http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/09/23/news/saudi.php

Now even Bush's *allies* are telling him he's messing things up in Iraq.

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Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.

And so NOW you're going to listen to the Prince of Saudi Arabia??? I'd like to know where he was when Saddam was building wmd? And has he stopped the teaching of Whabbism....which is the hate for all westerners and Jews..... in his country yet? I'm pretty sure the Saudi Arabian royal family wanted Saddam gone.....but what did they do to help? They are always happy for the U.S. military to save their arses, but then don't contribute to making things better in any way.

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"This is a time for a national imperative not to fail in Iraq." Condoleeza Rice, January 11, 2007

I trust the Saudis to look out for their own interests. When they start warning of a catastrophe it's because they see those interests being threatened. They're credible on that.

But Bush will stick his fingers in his ears and go "la la la" and pretend he can't hear them.

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Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.

So........exactly WHAT do you want Pres. Bush to do with this personal observation by the Saudi Prince?

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"This is a time for a national imperative not to fail in Iraq." Condoleeza Rice, January 11, 2007

I dunno. Maybe formulate a PLAN?

Maybe admit you can't pacify a country with 150,000 troops -- and then do something about it?

Maybe open his eyes and make a frank assessment of the situation and figure out what is and is not achievable, and at what cost?

Instead of just smiling and saying "everything will be fine" and continuing to poorly execute a bad idea?

I'm a member of the "we broke it, we bought it" camp; we have to stay until some semblance of order is established. But that presupposes that Bush is doing something useful to establish that order.

I'd like to see some frank talk from Bush that indicates he is able to recognize reality, and then hear how he plans to deal with it. Instead we get more vacuous bromides about how we have to be "strong" and it will be "tough" but we'll win in the end.

That sounds less and less convincing every time he says it.

I get so frustrated when I see mistakes compounded by sheer ignorant stubbornness. We went in with too few troops and *zero* plan for the postwar period. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Then we disbanded the Iraqi Army and began the ill-thought-out deBaathification campaign.

That's bad enough; but do you suppose over the intervening two years we might have learned our lesson and fixed it?

No. Instead I see western representatives and the Iraqi government hiding behind barricades in the Green Zone. I see our military conduct "sweeps" -- retaking the same ground over and over again, watching the insurgents move out ahead of our units and then move back in once we've gone. We know from decades of hard experience that such tactics don't work. But we're resorting to them because we don't have enough boots on the ground.

We're training the Iraqis to take over -- but two years in there's barely a brigade that U.S. commanders trust, and much of the military and police forces are infiltrated by either terrorists or militias. And we're reluctant to give the Iraqis weapons for fear those weapons will be used against us.

And let's not talk about the political situation. Hard Driver talks about making sure we arm the democrats and not the fanatics -- well good luck telling them apart.

We're trying to rebuild Iraq -- in a situation where security is so bad that projects are ruinously expensive, contractors are attacked in broad daylight and infrastructure is damaged almost as fast as we put it up.

And we're doing it all alone because Bush flipped off the rest of the world in his eagerness to invade.

Now the Brits and the Shia are squaring off in Basra, perhaps a sign of things to come in the heretofore mostly peaceful south. Meanwhile, our presence in Iraq is riling up the entire Muslim world, creating thousands of new terrorists and giving them valuable battlefield training.

The number of ways we continue to screw up because Bush refuses to recognize reality just stagger the mind. And all at the bargain basement price of $400 billion and 2,000 American lives.

Feh. Sorry about the screed. I get so frustrated sometimes that Bush has dug us such a deep hole that we have no honorable choice but to "stay the course." And instead of recognizing the hole and the bad decisions stacked upon bad decisions that led to it, he smiles vacantly and says "everything will be fine." And keeps digging.

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Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.

Civil war in Iraq goes badly

I thought we were wining the war or the occupation or the global fight against extremism or whatever you call the US having troops in Iraq. At 5 billion dollars a month it don't look like Bush's investment in expanding democracy or eliminating non-existent weapons of mass destruction is paying off. And I thought we were going to get lots of oil out of it. What's up with the oil?


http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story...577352,00.html

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Classic American liberal

This is a foolish question. It's not like Bush hasn't been warned about up and coming disaster in Iraq before. Bush and his advisers live in a fantasy world. It doesn't matter what anyone wants Bush to about warnings, it's what we expect him to do about it. And that's to have us believe that these warnings could never be anticipated.

Below is another instance of Iraqi events that Bush believes could never been anticipated.


PREWAR INTELLIGENCE PREDICTED IRAQI INSURGENCY

By John Diamond, USA TODAY

Two reports by the National Intelligence Council, a group of senior analysts that pools assessments from across the nation's intelligence community, warned Bush in January 2003, two months before the invasion, that the conflict could spark factional violence and an anti-U.S. insurgency, the official said. One of the reports said the U.S.-led occupation could "increase popular sympathy for terrorist objectives." Similarly sober warnings by the CIA went to senior administration officials and Congress as part of daily intelligence summaries, the intelligence official said.

So, you want more troops there? Less? Do you want us to pull out all together?

I am quite sure that kind of assessment goes on daily.

And IF the terrorists weren't coming into Iraq to fight us....where would they be fighting us? I say.....let them fight and die there....and many of them are dying. A lot more of them than us. And that is a GOOD think, IMO.

You ignore any of the successes.

Did you miss the recent cleaning out of Tal Afar? The area around the Syrian border? Sadr City? Fallujah? Or do you simply prefer to close your eyes to ANY successes there?

So, how convinced would you feel if he says....."You know Iraq is just going to hell in a handbasket; just like the Democrats in this country say it is. So, heck....let's just pull out. I'll let the next president.....Republican OR Democrat worry about it?"

Well, obviously some military personnel that knows more about it than you or I.....decided that they couldn't do it that way. Perhaps they felt leaving the Baathist army intact was just too dangerous. I'm sure they had their reasons NOT to use Saddam's army. And you know? I'm also sure that had they done so.....the Bush haters would have been condemning that decision as well.

And YOU know that better than the Generals? Bush has said if they want more, they'll get them.

Heck, we just had 2 back-to-back hurricanes....natural disasters......that are going to cost us that much AND that many lives. ALL IN A 3 1/2 WEEK PERIOD!!!! But you say that $400 billion and 2,000 lives during a 3 YEAR period in the name of trying to bring a democracy to the Middle East is TOO MUCH FOR YOU???

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"This is a time for a national imperative not to fail in Iraq." Condoleeza Rice, January 11, 2007

Either send in enough troops to do the job, or pull out. Half-measures don't cut it. Of course, that would require Bush to admit that he screwed up, which he won't do.

I am not. Bush and his advisers have shown a remarkable ability to ignore information they don't like.

We've been over this before. The short version:

1. The insurgency is mostly Iraqi. Prior to our invasion, not very many Iraqis were terrorists. You do the math.

2. Most of the foreign fighters are low-level jihadists, many of whom would never have had the means or possibly the desire to kill Americans until we invaded and put American troops within easy reach.

3. Terrorists aren't stupid. The handful with the means to attack us over here aren't going to go die in Iraq; they're going to continue planning ways to attack us over here.

So the "terrorists" we're killing in Iraq mostly weren't terrorists before we invaded, and the ones who survive are getting radicalized and battle-hardened. Great work.

Those are the "sweeps" I referred to earlier. We go in, blow up some buildings, kill a handful of the stupider bad guys, and leave. Then the bad guys return. We will be cleaning out those same sites in the future. Or are you claiming Sadr City is a safe place to be now?

About the only real success I can think of recently was the handover in Najaf. And we'll see how that goes.

Yeah, because those are the options: Ignore reality or pull out.

Frankly describing the situation and then outlining his strategy for dealing with it is what I'm looking for. Instead we get bromides.

Once again you ignore the fact that many people at the time thought it was a bad idea. This isn't 20/20 hindsight. Especially the complete lack of postwar planning.

A basic military maxim is "don't pay for the same ground twice."

As for what the commanders want:
http://www.military.com/NewsContent/...060305,00.html

No. Not when at best it's a distraction from the war on terror (and at worse is increasing terrorist ranks) that is blowing a hole in our budget and taking resources better used elsewhere. Given limited resources, democracy for 26 million Iraqis is not worth $15,000 a head and counting.

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Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.

Leaving aside the 9/11 issue (which is a big one), the Saudis have been turning a blind eye to the hundreds of young Saudis, mostly Wahabi Sunnis, who have gone to fight the Jihad in Iraq against the western crusaders (America and its allies). They have made no serious attempt to stop the flow of would-be suicide bombers, in spite of U.S. requests for them to do so.

It sounds like they are whining about their coreligionists being picked on and heretics (Shiites) favored instead. Maybe they were counting on the U.S. winning handily and solving their next door neighbor problem for them, and then the Sunnis in Iraq taking control again, after tossing the Shiites and the Kurds a bone or two each. Keep your mouths firmly shut, please, Saud princes!!