Paging Vitamin: Put down the bottle! (Iraq-R)
mannybolone
Los Angeles, CA 15,025 Posts
V,As often noted, we may not see eye to eye on a range of ideological or policy perspectives but I do appreciate your attention to thoroughness, esp. in light of the fact that foreign policy analysis is your job. So...Rumsfield - you even you admit was terrible - is out. You think Gates might be worse (this is troubling). What I want to know is: if there is now an opportunity for change...what should it be? What would be the most realistic strategy for the U.S. to pursue re: Iraq in your professional opinion?I'm sure "stay the course" is not part of your vocabulary.
Comments
b/w
"Do you even know what words mean?"
He's busy orienting himself toward the next generation of Outside-the-box thinkers, possibly looking for a job at a Thinktank. Young Turks if you will.
Or this, "the Dems need a real coherent Iraq plan for victory".
SORRY! Um, The Commander in Chief owns that shit. He shoulders all the blame and responsibility. He needs to fix it.
Congress has an oversight responsibility that it has neglected in favor of running permanent political campaigns. The American Electorate just checked them really hard on that shit.
So...
First things first in the Congress!
All these neocons that got off scott-free (now including Rummy) owe this country--if not the world--some retribution. Or...at the very least, full public disclosure under oath of ALL their activities that put us there in the first motherfucking goddamn place.
And this means Eli Lake all the fucking way up! (or down)
The war was over in May 2003.
If you looked at my earlier post on Rumsfeld's replacement, Gates is a realist and from the Republican foreign policy establishment. Those are also ideas that the neocons are opposed to, and I explained why in that earlier post.
1) Convene a regional conference or meetings on Iraq that include its neighbors, even ones that Bush doesn't like such as Syria and Iran, plus Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc. Syria is the main base for the Baathists and transportation for foreign fighters. Iran has been arming and funding the major Shiite parties. The conference/meetings, would be to try to work out a regional response to the problems in Iraq.
2) More pressure on the Iraqi government to crack down on the Shiite militias
3) Probabaly a temporary increase in troops, most of which will be sent to Baghdad, if they can find them (that's questionable right now), and more promises of troop reductions.
None of these will probably work.
Iran and Syria would want concessions from the U.S. and I'm not sure Bush is willing to give them any.
The Shiites seem to be arming up to win a civil war and hence, the Maliki government, which relies upon Sadr and his Mahdi Army, is reluctant to crack down on them. Plus they don't have the security forces to do it. The majority of the police are filled with Shiite militiamen. The army might be a better tool, especially because they are more ethnically diverse, but the U.S. has control of all but 2 army divisions.
Everytime the U.S. has talked about a troop withdrawal it hasn't happened. The U.S. simply doesn't have enough forces to secure the country. They do not have the numbers to secure the whole country and probably not even enough for Baghdad. Whenever the U.S. forces withdraw from an area it explodes in violence.
But. . . . . Gates will suck. And motown pretty much understands why I don't like him.
And Frank, that's ridiculous. I am a journalist who believed in the war and wrongly believed the administration was competant enough to follow through on their rhetoric. That describes a lot of people who don't owe any retributions.
This is from today's paper.
November 9, 2006 Edition > Section: National > Printer-Friendly Version
Rumsfeld Resignation Bodes End of Bush Doctrine
BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
November 9, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/43215
WASHINGTON ??? President Bush's nomination of his father's second director of central intelligence to replace Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is being interpreted by hawks here as a signal of the end of Mr. Bush's foreign policy doctrine and of a new willingness to negotiate with America's enemies.
Robert Gates, whose career in the CIA and National Security Council spanned 27 years, in 2004 co-chaired a task force on Iran for the Council on Foreign Relations. The group recommended that America engage directly with Iran and warn Israel not to take military action against Iran's nuclear reactors.
Today he is a member of the Iraq Study Group, a 10-person commission chaired by a former secretary of state, James Baker. That panel is likely to recommend, as The New York Sun reported first on October 12, that Mr. Bush abandon the goal of making Iraq a stable democracy and that the White House reach out to Syria and Iran in order to stop the bleeding in Baghdad.
Yesterday, Mr. Bush said Mr. Gates would bring "a fresh perspective and new ideas" to the Pentagon. He also pointed to Mr. Gates's experience as deputy director of the CIA in helping implement President Reagan's plans to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan and his experience on the National Security Council during the first Iraq war.
Hawks in Washington, however, fear that the nominee's new perspective could mean a softer line on Iran. The July 2004 report of the Council on Foreign Relations task force that Mr. Gates co-chaired, for example, cautions that "the use of military force would be extremely problematic, given the dispersal of Iran's program at sites throughout the country and their proximity to urban centers. Since Washington would be blamed for any unilateral Israeli military strike, the United States should make it quite clear to Israel that U.S. interests would be adversely affected by such a move."
Yesterday the president of the Center for Security Policy, Frank Gaffney, a Pentagon official under President Reagan, called the nomination of Mr. Gates "the beginning of the Baker regency."
"The president I think is surrendering to the seduction that has been evident now for some time of supplanting hard-headed bona fide realism with so-called realists of the Jim Baker, Brent Scowcroft, Bush 41 stripe. I suspect the current policies that stem from this will compound our present difficulties, not alleviate them," he said.
Mr. Gates, who is the president of Texas A & M University, was described yesterday by his former colleagues in the intelligence community as an intelligent and able bureaucrat and analyst.
A former president of the RAND Corporation who also was chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Henry Rowen, said yesterday, "I found him a very straightforward, intelligent man working to get as good work that could be done, done. Also later on, when he was the president's deputy national security adviser, I found him doing the kind of thing that that job calls for, to be sure to be an honest broker." Mr. Rowen however made one caveat in his praise of Mr. Gates. He said that when he chaired a committee to examine the CIA's assessments of the Soviet Union, at the behest of Mr. Gates who was then the CIA deputy director for intelligence, he found the agency's assessment of a booming Soviet economy to be inflated and incorrect.
"We kind of were not enormously impressed by that. I would say on that subject, generally on the Soviet Union, he is not an economist, so there is no particular reason to expect him to have deep insights. It wasn't bad, it was pretty good, it was defective on the assessment of the economy," he said.
In his 1996 memoir, "From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War," which was published by Simon & Schuster, Mr. Gates thanks Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, and Richard Armitage in the acknowledgements. The author expresses disappointment that both Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Bill Bradlee voted against confirming him as director of central intelligence. The book is mostly an account of the Cold War, which Mr. Gates called "a glorious crusade" against "a truly evil empire."
In the book, Mr. Gates praises both hawks and doves, saying, "If presidents had listened only to the hawks, U.S. belligerence and aggressiveness would have been so overwhelming that the Soviets would have been afraid to undertake changes in their system, to let down their guard at all. The danger of direct conflict would have been much higher. If the president had listened only to the doves, not only would the Soviets have seen many opportunities to gain strategic military advantage and new influence in the Third World; there would have been significantly less pressure on them to change."
The book's major surprise was its assessment of President Carter. "Carter's record in dealing with the Soviet Union," the book says, "was far more complex and successful than commonly believed at the time or since. Indeed, he was the most consistently ??? if often unintentionally ??? truculent President in relations with the Soviets since HarryTruman ??? If people had known what he was doing secretly to take on the Soviets, perceptions likely would have been different."
Although the decision to replace Mr. Rumsfeld with Mr. Gates has been seen as a defeat for Vice President Cheney, Mr. Gates's book carries a blurb from Mr. Cheney that calls the text "the definitive account of the end of the Cold War," and says of Mr. Gates, "No one has a broader understanding of these historic events."
Mr. Gates also is no stranger to other figures in the current administration. In 1989, he helped create a top secret task force inside the first Bush White House that planned for the collapse of the Soviet Union. To head it, he chose a National Security Council staff member named Condoleezza Rice.
President Reagan was forced in 1987 to withdraw Mr. Gates' nomination as director of central intelligence after a Democratic Senate raised questions about his knowledge of the CIA's efforts to aid the Nicaraguan contras. Some Democrats voted against him in his 1991 nomination fight over charges that he manipulated intelligence estimates, a likely theme for the next Congress if it investigates pre-Iraq war intelligence.
Mr. Bush had said last week that Mr. Rumsfeld would stay on. Yesterday Mr. Bush explained his decision by saying, "I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign," and explaining further, "I hadn't had a chance to visit with Bob Gates yet, and I hadn't had my final conversation with Don Rumsfeld yet at that point."
Mr. Bush said the decision was unrelated to the outcome of Tuesday's election. "Win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee," the president said.
November 9, 2006 Edition > Section: National > Printer-Friendly Version
nice avatar.
A phased withdrawl is the best option- A mixture of facing the fact that the US presence is not constructive and must eventually ( sooner beats later) go home b/w putting pressure on the Iraqi government to make some more realistic progress and solidify it's independent authority.
just my 2 cent.