And just how is the Surge going?

[jazkiljok]

Tomorrow's New York Times will report that the United States military is arming the Sunni Insurgents. Apparently, the hope is the Sunni's will go after al-Qaeda in Iraq or al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.


Now, I'm just spitballin' here .... but didn't we go into Iraq with the intention of DIS-ARMING the Sunni Leadership in Iraq?


Can someone please tell me how this doesn't turnout badly?

the convoluted mess that is iraq we discussed ages ago. i was and am still of the opinion that to rid iraq of alqaeda is to simply leave and let the iraqi's kill them off themselves. alqaeda is an affiliation of extremists not true insurgents- their agenda is mass murder with no true political outcomes except perhaps some taliban like submission of the population. their usefulness as a tool of the sunni insurgency is already waning.

one can assume the new tactic is to simply isolate and kill off alqaeda affiliates in iraq then exit declaring victory over an enemy that was nonexistent there before the US invasion... of course leaving the sunni, shia, kurd, tribal, family, turk, syrian, saudi, iranian conflagration to put itself out.

good night, and good luck.

 

[michaeledward]

An interim report last week indicated that 'progress' is being made in 8 of 18 metrics in the current Surge (escalation). No progress is being made in 8 other metrics. And 2 of the metrics have proven beyond measurement, either good or bad.

We have this interim report, because it was mandated by Congressional legislation.

The 'final report' on the results of the surge / escalation, are due to be reported, in person, in front of Congress, by General David Petraeus on September 15, 2007. This is mandated by the same Congressional legislation that required the interim report.

The first thing to be aware of, is that the Iraqi legislature is taking the month of August as a holiday. A reasonable conclusion to draw from this fact, is that little work will be done to forward any of the progress, or non-progress evidenced to date on the required surge/escalation metrics.



Wait for it ....


General Odierno, the second in command on the ground in Iraq, has publically stated that, despite obligations in law to the Congress, results from the Escalation will not be sufficient in September to accurately assess success or failure. No, at best we need to wait until November, or maybe January, to assess the Surge/Escalation.

Again, the administration moves the goal posts. Three soldiers a day are dying in Iraq.


Of course, how the escalation works is actually irrelevant, because the military planners have made no plans on how they are actually going to extradite 156,000 soldiers and 180,000 mercernaries from Iraq. By even asking a question, "what are the withdrawl plans for the miltiary", a United States Senator was accused of aiding the enemy by the military.


There are NO plans to get out of Iraq; Surge/escalation or No Surge/Escalation. Somehow, the Iraqis have ended up living over the Presidents' oil reserves, and he means to correct their oversight. The will of the American People be damned.

 

[jazkiljok]

well, i'll be... all this time, it was just bad branding.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/20/AR2007072002163.html?hpid=topnews

 

[jazkiljok]

An interim report last week indicated that 'progress' is being made in 8 of 18 metrics in the current Surge (escalation). No progress is being made in 8 other metrics. And 2 of the metrics have proven beyond measurement, either good or bad.

We have this interim report, because it was mandated by Congressional legislation.

The 'final report' on the results of the surge / escalation, are due to be reported, in person, in front of Congress, by General David Petraeus on September 15, 2007. This is mandated by the same Congressional legislation that required the interim report.

The first thing to be aware of, is that the Iraqi legislature is taking the month of August as a holiday. A reasonable conclusion to draw from this fact, is that little work will be done to forward any of the progress, or non-progress evidenced to date on the required surge/escalation metrics.



Wait for it ....


General Odierno, the second in command on the ground in Iraq, has publically stated that, despite obligations in law to the Congress, results from the Escalation will not be sufficient in September to accurately assess success or failure. No, at best we need to wait until November, or maybe January, to assess the Surge/Escalation.

Again, the administration moves the goal posts. Three soldiers a day are dying in Iraq.


Of course, how the escalation works is actually irrelevant, because the military planners have made no plans on how they are actually going to extradite 156,000 soldiers and 180,000 mercernaries from Iraq. By even asking a question, "what are the withdrawl plans for the miltiary", a United States Senator was accused of aiding the enemy by the military.


There are NO plans to get out of Iraq; Surge/escalation or No Surge/Escalation. Somehow, the Iraqis have ended up living over the Presidents' oil reserves, and he means to correct their oversight. The will of the American People be damned.

we have about a year and a half for this nonsense to go on. with the exception of a giuliani or mccain presidency, the center, as has been said, cannot hold.

leading republicans want out of this mess as much as dems and probably not one repub candidate will share a podium during their campaigns with the current schmuck-in-chief in office.

with a dead end in the political wranglings by largely suspect iraqi gov't officials (essentially the warring factions sin feins pondering how to get a slice of the oil pie.)-- there's little that our military can do with the exception of instituting an overpowering baathist-like police state (think OZ with a more inclusive population to be guarded over.)

the madness of this pursuit is obvious to most of us.

the fear of instability in the region caused by an american departure has merit. but that instability will trigger only a concentrated effort on the area's surrounding countries to put their own solutions to work to prevent instability from infecting their own gov'ts.

that solution will probably mean another strong man coming to power with the regions backing-- some one the US can count on as an ally, some one like an 80s Saddam Hussein... who will 20 years later be seen as too powerful and ambitious... and step and repeat.

 

[Tez3]

It really wasn't. Honest. It was reasonably secular and stable in a jackboots-and-guns Baathist sort of way, but the laurels go to places like Turkey, Dubai and Israel.

Not Dubai I'm afraid, my daughters just back from working out there and it's as restrictive as any other Gulf State.

Wade, I'm so sorry about your students,we were lucky...this time, ours came back physically fine, mentally I'm not so sure. We have a few months before they go back, either there or Afghanistan. The Garrison as a whole lost 26 dead and 136 injured.

 

[jazkiljok]

see this.

http://www.laweekly.com/film+tv/film/surge-this/16949/

 

[SeanKerby]

I suppose I should consider myself the resident expert about the surge because I was involved in it. First and foremost, I will NOT discuss my personal feelings over the past few years. It's been a long road. Also nothing here is classified. It's all there for people to read. My unit was one of the few that were extended because of the surge. I arrived in Iraq on Sept 09 2006. I left on May 15 2007. We were scheduled to leave in March. I was in Ramadi, at the time one of the worst cities in Iraq. Over the course of the nine months we were there I witnessed a complete turn around in the city. When we got there it was terrible, the people were afraid of us. The city was a mess. It was bad. Once we completed our turnover we started working on making things better. We identified the trouble spots and the BN decided on a course of action. That was to get a deeper foothold in the city ro get the bad guys out. The local populace was taking to us a little better but it wasn't enough. We took over abandoned buildings for the better foothold. The first of these was where I was. The local tribes then decided they had had enough of the insurgancy and started helping us. They became policemen and started to patrol the city on foot. As things got better we hired more cops from the city. The citizens decided they had had enough. We had to do very little. We provided gear and some weapons, but mostly gear. Combined with the locals the was turned around from gunfire daily to not a shot being fired in six weeks. Twelve Marines and Sailors were lost during our campaign. They will be remembered forever.

 

[michaeledward]

A couple of thoughts concerning the ever more forgotten Iraq.

For a while, we were hearing, quite a bit, that the surge "was working", that violence was down.

First, one relatively unnoticed fact of the reduced violence is that Muqtada al Sadr, in mid-summer, had called for a 6-month stand down of his forces; the Mahdi Army. His call for quiet was not tied in any tangible way to the American military build up or presence. It may have been to reduce losses while additional military were in place (tactical), or it may have been to reassess the situation on the ground (strategic). We don't really know. Our politicians would certainly not hesitate to take credit for something over which they had no impact. We all need to be watching cautiously as we approach the end of the stand down time line. That the Mahdi Army could be used in a coup against the (failed?) Iraqi leadership is not unthinkable. Don't let this period of relative calm lull you into a sense of mission accomplished.

Second, I saw an article this morning, which demonstrated the continued mis-understanding of the situation by our military.

year ago, when U.S. patrols in Baghdad were sparse and sectarian killings were spiraling out of control, President Bush proposed a troop buildup in part to establish order in the capital. Over the last four months, violence in the capital has begun to abate.

But the most significant improvements have been in outlying areas, where the first of about 28,500 additional troops arrived in February, followed by gradual improvements in Baghdad. Military planners at first thought it would be the other way around.

"There was a sense we would focus very significantly on Baghdad and change would come from Baghdad out," said a senior military official in Washington, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing troop strategy. "What we are seeing is just the opposite, it is probably outside-in, toward Baghdad."

Reading these paragraphs carefully .... from this article http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-troops16dec16,0,50951.story?coll=la-home-center .... Our military commanders stacked up our troops in Baghdad, hoping to tamp down violence in the Iraqi capital. However, the peacefulness (relative) of Iraq began where the US military build up was not (or at least not as much). Of course, this is just another example of how the US Military planners got everything wrong about this invasion. But, it also leads us to question the logic of some of the autumn arguments we heard. Just because event B (the reduction in violence in Iraq) was preceeded by event A (the military Surge); it does not follow that event A was the cause of Event B.

The bobble-heads want you to believe that the Surge caused the reduced violence. But, the "senior military commander" quoted in that LA Times article tells us that this may not be the actual fact.

See my first point.