Redstate

the newest game show, "Beat Socrates to the Punch!"

Contestants are required to read my inscrutable mind, and then take my hazy, ill-formed thoughts and transform them into an elegant and insightful post on RedState.

Such silliness aside, the thought that keeps ringing in my head is: Why does Rummy need to go? -- we're winning.

This is no game, Socrates.  Karl Rove reads your mind and transmits the contents to me through secret rays.

canning Rumsfeld would be pointless.  He did screw the pooch on the first year of operations though.

It took the military more than a year from the fall of Saddam to even begin to regear itself for a nationbuilding and counterinsurgency strategy.  There's all kinds of reports of Rumsfeld insisting behind closed doors inside the pentagon that there was no insurgency.

You can't fight an enemy that you don't believe exists.  Of course at this point, the army has adapted fairly well just as the insurgency has splintered and just in time for most of them to leave.

I'd put the first year's debacles partially on the generals (specifically the guy who took over from Franks for the first year, forget his name now), a little more on rumsfeld (what kind of "visionary" couldn't see an insurgency as likely), and a small amount on the president (not directly, but in a "the buck stops here" sense).  

are nevertheless continuously intercepted by the MSM.

Sadly, they have their trusty Secret Ray Decoder Rings on upside down.

But of course, you knew that I knew it, and knew that I would know that you know what I know, and know that I would ...

{Sound of head exploding}

"As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know..."

for this:

There's all kinds of reports of Rumsfeld insisting behind closed doors inside the pentagon that there was no insurgency.

This is news to me, and I am anxious to see the data.

By the way, I still don't think it's an "insurgancy."

http://elephantsinacademia.blogspot.com/2005/07/get-that-man-dictionary.htm
l

Rumsfeld agreed with me.

http://elephantsinacademia.blogspot.com/2005_11_01_elephantsinacademia_arch
ive.html

Are you saying that there was no clue that there would be some sort of internal resistance?  Or that there was a "failure" to anticipate exactly what form it would take?

Here's one, the whole article's amazing but you can skip to the part where he says "The most stubborn resistance to the idea of an insurgency came from Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, who was determined to bring about a "revolution in military affairs" at the Pentagon--the transformation of war fighting into a combination of information technology and precision firepower that would eliminate the need for large numbers of ground troops ...."  

Quoted from various people on background, so sure some may have axes to grind and any one source could be disputed.  However, there were quite a few very public pronouncements by the administration about dead-enders and all that.

I was asking booth to provide citations to show proof of his implication that Rumsfeld was in denial, that he didn't anticipate an insurgency (or resistance or whatever), or that he was too dumb or incompetent to be able to do so.

An insurgency, sectarian warfare or a 3-ring circus, we didn't put together the proper nation-building strategy for success until we had been there for more than a year.

This strategy should have been envisioned and planned for within months of invading if not months before.

Just read your links, apparently it's not an insurgency, it's terrorism.  Which is a name for a tactic, not for an army or a movement.  However, we could agree that it's motivated by political reasons and not just random crime at many levels, so that would make it an organized group of terrorists fighting within a country for specific goals.... like I said, call it whatever you want.  

The point is that it took quite a while for the Army to adopt proper counter-insurgency and nationbuilding tactics in Iraq.  1-1.5 years, which beats the hell out of the 6-7 years it took them in vietnam, but surely is not ideal.

indicated an implication of Rumsfeld incompetence in "not seeing" the insurgency for what the article implies everyone around Rumsfeld believed to be patently obvious.  However, a little further into your citation is this:

Rumsfeld's denial of the existence of the insurgency turned on technicalities: insurgencies were fought against sovereign governments, he argued, and in 2003 Iraq did not yet have one.

Perhaps I am being a little technical here, but even though this is a New Yorker article, this passage clearly shows he DISAGREED that it was an insurgency by how he chose to define the term...this is a far cry from him not being smart enough to see it.

just sayin'

Al Qaeda?

That is the major question.

The Iraqi insurgency is composed of at least a dozen major guerilla organizations and perhaps as many as 40 distinct groups. Terrorist groups are Iraqi insurgents who actively target civilian populations, in an attempt to communicate their political messages through violent means. These groups, both insurgents and terrorists, are subdivided into countless smaller cells. Due to its clandestine nature, the exact composition of the Iraqi insurgency is difficult to determine.

The line of thought represented by this post seems to indicate that Zarqawi is calling the shots for the insurgency, which is not the case at all.

After all, we wouldn't be negotiating with the likes of Zarqawi:

The US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has said US officials have held talks with some groups linked to the Sunni-led Iraqi insurgency.

Mr Khalilzad told the BBC that he believed the talks had had an impact, as the number of attacks on US troops by Iraqi militants had fallen.

But he ruled out negotiating with those he called Saddamists or terrorists.

He also urged Iraq's politicians to break the deadlock over who should lead the new government of national unity.

I think you can do better than this cheap grandstanding. The biggest myth being offered by the right is that if U.S. forces were withdrawn from Iraq that Al Zarqawi would be in charge. Not only is Al Zarqawi not even widely supported in the Sunni community, he has zero support inside the Shia.

The second myth is that if the U.S. withdrew its forces, that any Sunni whatsoever could manage to control Iraq. The next leader of Iraq will be a Shia, of that we can count on. The Sunni insurgency has no where near the kind of capability necessary to take over the country. Fragmentation is a possibility. A lot of dead Sunnis is a possibility, if the Shia decided to employ an 'Argentian/Guatamalan' style solution to their Sunni problems.

What is not a possibility is an Al Qaeda-run state emerging in Iraq. That simply can't happen, since the folks who want that are a minority within a minority.

This post makes it seem as if Al Zarqawi is our number one problem in Iraq. That is simply not true. He is a problem in that his car bombs kill a lot of Iraqis and make it more difficult to secure the population from harm. But his operation is chump change. The Sunnis, themselves, could get rid of him and his whole group. That is - if they decided to get on board with the U.S.

The Al Zarqawi organization could be completely destroyed, and yet the U.S. still not be out of the woods in Iraq. Focusing on this angle of the problem, in my opinion, doesn't really do the situation justice and amounts to nothing more than a ploy rather than a serious contribution to the debate over Iraq policy.

and we could go round and round forever on whatever was in Rumsfeld's head.

But the proof's in the pudding, the army was way too slow to react to the fact that a yet-to-be-defined group of people with lots of guns and bombs were blowing up lots of stuff and particularly aiming for US troops.  Actually, I'm just gonna say insurgency, it's shorter.  :)

So yeah, regardless of technicalities, the army wasn't nearly as ready as it should've been IMO for that insurgency and some share of that blame lies with Rumsfeld.  Some also with the generals, that particular new yorker article (let's judge it on it's merits, I think it's very good and certainly stays focussed on the conduct of the war instead of it's advisability) is harder on Abizaid than it is on Rumsfeld.  

It's patented by Haliburton ;)

I appreciate your sentiment--that you think I can do better than this "cheap" post--but I fear your optomistic confidence is misplaced.  I'm sticking by it.

I agree that at this point, Zarqawi is no longer our number-one problem in Iraq.  That's because he has lost, as is the subject of this post.  But make no mistake, an al Qaeda dominated government in Iraq was the goal of the plan for the al Qaeda ops who went in.  They have done a terrible job, and, as you say, the insurgancy is splitting between its internal al Qaeda minority and the home-grown Sunnis.  It is not entirely clear from your comment what you think should have been done (ignore Zarqawi two years ago when he was in a position to take over Iraq?), but I, for one, will continue to believe that the defeat of Zarqawi is a very good thing and his defeat is an enormous step forward in the Global War on Terror.

It seams to be a leap to give the results, that it took a long time to get a handle on the Iraqi "insurgency", as proof that Rumsfeld didn't recognize it.  Could it not be that these things are just hard?

From the link, and from everything else I've seen and read, it appears that Rumsfeld was arguing that it wasn't an "insurgency" but a series of externally sponsored terrorist attacks.  That's what he was saying publicly, as I recall.  In the end he seems to have accepted the redefinition of "insurgency", but every now and then you see him smile and throw in that it's not an "insurgency".

That's quite different than saying he "There's all kinds of reports of Rumsfeld insisting behind closed doors inside the pentagon that there was no insurgency."  

by DynCorp.  And I believe Ken Lay had something to do with it also...

That's one of my very favorite quotes from that eminently quotable man, that crusty old codger, our very own, much beloved SecDef.  Good one, AE!

for all Red Staters....free tin foil hats....while they last....don't let Karl down!

about what happend back in January.

From a diary I posted:

In an Internet message posted Jan. 15, Abu Maysara al-Iraqi, Zarqawi' s spokesmen, announced the establishment of the Mujahideen Shura Council in Iraq, an alliance of six Salafi jihadi groups created to lead the ''fight to face the infidels and their followers of the converters," unify the Mujahideen as per Sharia [Islamic law], and ''clear the mist off people's eyes."...

...It was thought that Zarqawi would head the new council however, the local jihadi became confused, when on Jan. 20, the council named its new leader, Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi.

al-Baghdadi's goal is to get elected and get as many of the new Mujahideen Shura council elected as possible.

Supposedly al-Zawahri has bigger and better plans for al-Zarqawi, like training other groups in IED construction and placement. He is considered the worlds expert on that subject. Imagine that, a high school drop-out, the world expert on a subject.

If you're right, and I suspect you are AE, the statement issued in January about this shake up in the Iraqi al-Qaeda structure could have just been a "face saving" gesture. Perhaps he has been sacked, but some how I doubt it.

who are losing.

They simply picked the wrong side, and can't figure it out.

OPINION: BEHIND THE CASUALTIES

By MACKUBIN T. OWENS

New York Post

August 8, 2005

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/50988.htm

August 8, 2005 --  THE recent spike in U.S. casualties in Iraq, although tragic, needs to be placed in strategic context. As usual, the press has not done so, focusing on the loss of life without any apparent effort to understand what the fighting that led to these casualties means. But the answer is there for anyone who wishes to probe beneath the surface. In fact, the intense fighting indicates that Coalition forces have stepped up their campaign in Al Anbar province to destroy the insurgency by depriving it of its base in the Sunni Triangle and its "rat lines" -- the infiltration routes that run from the Syrian border into the heart of Iraq.

[...]

[Brig. Gen. Carter Ham] also pointed out that the additional forces that made it possible to conduct simultaneous operations of this magnitude were Iraqi security forces. Ham explained that Iraqi forces were not directly involved in the Hadithah operation -- but were in Rawah, the next town to the northwest. This is good news. It indicates that Iraqis are making progress in developing a competent army. Of course, we mourn the loss of these Marines, as we do the loss of all service members fighting in this war. But the recent uptick in casualties indicates not so much that the enemy is becoming more aggressive, but that we are. Casualties always increase when one side goes on the offensive. The fact that we are applying force simultaneously means that the enemy has no place to run and must stand and fight. As in Fallujah, this means more Coalition casualties, but it also means that the insurgents are being killed and captured away from Baghdad. This buys more time for the Iraqis to draft their constitution.

(Mackubin Thomas Owens is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College.)

Are we gonna have a contest to see who can fool the fools the fastest? (say that three times fast!)

Good post!

But what do you think would happen after Zarqawi is eliminated, either by being killed or apprehended?  Would it have any impact on the state of affairs in Iraq?

Strategically, it would have very little impact at this point because as I said in the post, he's lost.  

But on another front, it could be enormously important--the public opinion front at home.  The sort of victory we've achieved over Zarqawi isn't a conventional one--he won't be "brought to terms" because he has no terms.  So his being beaten in Iraq is what we've been seeing--a sort of fading away of al Qaeda (where they're going is another and pressing issue) and the emergence of a different sort of enemy--but unlike al Qaeda, the Sunni actually have something to protect and to gain so dealing with them is at least possible.  But to get back to the point, the American public has little time to concern itself with such nuances, and the capture of elimination of Zarqawi would be a concrete event to which everyone could point.  So again, while tactically insignificant, it would have enormous PR value for the war effort.

I was trying to reply to the original comment, Haystack, not to go after you.

Did you think I had gone all subversive on you?

and I think we'll see his fingerprint on things to come in Gaza. al-Qaeda has an ever increasing presence there and will for some time to come, unless the Israelis bulldoze Gaza into the sea.

today I have heard some of the seemingly least likely people turn on the SECDEF!

As I said yesterday on another post:

The main qualification to be SECDEF is he must be an SOB! But, more importantly, he must be the President's SOB! The military leaders might not always agree with the president or the SECDEF but they have to respect and obey the wishes of the President.

The President needs someone in that post that commands respect, not just for himself, but also for the President.  The SECDEF needs to be able to kick butt if necessary, and to take the heat for doing it, so the President doesn't have to! Rummy fits the bill just fine, thank you!

I'm starting to wonder about that--and if maybe the turners might make it a 360 trip.

has everyone forgotten about 120,000 original occupants of Abu Gharib? Yes, there were political prisoners, I don't want to belittle them. But what about the criminal types that even Saddam's regime didn't want to deal with or kill outright? They had to have been kept alive for some purpose, why not this "insurgency"?

I don't think they ran home for tea and pastries.

And while I'm at it, aren't the Ba'athists more Maoist than anything else? I've never heard anyone being called a Stalinist, but it might be more appropriate.

Just askin'.

The Traitorous Mainstream Media would never call for Zarqawi's ouster. And they probably pray to whatever equivalent thay have of a God that our forces don't catch/cashier him anytime soon, devalued or not. It might bump up the polls for Bush.

If we was arguing that it was all externally sponsored he was very far off the mark.  Sure, external money was in it in varying degrees but how far could Iran get trying to sponsor the next Tim McVeigh in the US?  And frankly, if he wasn't expecting a bunch of externally sponsored terror attacks going on for years after the invasion, shame on him.

Like I said, just as much blame lies with many of the Generals for planning for a short war and peace and flowers afterwards.  A little less lies with Bush for "the buck stops here" reasons.  Honestly, it blows my mind.  I was a senior in college at the time and in between telling my liberal friends that yes, this was a good idea, I was yelling at my TV when I heard all the garbage about reconstruction with oil money, greeted with flowers and all that.  It was patently obvious to anyone watching then that A) Saddam probably had WMDs (turned out wrong) and B)  the country was gonna have it's fair share of issues with reconstruction, including lots of jihadis from neighboring countries as well as in Iraq and even more people who would rather blame the US than take responsibility for fixing their own country.  We've now blunted the jihadis and anti-US insurgents by giving them their own government that makes us look like occupational geniuses by comparison.

That being said, it could be a lot worse.  We gave up 3 years in the first year but at least we adapted after that.  If these clowns in the gov't over there don't get their act together soon maybe we can have another election that's run on competence instead of sectarian identity.  At any rate, we're leaving over the next couple years and they'll either sink or swim on their own.

aka insurgency, guerrilla war, resistance fighters, a rose by any other name it's all pretty much the same.  Some great Monday morning quarterbacking going on here.  A brief review of such warfare might tell us that except for mass extermination such wars usually have a long shelf life.  Please hold on to the word "usually", I couldn't stand it if somebody popped up and raised the Fijians Vs the Guamians or some such.  

     Now it stands to reason once the bombs start to go off or the first arrow flies sombody realizes that they have an irregular war on their hands, whatever they did or did not anticipate.  But the reference to longevity still stands, the trick being not what you thought might happen but rather what,where, and how it's happening.  That is , adapting to the other side's tactics, which in the very nature of irregular warfare, the inconsiderate other side bases on elusiveness, evasion, and timing.

     I could throw more than a few examples out but for now you might consider tha Japanese experience in WW II re China and the Phillipines. The latter started within days after Wainright's surrender.  The enterprising may find other examples if gifted with the ambition.

     I take it as a given that things are better in Iraq than commonly reported but the caterwauling about the past and what might have been  if only we had planned for what could have been at best guessed at is in retospect as well as for the future a waste of time.  Even retired generals are getting in on the act.

It was patently obvious to anyone watching then that...

From this, I can see that there is no sense to be found in any further discussion.

..... canning Rumsfeld would be pointless.  He did screw the pooch on the first year of operations though.

Mr. Bremer was the governing authority for the "first year of operations" or so, and had charge of the military efforts and the relations with the Iraqis.  The whole first year effort seemed to have been handled poorly; the Jay Garner interim, the Chalabi fiasco, the failure to get a temporary government up and running.  Bremer was also criticized for "disbanding" the Iraqi Army, but his take was that there was no Iraqi Army to disband.  It is certain that the best organized remnants were the Guards, who were equivalent to the SS, and should not have been the nucleus of a new army.

Rumsfeld capably handled his assignments, but the "first year" fiasco was a State Department operation.  Perhaps that is why Powell is gone, and Rumsfeld remains.  For sure, the only two people who have a vote on Rumsfeld's future are the President and Rumsfeld.  And Rumsfeld is not the target of the complainers, the President is.

that jihadis from other countries and opporunists from within Iraq would cause a lot of trouble once Saddam was gone and we had troops in Iraq?  I mean, I even thought the war was a good idea with that caveat.  You really thought it was gonna be all flowers and liberation?

licensed from Haliburton, inspected by DynCorp, in a secret plant, outsourced to India.

And it's also the method used for the NSA Domestic Suburban American Citizens Only Surveillance Program.

not that there isn't enough blame to go around, and like I've said multiple times here, IMO many generals including in some part probably the ones going after Rumsfeld now share that blame.  But Bremer was in no way responsible for how long it took the army to adopt proper counter-insurgency, peacekeeping and nation-building tactics.  He had his own screwups :)  But he wasn't commanding 150k troops, or even any to speak of besides maybe some polite requests of his own bodyguards.

You're right about most of the people going after Rumsfeld.  I personally think he has to have some responsibility but at this point his mistakes were for the most part in 02, 03 and the first half of 04 or so... I don't know what happened internally in the CoC but things started being run well after that so I'm not calling for his head right now.  Not that anyone cares :)

I dunno though, the Palestinians already have plenty of internal power struggles, dunno if there's room for Zarqawi.  Much different from Iraq where there was a total power vacuum.

And the Israelis won't bother to bulldoze Gaza, they'll just keep dropping shells on the launching sites for the Qassams.  We should make egypt take it back, earn that 3 billion a year they're getting from us.

Good point, Santiago--it seems to me that what many are faulting Rumsfeld for are weaknesses in the reconstruction effort--something that had never been under DoD purview before, and for which it did not have proper funding channels in place.  In other words, they are chastising Rumsfeld for not doing Powell's job.  Bremer also had a very rocky tenure.  But that said, I am not inclined to hurl blame at either Powell or Bremer because the circumstances were pretty terrible and in such episodes mistakes will inevitably be made.

It's a matter of How the Army is Designed.  We're not designed Or well suited for nation-building/counter-insurgency operations.  We're designed and Extremely well-suited for smashing the Hell out of an armed force in traditional combat.

It takes a LONG time for something as big and full of inertia to make such massive, integral changes as are required to gear up for nation-building/counter-insurgency operations.

I submit that for a machine designed for breaking things, the US military is far better at nation building that those bozos at State. Had the Army been in charge of putting Iraq back together instead of the civilian Coalition Provisional Authority I submit the result would have been a d*mn sight better. But we wanted to remove the image of "occupation" as quickly as possible and I think that was a mistake.

But its true that the military is not very efficient so hundreds of millions of dollars would probably have been squandered ... oh, wait that happened anyway :-)

It Still would have taken us about as long to reorganize to the new mission.  We might have been more effective (though more efficient is doubtful), but we Still would have needed that time to switch missions.

the mission might have been a problem, I don't know.

I do know that it took what seemed forever for the State guys to get their act together --- if they ever really did. I'm not sure that the Army shifting gears could have been any worse :-)

Is the Biggest Bureaucracy in the world.  Believe me, it would have taken just as long.  But once the shift was done, it would have been DONE.

an argument from me on getting the job done. It simply would have happened --- assuming the order had been given the same way the order to go to Baghdad was given.

I'm not at all sure where you're going with these articles.  The GlobalSecurity.org link takes us to a letter that was written by  Zarqawi.  It can therefore not be an example of his superiors rebuking him.  

That's probably OK because the Jamestown Foundation article substantiates the rebuke claim.   But it says among the reasons for the rebuke are as follows:

"Second, al-Qaeda's deputy chief said that the video-taped beheading of prisoners was costing all of the Iraqi mujahideen public support.

(...)

Third, al-Zawahiri asked al-Zarqawi to consider if "the assumption of leadership for the [Iraqi] mujahideen or a group of the mujahideen by non-Iraqis stirs up sensitivity for some people?"

(...)

Fourth, al-Zawahiri argued that indiscriminate attacks on Shiites and their sanctities were--like the beheadings--backfiring on the mujahideen."

In other words, al Qaeda lost its war because its own, internal mistakes have cratered its support among the Iraqis.  At minimum, this passes a neutral judgment on Rumsfeld and/or the generals on the ground in Iraq.  

However, Scheuer (the author) also goes on to say this:

"Based on the foregoing, al-Zarqawi now seems ready to play this traditional al-Qaeda role, which is likely to bring greater unity to Iraq's Sunni resistance. The foregoing also ought to give pause to those Western analysts who have concluded that bin laden and al-Qaeda are largely yesterday's news, an isolated, cowering organization unable to influence--let alone direct--the affairs of the many fronts of the worldwide anti-U.S. Islamic insurgency."

Hmmm.  The marginalization of the man who is supposedly our arch-enemy in Iraq is going unify the insurgency.  I think is speaks very ill of Rumsfeld's/the generals'/Bush's/whoever is in charge of this war's competence that we actually seem to need al Qaeda to help us splinter the insurgency.  (FYI, I don't actually believe that;  I'm just trying to read the evidence you've presented here.)

Then there's the Behn article (Washington Times).  Where to begin....  Well, the article really does say that al Qaeda has abandoned pursuit - according to a U.S. general who once commanded Multinational Corps - Iraq.  I would be thrilled if this proves true (the previous article's assessment not withstanding).  I've just been, justifiably I think, a little skeptical about pronouncements from current leaders that "the enemy is broken."  Cheney's comment that the insurgency was in its last throes, later qualified by the preposterous line that the last throes could last for 12 years, comes to mind.  

But I believe General Vines.  Why?  Because this very article proves that he's no starry-eyed optimist.  How else does one explain this last passage?

""Iran wants us out, but not too soon -- after a Shi'ite government friendly to Iran is established," Gen. Vines said. "Iran's view is that the current government is not strong enough, and if we pulled out now, there would be a low-level civil war."

??  A general who is still in the military and who commanded a major unit in Iraq and who just wrote an obituary for al Qaeda's Iraq operations says (did I read this correctly?) that our presence is helping Iran turn Iraq into its own satellite state?   A satellite state of the same Iran that declares the intention to enrich uranium with 50 000 centrifuges less than 48 hours before its "president" REITERATES that Israel will be annihilated, or wiped off the map, or however he said it this time?  

That's not good.  

That was an understatement.  

How is it that in a country with over 100 000 of the best-trained, best equipped soldiers in the world (I'm referring to ours), Iran is able to even think about exerting political hegemony?  I'd say, it speaks very ill of the competence of whoever we figure to actually be running this war.  I'd say it speaks so ill of that person that suggesting his removal is definitely not absurd.  That might be Rumsfeld.  It also might be the Generals.  

It could be Bush.

You know, that guy whom General Vines respectfully refers to as Commander-in-Chief?  Then again, it could be Condi.  Then again, what do I know?  I'm just looking at your evidence.