Retired general says America on dangerous path in Iraq

The United States has made a series of "monstrous and horrendous mistakes" in Iraq, a retired Marine Corps general said last week, but it can reassert its control in the troubled region if it does two things: decides what it wants to do and then does it ---- without hesitation.

Bernard Trainor, a three-star general who saw combat in Vietnam and Korea, said the fragile U.S. cease-fire in Fallujah, and the unrealized tough talk of "capturing or killing" Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical cleric holed up in the holy city of Najaf, could backfire ---- emboldening insurgents and further inflaming anti-U.S. sentiment.

The 75-year-old Trainor is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a centrist think tank in Washington, D.C., and co-author of "The Generals' War," a highly acclaimed, behind-the-scenes look at the first Gulf War, which Trainor covered for The New York Times as a military correspondent.


more... http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/05/02/opinion/17_53_135_1_04.txt

...either responding with overwhelming force vs. not responding at all. His criticism is that the US is giving the resistance time to regroup, rearm, and is only putting off another violent confrontation.

This is incredibly limited thinking. The military is really part of the problem, not the solution. What has bungled this whole thing so very badly is relying on the military instead of relying on the Iraqis themselves, allowing Iraqi contractors to bid on the reconstruction and then hire the Iraqis to do it. Without that 70% unemployment, the resistance would be far less than it is now.

It may be too late for this alternative to work, even if we could eliminate the Bush gang and their use of that country as a way to fatten their profits.

The problem with this guy is the problem with the Bush gang, that they can see only a military solution to any problem.

I agree with you. You really wonder about the sanity of these military planners. I sometimes think they see the people living on top of their oil as "ants" or "bugs" to be blown off as quickly as possible. It must be infinitely frustrating for them when they have to deal with religious clerics who stand their ground and mobilize people behind them.

Of course, I put a certain group of people above the military in this splendid war-planning effort: the corporations. It was corporate people who planned this. It was the military who is carrying it out. Look one step further up, and you will see incompetence, stupidity, arrogance in the name of BUSINESS.

Gee, Rumsfeld's quick and cheap war is taking a long time and costing a lot of money. If our forces are stretched thin now, imagine if they initially had had to contend with finding, securing, and destroying vast caches of WMDs and bioweapons while dealing with a still viable Iraqi Army.

Is Trainor right or wrong? I haven't a clue. But I suspect there is just as much of a power struggle going on in the White House, the Pentagon, and the Department of Defense as there is in Fallujah and Najaf. Awful enough to have strategically flawed plans to begin with, but to let everything fall into incoherence while forces are still in the field is beyond words.

Can the Commander-in-Chief be court-martialed?

But he sticks at stating flat out that there is
no military solution. But then that's his gig.
But he's right on with the stuff about half-ass
decision making, the bluff and run stuff, the
worst of both worlds for the troops.