How convenient to suddenly forget that the military and especially the top military brass overwhelmingly voted for Bush not once but twice, that they are traditioinally uber-conservative and did not actually have to negotiate with Miloshevich.
the competent high ranking military officers were never drummed out of the service. I worked for DOD for 35 years and I knew all three of them.
on top of that Top Brass told rummy that going in with 150k troops would be suicide ...and he did it anyways...it was an easier sell to americans than sending in more troops...what a major f**k up...
Politicians in general wether they are left/right, republican/democrat always seem to know how to screw things up. It must be an ego thing for most of them. While some of them may actually know what they are talking about, who the hell knows more about fighting a war than the Generals in the military (that goes for the public as well, meaning me, you, and all the other armchairs generals). With that being said you sometimes have to make due with fewer resources than you would like. In other words you just have to grin and bear it sometimes. Politicians screw up more than just the war in Iraq, if they were more interested in doing the right thing instead of grandstanding and trying to constantly get press time we might actually acomplish something.
You think it's easy invading and occupying a distant third world country of 26 million people? Let's see <i>you</i> do it, without committing any tactical mistakes.
WAELO, You are losing your touch. You have to bring a better game than this crap. Rummy would not agree to such a plan if his life depended on it. Others in the US government might consider the plan, but not Rummy. As far as I am concerned, we should pull out, give them back their mess, pull back to our shores and stop giving aid to all these bums around the world. Fix our problems here at home first.
Hmmm.....If there was any validity to this story, surely CNN, Fox News, ABC, NBC, or CBS would be all over it, no? Or maybe those guys are just a bunch of rookies. And maybe I'm just getting my news from the wrong sources. Or could our own brother-in-com, as in EliteTrader.com, be a modern day "Deep Throat"???:eek:
WASHINGTON TIMES: When asked to verify a British account of meetings at a summer villa north of Baghdad between American officials and "some members of the insurgency," as NBC's Tim Russert fashionably put it, Donald Rumsfeld disputed only one assertion: the number of meetings said to have taken place. The Times of London counted two, but "there have probably been many more than that," Mr. Rumsfeld replied, launching into a secretarial defense of "reaching out to the people who are not supporting the [Iraqi] government." Can we take a roll call of these "people" who are "not supporting" the Iraqi government? According to the Times report -- which, again, Mr. Rumsfeld let stand, correcting only that one small detail -- it seems that an American delegation, including senior military and intelligence officers, a Congressional staffer and an employee of the US embassy in Baghdad, has met probably multiple times with non-supportive people including representatives of Ansar al-Sunna, the Islamic Army in Iraq, the Iraqi Liberation Army, Jaish Mohammed, Thawarat al-Ishreen, the Shoura Council of Mujahideen and "other smaller factions." In other words, some number of U.S. officials have sat down to tea with some number of Islamic terrorists -- or, as they are now officially known -- "people" who are "not supporting the government." There are two absolutely mind-boggling aspects to this story. The first is that such meetings even took place. Aren't we the people who don't negotiate with terrorists? The ones who voted GeorgeW."You're-With-Us-Or-Against-Us" Bush back into office? Apparently not. Or, if we are, something has changed to the point where such lines in the sand don't matter anymore. Additionally mind-boggling is the fact that practically no one in the world has noticed the change, or considered its disastrous ramifications. After all, who are these groups we apparently had in for tea? They may not exactly register with the Chamber of Commerce, but Ansar al-Sunna, for example, is known to be either an offshoot of, or an alias for, Ansar al-Islam, a post-September 11 jihadist group believed to have ties with Iran and al Qaeda. Similarly, Ansar al-Sunna, which officially opened shop in 2003, is said to be linked to al Qaeda and the Zarqawi network. Among the many bestial acts it is believed to have committed in the name of Allah are last year's murders of 12 Nepalese laborers -- one beheaded with a knife, 11 shot in the back of the head, their point of death a perpetual Internet display -- as well as 22 American servicemen, Iraqi soldiers and civilian contractors, suicide-bombed to death as they sat down to lunch in a Mosul mess tent a few days before Christmas. Islamic Army in Iraq has achieved its own measure of bloody infamy: the murder last August of Italian journalist Enzio Baldoni. It also claims the shootdown of a civilian helicopter that killed 11 passengers earlier this year, including six Americans. The lone survivor, a Bulgarian pilot, emerged from the videotaped crash injured but alive before being shot dead to cries of "Allahu akbar" (Allah is great). If "Jaish Mohammed" is the same as "Jaish-e-Mohammed," U.S. officials sat down with still another gang of thugs, this one Pakistani-based, with ties to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. As for the Shoura Council of Mujahideen, which the Times described as "lesser known," a Google search turned up a possible clue at ArabicNews.com. The Web site reported that the "Iraqi Mujahideen Shoura Council" was the group responsible for kidnappping Douglas Wood, the Australian engineer recently rescued by American and Iraqi forces. If these slightly different names stand for the same group, it could well be that while these mujahideen were holding an Australian captive, they were also dunking crumpets with American brass. In other words, that was some tea party the United States of America threw. If this guest list is legit, it represents a ghastly capitulation to terrorists and a strategic victory for terrorism, living proof that it's possible to kill and behead and hack and dismember and terrify your way to a peace parlay with the U.S.A. This suggests we may now be seeking an accommodation with Islamic terror networks, rather than their obliteration or even containment. And that suggests a sea change in strategy, vision, and soul. But maybe, after almost four years into this brutal war, that sea change is already behind us. For what is also remarkable about these no-longer-secret talks is how unremarkable their revelation has been. Talking with terrorists is no longer taboo. Come Hamas, come Hezbollah, come Ansar al-Sunna: America is pouring tea. http://washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20050630-085633-1820r.htm