Is David Petraeus Our Generation's William Westmoreland?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

I don't think neither were evil people but their views are a function of their profession...
They desperately want to win but military victories and political solutions are not synonymous.
Baron Von Clausewitz said "war is the continuation of politics by other means." True military victories lead to political solutions... Pacifying one area while others erupt isn't a political solution...

The only political solutions are for the warring factions to lay down their arms and form a true coalition government (which only works in political science textbooks) or for one side to emerge victorious and impose their will on the other side... The latter is what happens in most civil wars, including our own, even accounting for the fact that many in the south never truly accepted their defeat...

Eventually the Sunnis or the Shias will emerge victorious and my money is on the Shias because there are a lot more of them...

[Raven]

1. You read my mind. Absolutely! He's our "Westy". n/t

[katmondoo]

2. YES For days I have been reminded of Westmoreland

I think I am in a time warp going back to the 60's and 70's

[Individualist]

6. That's been my experience as well

So many similarities!

[DemocratSinceBirth]

13. I Was A Kid But The Arguments Are The Same...

Peace with honor...

If we leave now those that died , died in vain...

We will stand down when the Iraqis stand up... That's the policy of "VietNamization" revisited...The Americans would stand down as the South VietNamese army stood up....That didn't work very well...


If we leave now the region will descend into chaos...I am sympathetic to that argument...I'm glad I'm not the president because I don't know what I would do...There are no good options... That's why we should have never get involved in the first place...


To paraphrase Tolstoy, " All victorious wars are the same, all losing wars are different in their own way."

What a mess...This is a mess so big only a glorious idiot could make it...

[Jacobin]

3. Yes indeed. Complete with 'body counts'

[goodhue]

4. Except Beytraus is an evil puppet!

www.betrayusreport.com

[DemocratSinceBirth]

8. I Think He Believes In His Mission Though His Mission Is Fundamentally Flawed...

I think he's "kicking the can" down the road...

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

5. I was thinking "Baghdad Bob"

But Westmoreland fits too.

[Selatius]

7. Vietnam's civil war didn't end until the North won. The US delayed that for 10 years.

In this civil war, one side will emerge as the victor if no side wishes to negotiate with the other.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

11. I'm Not A Military Genius Though I Expect That To Be The Final Outcome

The situation in Iraq reminds me of the situation in the former Yugoslavia... In both cases you had a strong man, Saddam and Tito, who were able to stifle ethnic strife through blunt force... Except Tito lacked Saddam's sadism and truly led in the name of all not just the ethnic group he belonged to...

[Selatius]

16. Yugoslavia had its economy destroyed by the IMF after Tito died.

The odd thing about the Yugoslav economy was that unlike other Eastern Bloc nations, the government that ran the factories and businesses practiced co-management with the workers; the workers had a say in output levels and products offered. Living standards were roughly 2/3rds that of Italy, remarkable for a command economy; the northwest corner Slovenia had living standards roughly equal to that of Austria.

When Tito died, the power vacuum was filled by corrupt party bureaucrats who took kickbacks from the IMF. In return, they started privatizing state-run firms and passed bankruptcy laws that forced firms to sell out to private businesses/banks if they were not able to reach an arbitrary level of profit. Millions became unemployed, as the new owners sought to cut labor costs by firing workers and reorganizing the firm, sometimes simply liquidating the entire firm altogether, and people got pissed. Pretty soon, ethnic nationalists like Slobodan started scapegoating other ethnic groups such as the Bosnians and the Croats and Albanians as the source of worker woes.

This was all planned. The IMF had to ensure that no alternative economic model could survive after the collapse of the Soviet-style command economy model; it would become a threat to the industrialists/bankers. As a result, tens of thousands died in the ethnic bloodshed. As long as the economy was still functioning and people had jobs, nobody had a reason to be angry or a reason to want to kill for resources, but with the economy shredded by IMF restructuring, the safety net was simply gone.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

19. As You Know Tito Was Part Of The Non-Aligned Movement

And Yugoslavians enjoyed much more freedom than other Eastern European nations...

Back to Iraq...I read a good book about Arab culture during the first Gulf war ... It had the word "circle" in the title but I forgot the whole title...The author's thesis was that among Arabs their first loyalty is to their clan and not to their nation state... That's much different than the American model... I think of myself as an "American" before I think of myself as a Christian, a southerner, or even a Democrat...

[Selatius]

20. This is why Iraq as a construct flies against the historical norms in this region

Clan-level government seems more functional than provincial or federal level government in Iraq. Is this a bad thing? I'm not passing judgment on whether it's inherently less or more democratic, just that this is how they have socially organized themselves vs. how we organize ourselves. The point is Iraq was essentially "created" when the departing British Empire drew several lines on a map and called it "Iraq." Prior to that, there was no such history of a nation called Iraq, and the Ottoman Empire before them administered the region as three separate entities, knowing the historic issues dealing with the Shi'ites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds, but the British ignored that. As if to add insult to injury, the British Empire then cut off access to the Persian Gulf by declaring the ancient port city of Kuwait to be its own independent state, ruled by a pro-US/UK regime.

[rug]

9. More a Henri-Philippe Petain.

[Javaman]

10. Naa, ours is like westmoreland made of mercury...

someone hit it with a hammer and we are stuck with a whole bunch of them now.

[OHdem10]

12. Let us be fair. General Petreus and Amb. Crocker

cannot deal with policy. They simply lay out the situation.

The WHite House, Congress and Civilians DOD and State.
These are the people who decide . How long can we afford
the loss of Lives, Disabled Veterans, Loss of Money on this
Quagmire.

We should be calling for the real Deciders--all of them to
come out and stop hiding behind Petreus and Crocker. This
is above their pay grade.

[EFerrari]

15. They can lay out lies like when David told us those weather stations

were mobile weapons labs.

He's a liar.

[EFerrari]

14. Yes,exaclty so. He has so disgraced his uniform. n/t

[AX10]

17. He does remind me of him.

[Rydz777]

18. Our record as the world's policeman since World War II =

(1) Korean War. The border between North and South Korea is just about where it began.
(2) Vietnam War. Debacle.
(3) Iraq War. Debacle.

The best way - indeed the only way - to support our troops is to bring them home alive and with their limbs attached. Appropriate only enough funds to get them out of there.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

21. I'd Rate Korea Is A Success...

South Korea is a liberal democracy now with the rule of law,something that Iraq will never be...