At this hour, US and Iraqi forces are sieging the terrorist stronghold of Fallujah, securing the hospital and key bridges over the Euphrates. US commanders are saying that they expect some of the most fierce urban fighting since the Vietnam War.
Our military has been working for years on urban warfare through programs like Military Operations in Urban Terrain, especially after the diasastrous operations in Mogadishu in the early 1990s. Unlike Vietnam our troops are professionals who have been trained to bring massive firepower on combatants while doing everything they can to spare civilian lives. No military in the history of the planet is as well-equipped, well-trained, and effective as the United States military, and the US Marines are often the tip of the spear in operations such as this. While there is little doubt that the terrorists who have build bombs designed to murder hundreds of innocent Iraqi civilians and US troops will put up a fierce fight, now that we’ve decided to close the trap, they’re as good as dead.
To paraphrase Sen. John McCain, may God have mercy on them because we will not.
God bless our troops, and good hunting…
“[Iraq is] a huge strategic disaster, and it will only get worse…. The idea of creating a constitutional state in a short amount of time is a joke. It will take 10 to 15 years, and that is if we want to kill 10 percent of the population.” (Lt. Gen. William Odom, Director of the National Security Agency, 1985-88). That’s a quote from an article by Paul Alexander I just read on the on-line edition of Rolling Stone, where 7 retired US generals describe how “Bush screwed up” with this war. Informative read.
“‘We had to stop some operations until the [U.S.] elections were over,’ said a senior Iraqi Defense Ministry official who requested anonymity because he’s not an authorized spokesman. ‘The Iraqi government requested support from the American side in the past, but the Americans were reluctant to launch military operations because they were worried about American public opinion. Now, their hands are free.'” (Jonathan S. Landay and Hannah Allam, Bush expected to move quickly on Iraq, Knight Ridder). Well, that explains why we didn’t invade Fallujah before the elections. Politics comes first. What a surprise.
Except we didn’t leave Fallujah alone – we’ve been softening up the defenses in the city with precision airstrikes for days now. You don’t just go straight in without preparing by getting intelligence and softening up defenses. Furthermore, Allawi himself asked for more time in order to negotiate with the local Sunni tribesmen. Blaming everything on Bush is simply playing armchair general.
Iraq will be free and it will be stable. There will be elections in January – just as Afghanistan held its first elections last month.
It was the Iraqi Defense Ministry official who said their orders were to wait until after the election, not me. You have to admit the timing is at least slightly suspicious. And even you wrote we might go in before the election.
“Iraq will be free and it will be stable”. I hope you are right. But when? The people who planned this war miscalculated by thinking we’d be welcomed as liberators. We didn’t factor how hard it would be to win the peace, especially after winning the initial war, which was rather easy. Why should we now have faith everything will work out given such gross miscalculations? And what if the people vote for extreme Islamists? Then what? You say it is their country and we are only there at the behest of the Iraqi government. Do you seriously think we’d let an extreme Islamist government take power, even if it is fairly elected by the people of Iraq?
The Russians tried making concessions in Chechnya and they tried leveling it. They also installed a puppet regime loyal to Moscow. Nothing has worked because the Chechens want them out. Period. I realize Chechnya and Iraq are not the same thing, but they are similar, and the Russians are still suffering from terrorism, ten years on. Israel is too, and much more than 10 years, despite having such a lethal military. I cannot see how Iraq will turn into a free and stable democracy anytime in the near future.
One plays an armchair general only when that person doesn’t speak up beforehand. I, and many other people, were saying this war was a mistake well before it happened. Now time will tell who was right.