processes (NSDMPs + MDMPs) that have hampered successes in Iraq the entire time. It is an unwillingness on the part of the White House to admit that they did not achieve the goals identified at the outset, and an unwillingness on the part of the Army to admit that the tactical planning for the Army of the 21st Century was all wrong and totally inadequate to meet the real-world challenges of today.'

That about sums it up for sure.

"...Today, Al Qaqaa has become a wasteland generally avoided even by the marines in charge of northern Babil Province. Headless bodies are found there. An ammunition dump has been looted, and on Sunday an Iraqi employee of The New York Times who made a furtive visit to the site saw looters tearing out metal fixtures. Bare pipes within the darkened interior of one of the buildings were a tangled mess, zigzagging along charred walls. Someone fired a shot, probably to frighten the visitors off.

"It's like Mars on Earth," said Maj. Dan Whisnant, an intelligence officer for the Second Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment. "It would take probably 10 battalions 10 years to clear that out."..."

Can't even manage 2GW all that well.

1GW? I think even cave men had come up with the idea of guard duty.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2004Oct25.html



Doh!

Rocco, are you really sure that more regular infantry at the beginning, just to stand plain old guard duty, wouldn't have helped keep things from getting so out of control?

Guard the explosives?


They should have just blown them up.

Funny, they've been missing a while, but the story just happens to come out the week before the election




http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/internat...artner=homepage

"BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 24 - The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year...."



I notice on the news this AM they showed that every NYT front page article was pro-Kerry or anti-Bush. Good job media. Keep trying

Er, how could the NYTimes spin this story to be "pro-Bush?"

The thing that most amazes me, is the Bush campaign's puerile response to this latest show of incompetent leadership:



http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1327947,00.html

The headlines are about losing a bunch of explosives, but Kerry "has no vision?!"

Now that is about the scariest thing I've heard, GOP bluster aside, for a long time.

Timing is everything. Of course the NYT has the choice of covering a lot of things, as well as choices of what to put on the front page and what to hide in the back. The fact they are shills for Kerry doesn't make any real difference, I just point it out now and then.

The Iraqi Government reported it yesterday. As for "choosing" to hide a story like this "in the back," are you out of your mind?

There certainly is a shill here, but it's not the New York Times, and it isn't for Kerry.

Geez!

Supposedly the UN knew about it from the start. I sincerely doubt the Times sits around waiting for the Iraqi government to report something to look for their own news.