Rice claiming the Iraqi army disintegrated. Face the Nation

[rodeodance]

[rodeodance]

1. admits the order came from Coalition forces to disband but .....

[spanone]

5. Coalition forces = United Snakes of America.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

2. And she was called on it! That was wonderful! eom

[leftchick]

3. and Bob does not correct her

our media is fucking worthless.

[Kagemusha]

4. It disintegrated from the battlefield, yes.

And then the US ordered it disintegrated in all other senses. Such as jobs. Such as paychecks. Such as chain of command.

[rodeodance]

7. Bob could not get an answer from her about English nat. atheum either.

[Oversea Visitor]

6. She sometimes make as much sense

as a doorbell.

[MikeNearMcChord]

8. I wonder has anyone here at DU

read the works of Robert S. Lind(he write occainsionly at CounterPunch) and Martin Van Creveld. They write articles on insurgent warfare that Lind calls "Fourth Generation Warfare". Basically it is extremely difficult for a conventional army to fight this style of war. One reason is that the insurgents has acess to better weapons that evens the odds, I will try to find it but Chris Floyd had a great article on the evolution of the IED, that has dogged the military.

[Rose Siding]

9. Disbanding the Iraqi army fed the insurgency

Trained, armed, disgraced and unemployed. Custom-made insurgents.

Of course conventional forces can't operate effectively against insurgent forces. That's WHY it was so stupid to have sent the Iraqi army home.

[Evergreen Emerald]

10. we also gave them weapons

remember the storage units of weapons that no one guarded, and were taken by the insurgency?

[NewJeffCT]

18. and don't forget

the unguarded high explosives at places like Al Qaqaa (sp?)

[Arkansas Granny]

13. There is no doubt about that. The U.S., in essence, gave the

insurgency it's members. Our policies insured that they would become hostile to the U.S. How many Iraqis do you suppose joined the insurgency after seeing the pictures of Abu Ghraib, after they witnessed the killing of civilians and after the assault on Fallujah?

[SOS]

17. Definately stupid and a missed opportunity

Bremer comes in and says "you're all fired"!
The average Iraqi soldier was getting $30 a month in pay.
If Bremer had kept the army and given them a 400% pay increase (to $120 a month) the insurgency would not have taken hold.
The average conscripted guy would have been happy rather than violently enraged at losing his job and his income.
500,000 people @ $120 = $60 million a month, or about 1% of current US expenditure in Iraq.

[MikeNearMcChord]

12. Correction, It is William S. Lind

My bad.:spank:

[Rose Siding]

14. Is your point that disbanding the army was irrelevant to the insurgency?

[Kagemusha]

15. I'm familiar with the ideas...

I feel that it's a bit of a flashy concept that breaks down on some of the details. For instance, the insurgents by no means have access to BETTER weapons. They have access to lowest common denominator weapons from the old Iraqi army inventory, the most basic of which is a standard 155mm Warsaw Pact-built artillery shell, last featured in a Wash. Post article about how the Iraqi Army isn't trusted by Americans. However, it would be difficult to call this *insurgent* training; the process of turning such a shell into an IED was in the old Iraqi army training manual (or one of them, I have no idea how many they had, the US Army has tons and tons). So the weapons are not *better*. They are, in fact, made as cheaply as absolutely possible while having some reasonable chance of effectiveness. The problem is that stopping the insurgents from deploying IED's is a nigh impossible job. So, even if the success rate is low, they essentially have a free hand to try again and again until they get lucky. THAT is what's hard for the US military. You can't just blow up a tank and the engagement's over.

[katinmn]

11. It was disbanded by the US so it could reorganize and fight on

300,000 told to walk to the nearest stockpile of weapons and load up!

[Jack Rabbit]

16. Please provide a context

Is she speaking in present tense or of events in the Spring of 2003?