short and sweet. old man had the Iraqis on the roap's in full retreat, could have chased them all the way to baghdad, would have required the old man to tell the allies how the cow ate the cabbage, but that didn't happen. Junior comes along, pretty much loads up his staff with whomever from his old mans admin that wanted to come along, attitude seemed to be let's finish that war we didn't finish from early in juniors admin. to be fair junior got distracted by the terrorist attacks against US here. short and sweet. and i do agree with earlier poster, about big battle looming there in the future. what we do now will have no impact on that future battle, cause it is coming regardless of what we do now.
my thoughts exactly
I see. I dont remember it that way.
Sadly it seems quite possible, and the possible ramifications both here and abroad are sad indeed.
I recall, The part about the iraqis in full retreat along highway 80. OK perhaps it wasn't Sr. that could have told the allies to shove it, most liekly it was Sr. just calling it quits right there. I recall a high number of Sr's admin in jr's admin, do I need to start a list? I recall the misleading information that jr's admin fed the citizens to justify going back to war with iraq? That pretty much sums up the facts in my post, am i misrepresenting anything with those items?
you only left out a couple of things.
You left out the part where the UN mandate; which was secured by a coalition including several middle east nations, called for the removal of Iraq's military forces from Kuwait, full stop. There was never a contingency for full scale operations to remove Saddam Hussein or his government as the controlling authority over Iraq except as provided later on with the no fly zones and subsequent humanitarian mission for the Kurds. An argument could be made that our promise of support for a Kurdish rebellion against the Baathist regime was sort of a plan to remove Hussein, but even that did not include large scale military intervention by the allies. That is another story altogether, we screwed them in my opinion.
Sr. stopped the fighting at the point where the mission had been accomplished and we were in a position of dominance to dictate the terms of surrender. In fact, some think we went too far according to the terms of the UN resolution. I am not one of them. I was of the opinion that we should have taken care of the rest of Saddam's forces and removed him from power in spite of what the agreed mission was. Of course I was just a 22 year old piss ant E4 at the time, with all the wisdom that entails. The benefit of time has shown me that it would not have been as simple as it seemed.
First of all, if we had tried to go further we would have lost the support of the Arab nations in the coalition. That means no bases in Saudi to work out of. Why is that important? Why not just move our base of operations to another country? It would mean moving the half million men and women and associated equipment out of Saudi, the gulf and Kuwait for one. Considering the time it took to secure the bases we were already occupying and moving that mass of war making implements would have taken too long. That is assuming we had somewhere to take them which could support operations and was willing to let us park there while we conducted business.
As far as Jr's information on invading Iraq. People like to harp on the weapons of mass destruction angle while ignoring the fact that Saddam and the Baathist were overt and covert supporters of Al Qaeda. For me , that was enough to justify leveling the country. WMD's would have just been the icing on the cake. I am not satisfied with the way the war was fought beyond the specific military operations which defeated Iraq's armies. The subsequent inability of our leaders to timely transition to a different kind of war was and is an issue.
I dont think you misrepresented anything, just gave your opinion from your perspective. Thats the same thing I am doing.
Nope...............enough is enough.
Just like in the nam.
That being siad..............tihs place will fall and sometime in the not too distant future you will begin to hear that the military lost the war. Like the libs say about Nam.....the military lost the war.
Hog wash. OK, rant over.
Gawd but I hate HATE democrats.
Just like in the nam.
That being siad..............tihs place will fall and sometime in the not too distant future you will begin to hear that the military lost the war. Like the libs say about Nam.....the military lost the war.
Hog wash. OK, rant over.
Gawd but I hate HATE democrats.
These are the same people fighting Assad in Syria that the.gov wanted to help last year. Now they are the bad guys? What am I missing? At one time we were going to help them kick Assad out, now we are talking about bombing them in Iraq?
