Shipwreck

And how does Iraq invading Iran back in 1980 fit in your rather simplistic strawman of Iran taking advantage of every opportunity to over-power Iraq ?

__________________
"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God" (Matthew 5:9)

Bluesman

Well, if you're trying to get me to defend the administration's mistakes, I won't, EXCEPT to say this: in stark contrast to DEMOCRATS, this Republican administration has always made the moves it has with the intent of seeking victory. The small footprint mistake? It was thought that going in 'heavy' would be tougher to sustain politically (because who here really believes the Democrats would've consented to a massive overkill-type build-up without shreiking even louder than they were?), and that we'd be using a sledghammer to crack a walnut. (Which was true, as far as Saddam's army was concerned; the trouble was, not enough troops meant an insurgency had enough oxygen to start and spread. So, in hindsight, the administration's mistake was looking over their shoulders at what the Democrats were likely to do to screw us up, and seeing ONE problem, and failing to see the other.)
Well, AGAIN, the whole point was to put THEM on the defensive, and it was actually working, until mid-2004, when the ayatollahs noticed something: the US anti-war movement was NEVER going to allow the administration to do anything that smelled like widening the war, which is exactly what they would charge if we did anything effective to the Iranians for shipping weapons and agents into Iraq to help the Shiites. So, the Iranians began indirectly killing US troops and the Democrats' reaction was to make certain the administration was powerless to do anything about it. REMEMBER, at that time, the Democrats were simultaneously saying we didn't have enough troops, AND opposing any 'escalation' of the war. Again, Democrats had managed to find the exact method of making sure the United States would not achieve her goals.

I blame the Democrats for precisely this: making certain that the administration knew they'd NEVER approve of a massive assault, AND making sure the administration would NEVER be in a political position to get them even if they DID ask for more troops.

Well, it took BOTH parties to get us here: enough mis-calculations in seeking victory were made by the Republicans that, combined with EXCELLENT calculations from the Democrats on how to AVOID it, here we are today, trying to get a draw that won't be the unmitigated disaster that the Democrats have sought from Jump Street.

No, you're wrong, AGAIN. We could've had an American victory by now, IF the Democrats were more loyal to the country than they are to their own political fortunes. I saw what happened, and we almost had 'em. The insurgency was so close to collapse, it looked imminent. But with fanatic leadership that had an unbreakable will to keep going, no matter how bad it looked sometimes, combined with Democrats that provided the sliver of hope to them and their men...they actually came through their own Valley Forge Days, and emerged from the crisis, hopeful, full of elan and fighting spirit and the knowledge that they just needed to perservere, and the Democrats would hand them what they could never achieve any other way: American fatigue and coollapse of our national will.

It is still what keeps them in the field and fighting. They see things like the full-page ad in the New York Times, which cost a lot of money, but is lavishly-funded, and they know they still have powerful allies undermining American troops in the field.

And YOU support this.

No, I'm not. And I never said they're dumbasses. As a matter of fact, I think the Democratic leadership is cunning as hell, and they know EXACTLY what they're doing.

Which is why they're the traitors they are, and not merely mis-guided.

__________________
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell

Julie

You're not the particular fly I want in my web, but if you just gotta insist.

Iraq retreats; Iran invades Iraq
Saddam Hussein, realising that he had no realistic hope of remaining in Iran, ordered his troops to withdraw to the international border between Iran and Iraq. He believed that his battered army would only be able to fight knowing that it was fighting for the homeland, and that they could rely upon the static defenses which had been built.

He announced that, for humanitarian reasons, he was withdrawing his army from Iran in order to help Lebanon, which had been invaded on 6 June 1982. He asked the Iranians to consider the plight of the Lebanese, although Saddam would obviously have been more concerned about avoiding an Iranian attack than the threat faced by Lebanon, and to make peace.

However, not only did the Iranians refuse to make peace, but that also increased their demands. Aside from the removal of the Saddam Hussein regime, they demanded $150 billion in war reparations and the repatriation of 100,000 Shi'ites expelled from Iraq before the war.

It is unlikely that anyone in Iran seriously expected that Iraq would accept these terms; and only offered them as a way of getting Saddam to refuse peace, thus making him continue to look like the aggressor. In fact, many within the Iranian government were demanding that the war be expanded into Iraq. On 21 June, Khomeini hinted that the expulsion of Iraqi troops would not be followed by a cessation of Iranian attacks, but by an invasion of Iraq. The following day, the Iranian Chief-of-Staff Shirazi said that the war would continue "until Saddam Hussein is overthrown so that we can pray at [the Shi'ite holy city of] Karbala and Jerusalem."

This statement was not long in being fulfilled. On 13 July, the Iranians crossed the border, in force, aiming towards the city of Basra, the second most important city in Iraq.

US response:

"While condemning Iraq's chemical weapons use . . . The United States finds the present Iranian regime's intransigent refusal to deviate from its avowed objective of eliminating the legitimate government of neighboring Iraq to be inconsistent with the accepted norms of behavior among nations and the moral and religious basis which it claims" [Document 43].

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/iraq43.pdf

astralis

bluesman,

disagree here. the administration wanted to use a lighter footprint because SecDef Rumsfeld wanted to make a point about the lethality of a RMA-ized american army. in this, he was supported by neo-conservatives such as paul wolfowitz, as they believed a smaller army would add to the shock effect ("look what the americans did with only a fraction of their possible power!"), and also because they were pushing for military action into either tehran or damascus next.

rumsfeld wanted to use 75,000 troops, utilizing heavily on SpecOps and air power in a replication of the afghan campaign. gen. franks originally wanted gulf war levels, and the result was a compromise.

aka in the end, faulty troop levels were a DoD decision and NOT a politically-motivated decision, either on part of the white house or for that matter, the democrats.

to the extent that troop levels were politically-motivated, should have been when the administration- not just rumsfeld- refused to listen to the testimony of gen. shinseki, whom asserted that iraq needed even more than gulf war level of troops.

__________________
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Bluesman

It is simply not debatable that the administration did not consider and react to what the Democrats were likely to use as grounds to mount further opposition to the war.

Shipwreck

SO WHAT ???

How does this brief passage from Wikipedia on the Iran-Iraq War answer the question I asked earlier, i.e. :

HistoricalDavid

"SLACKTIVISM...

We can't claim credit for having coined this term, nor do we know its actual origin, but we love it nonetheless. Slacktivism is the search for the ultimate feel-good that derives from having come to society's rescue without actually getting one's hands dirty, volunteering any of one's time, or opening one's wallet. .... Slacktivism comes in many forms, but its defining characteristic is its central theme of doing good with little or no effort on the part of the person inspired to participate, through the mechanisms of forwarding, exhorting, collecting, or e-signing."

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Internet Petitions

Bluesman

Awesome.