I found this piece and thought it was very interesting reading.
Here is a small sample.
* The biggest surprise for him was that they've found no weapons of mass
destruction (WMD), the "reason we went to war." He says multiple
Middle Eastern leaders, including Jordan's King Abdullah and Egypt's
Hosni Mubarak, told Franks that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
In January 2003, Mubarak said point blank to Franks, "Saddam has
WMD-biologicals, actually-and he will use them on your troops."
Story @ prnewswire.com
Posted by Muddy at August 1, 2004 01:19 AM | TrackBackGood to see you back to reason.
How the 150 000 auxialliary troops never turned in ... is related to how this war was backed on wrong reasons and pushed too hard too fast with no real planning. No post invasion plan. And no plan B.
The "marketing" of this war was terrible. And this is clearly the fault of Bush&hawks ...
You may have me mistaken for a Bush fanboi, don't be mistaken. I simply respect the office of the president and try to support the president. (although it's very difficult sometimes)
Bush has done many things that I think were wrong. Going to war on bad intel is not one of them, the end result a free Iraq is good no matter what the reason we went was. However having our boys in Fallujah locked and cocked and ready to rock and then tell them no we're going to do joint patrols with the unready Iraqi military, is a dumb move.
We had hungry Marines, all wound up and ready to rip the terrorists holed up in Fallujah and we told them no, what Bush didn't say but came through loud and clear was "It's election season and a high body count would look bad."
Not following through on our mission is going to cost us more in the long run, we need to bust in now, kill all the terrorists and turn over a manageable Iraq and send the troops to Afghanistan to clean that up.
Posted by: muddy at August 2, 2004 10:38 AMGoing to war on false reasons and bullying your allies can cost you 150 000 troops... Number of the other troops in Gulf war number 1 ... ANd a lot of political support ...
It's hard to be believed on the democratic case when you lied on others and when you have a bad track on democracy at home.
Apart from that ... The fallujah case was bad, even worse was trying to do that at the same time as fighting Saadr ...
You have to remember that many irakis seemed to oppose the fallujah attack ... (yet many also felt betrayed when the old Baasists and the "terrorists" were authorized to rule fallujah).
The military operations are important. And you can win battles with little means with genious leadership... But I think most of the time this is not what counts.
Right from the start the war in Irak and AFganhistan was doomed to encounter serious opposition, reason being nation building is hard, and democracy is hard to build, even harder when it is viewed has imposed by foreigners.
Imagine you are american. your president has turned into a dictator. Some 30 years later, the united african army comes to liberate your country. In the process it needs to repress strong oppositions in Dallas, led by religiours fundamentalists ... Though you favor democracy, when you see the images of people you know, are related to, killed by foreigners ... Who do you side with ?
Irakis are freer now. But free irak is not yet build. I read somewhere that the new president of Irak entered in a police station in Irak, there were 6 suspected terrorists, he shot them with his own gun.
I have not checked the truth of the source, but it is clear that events like this could happen, democracy is a too recent thing ... And if the new transitory government and the future elected government start using repression in the same way
as the old was ... Then there will be no gain.
US Marines are without a doubt the most highly trained urban combat troops int he world. Other countries come to us to train their troops in MOUT. When I heard that Bush was pulling that stunt in Fallujah I was pissed The body count would have been considerable, but not disasterous. Especially when you consider the potential end result.
On the other hand DF, we have a saying in the military: You can have all the plans in the world, but when your boots hit the ground it's all going to go to shit.
Warfare is a moment by moment process. You make plans, but plans get destroyed rather quickly by circumstances, so you have to plan on the fly. That being said, the Bush administration has made some serious tactical and strategic errors in post-war Iraq as far as combat operations go. On the other hand, I don't think Kerry is going to fix it. In fact he said today, his plan to fix IRaq is to pull the majority of our troops out and cut off funding! Yeah, that's going to help. What needs to be done is to leave the warfighting to the warriors and leave politics to the politicians.
Posted by: skywalker at August 2, 2004 06:56 PMhttp://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=354&row=0
you can read this on Kerry. Consider it as my opinion too. And it's the same for the leaders of the "socialist" party in France. Far too moderate, complacent, hype and all.
What is needed on the economic front is tough action. Not an economic Munich, preparing for the future depression and collapse.
Egyptians recently said that they never told Thommy Franks that Iraq had WMD
Posted by: DF at August 9, 2004 07:24 AMMore on WMDs
article in the rolling stone
THE WMD Fiasco
Bush finally gives up
By TIM DICKINSON
In December, after nearly two years of intense but futile searching, the Bush administration quietly called off its hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The Iraq Survey Group inspected 1,200 suspect sites, examined 40 million pages of documents and debriefed more than 4,000 Iraqis. But its final report reached the same conclusion that David Kay made public when he resigned as director of the search a year ago: Iraq had no WMDs -- none. No nukes. No anthrax. No nerve gas. Whatever stockpiles Saddam once possessed, the report conceded, were apparently destroyed by 1992.
The cost of reaching that conclusion? Classified -- but reports place the price tag as high as $1 billion. The work also had a steep price in human life: As many as a dozen men died in the hunt for weapons that didn't exist. "To keep 1,200 people in Iraq looking for WMDs that everyone knew weren't there was both dangerous and foolish," Kay told ROLLING STONE.
Sgt. Sherwood Baker was one of the last men to die for this mistake. The thirty-year-old from Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, was killed searching for WMDs last April. His death came a year after the United Nations found no evidence of any stockpiles in Iraq -- and three years after Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that Saddam had not "developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction."
see the rest here
yeah, I heard they called off the search which I think is complete BS. NO one on the face of this earth will *ever* be able to convince me that Saddam didn't at very least have every intention of starting the program back up again. He's an evil monster and evil can only be capable of doing one thing - Evil!
Posted by: mrs. muddy at February 8, 2005 08:21 AMThe problem is that even though we found evidence of them having been there, including arty rounds that still had chemical weapons in them, they were probably moved while we waited around for the UN to give us permission to do what we could do anytime we liked.
Posted by: skywalker at February 8, 2005 01:03 PMThe problem is that even though we found evidence of them having been there, including arty rounds that still had chemical weapons in them, they were probably moved while we waited around for the UN to give us permission to do what we could do anytime we liked.
Posted by: skywalker at February 8, 2005 01:08 PM