TOPDOG08.COM

« General admits to secret air war | Main | Some interesting reactions »

July 06, 2005

Iraqanistan?

If you have not read "Against All Enemies" by Richard Clarke you are really missing out on the definitive book about the War on Terror. I had paged through it before but missed the key chapters on his time with Bush, so I had not bothered to buy a copy. All that detail about a Millienium bomb plot and so forth. Trust me, I'm reading it now, and it explains how Iraq distracted us from al Qaeda to a T, and in the words of the Bush administration counterterrorism leader, too.

Anyway, this post by Stirling Newberry reminded me of that today:

The harsh conclusion is that the very documents being read in the Pentagon in the days after 9/11 provided clear warnings not to go into a nation without intelligence, not to go in with a "limited contingent," not to set large and sweeping goals of political transformation, and not to rely on an increasingly fragile military instrument to effect change. The Downing Street Memos show how, systematically, these points were ignored by key US envoys to Great Britain, and the final invasion of Iraq ended up looking like the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR. That is, politically compelled for ideological reasons, but constrained by economic and military shortages.

With the crash of a Chinook troop transport helicopter, lost, in all probability, to hostile fire, the parallels between the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq should be held to closer parallel. Consider that, from the point of invasion to the 10 May letter, the Soviets had suffered, on average, 5 killed per day of involvement, and 13 wounded. The United States has suffered only 2.3 killed, but 16 wounded. In other words, the intensity of American combat in Iraq differs from the Soviet presence in Afghanistan only in that better American evacuation and medical technology, plus better armor, saves 3 people every day who otherwise would have died.

In short, the United States is fighting its own version of the war that, according to the the foreign policy intellectual establishment, either brought down or hastened the fall of the USSR. We have engaged in the same mistakes: the Downing Street Memos of March 2002 show a determination to invade but an admission that there is poor intelligence on troops, deployment of Weapons of Mass Destruction and the state of Saddam's air force. There is no mention made of non-conventional or guerrilla warfare, just as the planning documents of the Soviet invasion do not once mention the possibility of a resistence developing. There is a reliance on an outside trained elite that, it is admitted, has no credibility on the ground.

It was a Soviet politician who reminded his fellow politburo members that with each person's death and closing of the eyes, a unique world comes to an end. It might also be added that when a nation closes its eyes to the lessons of the past, it too sets itself on a course toward its own death, a journey to that country "from which no traveler returns."

Posted by Mike at July 6, 2005 06:12 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.topdog08.com/cgi-bin/mt-trackback.cgi/694

Comments

Post a comment