Why we fight?

[Guest endymion]

There is an inherent contradiction in the Bush Administration's Iraq policy. Ever since General Ricardo Sanchez was replaced by General George Casey, the US strategy has been to turn over Iraq to the Iraqis. Our fundamental strategy has been to get the hell out, and our strategy in Iraq has not included going on the offensive against Al Qaeda. We focus on security, and training Iraqis to provide security, but we do not have an offensive component to our strategy. Our recent "surge" strategy also focuses on stability and defensive security and contains no offensive component to defeat Al Qaeda.

Why, then, is George W Bush giving speeches telling us that the reason why we're still in Iraq is to fight Al Qaeda? That's an obvious contradiction, since the "New Way Forward" strategy from January 2007 does not involve fighting Al Qaeda, and neither did the "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" that it replaced, from 2005. On the contrary, our overall strategy since 2005 has been to do fewer offensive operations, to turn those operations over to Iraqis, and to get the hell out, at the expense of offensive operations against Al Qaeda.

Why does our strategy not serve our goals, if our goals are to stay in Iraq to defeat Al Qaeda? There are only two possible conclusions: one is that the Bush Administration is lying to us (again) about our goals in Iraq, and the other is that they are so incompetent that they don't see that the strategy that we have in place does not advance the goals that they are citing in public speeches to justify the strategy. Lying or incompetent? You decide.

It's nothing new for the Bush Administration to rationalize justification for military policy AFTER deciding on the military policy. When I saw the recent PBS analysis piece FRONTLINE: End Game, it made me realize that there's a new incarnation of this going on now.

Why do we fight?

[Guest endymion]

The "well-defined mission" of US troops under our new "surge" strategy in Iraq according to President Bush is "to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs."

Now, six months later, the reason that Bush is citing for the surge has shifted. Now it's, "Al Qaeda in Iraq is a group founded by foreign terrorists, led largely by foreign terrorists and loyal to a foreign terrorist leader: Osama bin Laden."

Why, then, are the forces involved in the "surge" not aimed at fighting Al Qaeda? They are aimed at securing Baghdad from its sectarian conflict, of which Al Qaeda is only a small percentage, and "nation-building" in general. Not fighting Al Qaeda. Are we so incompetent as to have a strategy that does not pursue our own stated strategic goals, or is Bush just lying to us and assuming that we won't notice? Or that it won't matter if we notice?

[Guest RzO]

The Bush administration has been spinning their wheels for quite a while now. At this point, it doesn't matter what they say cause he knows the public doesn't support the war and knows damn well we are not going to be able to quell a polity that has deep religous differences. He has to go on tv to make it look like they are doing something right, when in truth he knows we are going to be in the same place we are now, when he finally gets out of office.

Kinda like going all in on a poker hand when you know you don't have enough chips left to compete but you cant turn back once its in. It is quite deplorable that i can analagously relate real ife to poker , but unfortunately this is what they have gotten into, or at least the way i see it.

At this point he is gung ho, showing his true stubborn ways. There really isn't much we can do, i mean we took back capitol hill and we know he is going to veto every bill we try to throw up with any sort of benchmarks. It really is going to come down to 08. We know that even if we did clear a bill to start the withdrawal, we couldn't bring home more than 1-2 brigades a month, with that being said, if it started today we wouldn't be out for almost 2 years. The thing is they don't even have this is place so we are going to be in this place until 09-10, 6-7 years, and for what. I mean we can talk cyclic theory and relate it to Vietnam, but that doesn't make anything better. I guess perhaps all said and done we will have a presence in the middle east and profit from the oil in years to come, that if any is the only positive i see.

I will say this, it is a fact that many of the iraqi civilians do want us there and are scared that if we leave it will go back to a sort of tyrannical system. Who will win, shiites, sunnis? It doesn't matter, there will be civil unrest and innocent regular iraqi's are gonna still get killed just because of there side of the religion they are on. This is why this whole issue is extremely complex and is multi-faceted.

Good topic Tech, this is the type of stuff that I like to discuss round here, it is meaningful and real. btw what years were you @ Florida? Maybe we had some poli sci classes together in anderson hall, i basically lived there and flynt.

[Guest coach]

You guys are kind of missing the point. The real problem is, Bush has gotten himself into a terrible spot. I think he really went into Iraq thinking we could win it clean and it would put him in the history books with a double-plus gold start.

However, at this point, even he has to realize that this situation is not "winnable" by any reasonable standard by the 2008 elections. He also realizes that it has become very unpopular amongst the American public.

So, he really has 2 choices, neither of them good for him.

1) If he pulls out, he will go down in history as a "losing" President. He lost the war in Iraq.

2) If he stays in, he is nearly guaranteeing a Presidential loss for the Republicans in 2008.

If he pulls out, he would be sacrificing his place in history for the greater Republican good. Will he do this?

If stays in, he would be forcing then next administration, almost certainly Democratic, to make the tough decision of how to deal with it. Is he willing to cede Presidential control to the opposing party for at least 4 years in the hopes it will make them look bad? What if the Democratic Pres gets a stupid lucky break in 2010 and the war ends successfully? Can he afford to take that chance?

At this point, the situation on the ground is utterly irrelevant. That's his decision, go down in history as a loser or cede the 2008 election to the Democrats.

I'll also point out that he has set up a very nice little potential dictatorship. Note that the "war" he started, the war on terrorism, technically could have no end point. Note that, historically, all dictators have used similar tactics to bring themselves into power. By setting up very vague qualities of what constitutes this "war", he can easily extend it indefinitely.

[Guest Mattivi]

coach its pretty obvious this assbag put little thought into the war origianlly let alone how he is going to setup his party for the next elections...

[Guest coach]

LOL, no response from the Right.

Anyway, my question is this. Under the current circumstances, where the Congress has basically given the President the right to wage never-ending war, since a "War On Terror" does not have any specific enemy that we could ever say is defeated, assuming that the situation worsened, say we got into a scrap with Iraq due to completely bungled foriegn policy, could President Bush call Martial Law at some point in late 2008 and abrogate the 2008 election, thereby keeping himself in office indefinitely?

[Guest endymion]

You guys seem to think that it's about Bush and his personal ego and his inability to save face. I'd like to believe that it's that simple but I think that what's really going on is worse. Coach, you mentioned a "potential dictatorship", but there's already a dictatorship. Or an oligarchy. The military dictator in charge is not Bush the man, or Cheney, or their party, it's both parties and the entire system. It's the military-industrial complex that President (and General) Eisenhower warned us about. Our country has become dependent on a permanent war economy, and we need to have a war on something, somewhere, at all times.

When George W Bush presses on in Iraq with no clear goal, it becomes more and more obvious that the true goal is simply to be at war. All of our strategies for "success" in Iraq have failed when measured against the administration's stated goals. Things like WMDs, spreading democracy, securing Baghdad. But our strategy in Iraq has been a spectacular success if the true goal is simply to be at war, and to maintain an expensive military presence in the region that benefits our permanent war economy through military spending. Military objectives are secondary.

The trailer for Why We Fight (2 minutes):

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Part 1 of Why We Fight (27 minutes):

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[ryan2772]

where the frick are our cooljunkie t-shirts?

[Guest slamminshaun]

LOL, no response from the Right.

What would be the point? Same thread, different day.

[Guest endymion]

What would be the point? Same thread' date=' different day.

[/quote']

Yes, today we get the same flailing rationalizations for policy that's already been decided as we did back in 2003.

Then it was "imminent threat" of a "mushroom cloud" when there were no WMDs, and now it's 'we must fight Al Qaeda' when our actual strategy on the ground is nation-building and not offensive operations against Al Qaeda. Then, as now, the real goal is simply to be at war. Same shit, different day, except that now we're a half a trillion dollars poorer and we're no safer. We failed to defeat Al Qaeda and we aren't even trying right now because we're busy mediating a civil war. But that's okay because the goal is not to defeat Al Qaeda, the goal is to be at war.

PS: RzO, I spent most of my time in the "CSE" building. I got to UF in 1991 just as Tim Berners-Lee was launching the world's first web server and browser at CERN. I built one of the first web applications that year and I've been pretty preoccupied with the whole web thing ever since. Had a lot of math classes in Flint though. And the first public optical scanners on campus were at Anderson so I went there a lot too.

[Guest endymion]

I rarely edit these messages after I post them but I realized while I was reading the newspaper by the pool this morning that while I was just waking up I had posted "billion", not "trillion" in the above post. My fingers can't even deal with the ridiculous notion that we spent half a trillion dollars without any particular goal other than to spend the money.

Here's my evidence from today's news that the goal isn't military objectives, it's just to be at war. From Fox News:

"In a time of war, one spending bill ought to take precedence over all the rest," Bush said in a speech before a meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council.

"Members of Congress ought to finish the spending bill for the Department of Defense before they go on recess so I can sign it into law," the president said.

Note how the president is far more concerned with the defense spending bill than he is concerned with the fact that his current strategy in Iraq doesn't even pursue the goals that he's telling us about every day in his speeches.