We get your drift, General.

'Hardball with Chris Matthews' for April 14
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4749230

MATTHEWS: We have three areas of the country all have come under—Kurdistan, which is very pro-American, the Sunni area, which is the defeated party. They were with Saddam Hussein. They lost this war. They don‘t like us. The Shia, the majority, largely in the south, but also up through the country, about 65 percent of the people, mixed bag, mostly calm under Sistani, Ayatollah Sistani, but a lot of people are getting antsy about us being there. Should we occupy literally the entire country to bring peace to that country? Should we put troops on every block?

GENERAL GEORGE JOULWAN: Not on every block. But you have to create this secure environment and the commanders are going to have to understand what does it take to do that. Then you can go about turning on the electricity, running the water and letting the NGOs and other organizations get out there. But until you have that secure environment, it‘s going to be very, very difficult. And I would just add that I think what has to happen now is that—if I could use the term moderate Iraqis, we have got to work with them in a way that creates this sort of support. The problem you have now is you have the Shias in Najaf and the Baathists and the Sunni in Fallujah, and what we‘re having is, as you said before, a two-front war. If those two join up, we‘re going to have serious problems.

MATTHEWS: Let‘s talk about we deal with the situation in Fallujah. This is classic occupying politics, occupation politics, whether it‘s us, the good guys, or the Germans or Japanese or anybody. When there‘s an atrocity committed against the occupying force, like those four Americans who were killed and then their bodies desecrated, hung by the bridge there, the normal reaction is to go in on basically a punitive raid. They go in and clear the streets block by block. Isn‘t that the tactic, tactical response that the terrorists want? We go in there and kick butt. We kill more people. We‘ve killed hundreds already going block by block. Was that a smart response?

JOULWAN: I don‘t want to second guess the commanders. All I would say is that, when you analyze the situation, it‘s a town of 250,000 people. This isn‘t a hamlet somewhere.

MATTHEWS: Right.

JOULWAN: And so you have to take that into consideration. What has to happen is, the Iraqis we‘ve trained, the Iraqi leadership, all of those people, you need their support to get...

MATTHEWS: But they ran when the fighting started.

JOULWAN: Well, some of them went in there and tried to really try to get some justice done. The problem is, if there‘s not a secure environment for them to work in, then you‘re going to have this mob rule and that‘s what‘s happening now.

MATTHEWS: You think the mistake we made was to basically island-hop, grab certain towns, hold certain areas, but leave a lot of exposed to the enemy, basically.

JOULWAN: Let me try...

MATTHEWS: Well, Fallujah, for example, we left that open as wide open bit of territory. It was like Indian territory back in the Old West. Nobody went in there until those four guys went in there, and nobody protected them.

JOULWAN: We have great commanders on the ground. What I really don‘t understand yet is the political clarity of that what force was supposed to do. It is not just good enough to take Baghdad and defeat the Army. You must impose your will on the enemy, and that takes more troops, in my opinion, than we had there and a clarity about this is what you want done. Without that, Chris, it‘s very, very difficult to do all the things that need to get done.
MATTHEWS: Do you think the political thinking that went into this war forget whether we should have gone in or not—but the political thinking that said, basically, once we get in there, they‘re going to be on our side, was wrong thinking?

JOULWAN: It was—let me use correct terms here. There were assumptions made that certain things would happen. Those assumptions proved to be false or faulty.

MATTHEWS: All of them, by the way, by my count.

JOULWAN: And what has to happen...

MATTHEWS: Yes?

JOULWAN: ... you had a Corps commander, when he took Baghdad, said, we ran into more opposition than we anticipated.

MATTHEWS: Right.

JOULWAN: He gets his butt chewed back here for saying something like that, rather than react to it. How do you quickly adapt your plan to react to it? Now, I don‘t want to second guess these guys but that, to me, is a clear example of how we did not understand the threats that we were going to face. They didn‘t. The Iraqi army didn‘t melt away. We weren‘t greeted as liberators. And all of that...

MATTHEWS: Where‘s all this ordnance coming from, all this firepower they‘re using for these IEDs, blowing up legs and arms off of guys running along in Humvees? All that TNT, where is it coming from?

JOULWAN: It‘s this has been—Saddam Hussein has been stockpiling this for a long, long time.
Remember, when we went in in the first Gulf War, we only liberated Kuwait. All that other stuff remained in Iraq. And part of this—to me, part of this stabilization mission, you know, you go from normalization—or, excuse me, from implementation of the war fight to stabilization to normalization. We did the war fight. But the stabilization as a mission, where you try to stabilize a country, we didn‘t do well, which means disarming the factions, taking as much of the heavy weapons as you can.

MATTHEWS: Was Shinseki right in saying we needed hundreds of thousands of troops to do this right?

JOULWAN: I think it was good advice.

MATTHEWS: But it was blasted for being spoken.

JOULWAN: That‘s in our democratic system.

MATTHEWS: Do we have too many commissars, political commissars, in this war and not enough soldiers?

JOULWAN: I just there has to be some accountability at the end of all this.

MATTHEWS: OK, you‘re being very careful, but we get your drift, General.


General George Joulwan was the supreme allied commander in Europe.

it was good.

He should stick to blow jobs.

Wants to bury the issue of whether Iraq should have been invaded; but is becoming aware that the Bushista's 'plan' was a porcelain container of feces. It's too much to hope that Chrissy would begin to doubt the wisdom of the Invasion itself.

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