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Originally Posted by JP5";p="
Well, gee Raytri. You should have stayed in the service. Maybe by now you'd be General and could have made that decision before the one in charge did.
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This isn't about the generals; it's about Bush and Rumsfeld, primarily. They're the ones who thought we'd be welcomed with open arms and that the occupation and reconstruction would pay for itself.
You will counter that the generals are free to ask for more troops if they think they need them; to which I invite you to read the last few paragraphs of the link I provided.
And I wasn't alone. There were plenty of knowledgeable observers during the run-up to the war that predicted a successful occupation would require several hundred thousand troops. They were ignored and ridiculed. The ones within the administration or active military found their careers in jeopardy.
This isn't hindsight, guys. All hindsight is doing is proving that everybody but Bush/Rumsfeld were right all along.
Gaar wrote:
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To generalize that "more Troops" was the answer is as stupid as saying "more money" will definitely help. It depends on what the Troops are trained for and what their Mission is, just as it depends on how the money is spent as to whether each will "help", right?
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While it's true that the type of troops matter (we're not going to pacify Iraq with the accountants from the Finance Corps), that's a given, not a legitimate argument. The number of boots on the ground is the most accurate predictor of success in an occupation.
Which you might have noticed if you saw what soldiers are doing in Iraq: basically, every sort of soldier is being converted to infantry and sent out on patrol. I've seen artillery units conducting foot patrols, and a year or so ago there was some dark humor on military sites when a Public Affairs officer was killed while on patrol.
So maybe we *could* pacify Iraq with the help of the Finance Corps, if we gave them rifles and some refresher training in patrolling. Because in occupation duty, the idea is to blanket the country with troops and snuff out resistance before it gets started. That doesn't take highly trained combat troops; it just takes a *lot* of troops.
That's what we did in Germany after World War II. It's what we did in Japan. It's what we did in Kosovo. It's what we've done in every successful occupation we've conducted this century.
So when Bush/Rumsfeld decided they could do Iraq on the cheap, they weren't just ignoring their critics; they were ignoring the history that criticism was based on.