Supporting WHICH troops???

[Gimpy]

Originally posted by SuperScout How did Shinseki and Zinni get to be such all-fired up experts on counter-terrorism? That they opposed the war doesn't make them right, only gifted with a different opinion. Just because a person has four stars on his lapel, he isn't given, ipso facto, wisdom, knowledge, or even a dose of common sense. Case in point: Wesley Clark, aka Hillbillie Lite, whose clumsiness and idiocy almost brought the US and the former Soviet Union to the point of trading hot lead. That, among other reasons, why he was relieved of command, a rather unceremonious end to what otherwise was a less than stellar career.

And Chuckie Hagel, who was a member of the Panther Battalion when I was the Scout - isn't he one of those bright shining lights who wants to shut down Camp Delta? Now where does little Chuckie porposed to send all the miscreants, to the University of Nebraska for psychological testing? He's a political opportunist, exceeded only by his mentor, John McCain.

Rattle the 'cage' of the propagandists and you get MORE insults,inuenndo, misinformaton and character assasination.

SuperSilly Quote, "How did Shinseki and Zinni get to be such all-fired up experts oncounter terrorism?"........ Hmmmmmmmmmm, lemme see heanh. I don't THINK I ever said that, did I? What I DID say was what Shinseki & Zinni said WOULD HAPPEN.........did in fact HAPPEN, correct?

You're getting JUST like your leaders at the RNC there SuperSloppy, trying to manipulate and rewrite/revise what folks SAY to suit your own warped views of reality!

[BLUEHAWK]

Originally posted by Gimpy

What I DID say was what Shinseki & Zinni said WOULD HAPPEN.........did in fact HAPPEN, correct? [/color]

No, what they said would happen did NOT happen.

[Gimpy]

You are in desperate need of a 'REALITY' check there Sir Blue!

The 'FACTS' on the ground are proof-positive that these two gentlemens' predictions were well founded. That CANNOT be denied, undone nor manipulated in ANY form to ignore them or subvert the truth that they spoke!

[Gimpy]

Some 'REMINDERS' about General Shinseki! And................how his expertise and experience were ignored by this administration!


####

"He (Shinseki) came into office in June 1999 with a clear vision for "transformation" and talked passionately about the army's need to adjust from thinking about traditional enemies to what he called "complicators", including both terrorists and the then little-known phrase "weapons of mass destruction". Gen Shinseki might thus have relished the arrival of a Republican team equally committed to change." [1](http://www.guardian.co.uk/internatio...925140,00.html)


"The general wanted a new kind of army, one that could combine the adaptability of light infantry and the power of heavily mechanised forces. His new bosses had other ideas . "They had pre-decided what transformation meant," said one Pentagon source. "It meant more from space, more from air and it didn't involve the army much. That was the essence of the[ir] conflict."


On August 1, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld replaced General Shinseki as Army Chief of Staff with General Peter J. Schoomaker after Shineski "questioned the cakewalk scenario (...,In February 2002, Kenneth Adelman, an assistant to Donald Rumsfeld in the 1970s and now a leading neoconservative defense intellectual, wrote, "demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." He predicted that Saddam Hussein would quickly fall if the US military attacked his 'headquarters, communications, air defenses and fixed military facilities through precision bombing.' ... ") and Shinseki then told Congress (that February) that we would need several hundred thousand soldiers in Iraq to put an end to the violence against our troops and against each other." [2] (http://why-war.com/news/2003/09/14/seekingh.html)


Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz called his estimate "wildly off the mark " and said, "I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down." By July 2003, "many experts say that the worst of the chaos in Iraq could have been contained if there had been enough troops on the ground from the beginning. There's a growing consensus that something close to what Shinseki suggested might be necessary to turn the situation around." [3] (http://why-war.com/news/2003/07/18/fromhero.html)


"Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required," General Shinseki told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee today. "We're talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems." [4] (http://why-war.com/news/2003/02/25/armychie.html)


General Shinseki continued, "It takes a significant ground force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure that people are fed, that water is disturbed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this."

General Shinseki made clear that he was providing only his personal assessment of postwar needs. Which it turned out, was right on the money.


Mr Rumsfeld publicly repudiated him, saying he was "far off the mark". In semi-private, the Pentagon's civilian leadership was far more scathing. A "senior administration official" told the Village Voice newspaper that Gen Shinseki's remark was "bullshit from a Clintonite enamoured of using the army for peacekeeping and not winning wars". [5] (http://www.guardian.co.uk/internatio...925140,00.html)

The absolute hatered of ANYONE that was promoted to positions of authority within the Clinton Adminstration, regardless of their qualifications and field(s) of expertise was undoubtly MORE important to the NEOCONS way of thinking than what was best for the TROOPS or this COUNTRY!

Every single scenario Shinseki predicted has been proven correct !


AND............THAT'S A FACT..............JACK!

[BLUEHAWK]

That was almost four years ago, Gimpy.

[Gimpy]

Can't you even READ Blue?

Let me put it up in BOLD LARGE TYPE where you can see better, ok??

By July 2003 , "many experts say that the worst of the chaos in Iraq could have been contained if there had been enough troops on the ground from the beginning. There's a growing consensus that something close to what Shinseki suggested might be necessary to turn the situation around." [3] (http://why-war.com/news/2003/07/18/fromhero.html)


"Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required," General Shinseki told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee today,(in July 2003). .. "We're talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems." [4] (http://why-war.com/news/2003/02/25/armychie.html)


General Shinseki continued, "It takes a significant ground force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure that people are fed, that water is disturbed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this."


General Shinseki made clear that he was providing only his personal assessment of postwar needs. Which it turned out, was right on the money.


Did THAT clear it up for you Sir Blue?-----Is it NOT evident to anyone with an IQ higher than driftwood for Gods' sake that the man was RIGHT, and the 'proof' is no further than the daily, weekly, monthly 'casualty' reports coming out of Iraq??

The absolute arrogance & unprofessional lack of character of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Kenneth Adelman, Dick Cheney and ALL the other so-called 'experts' on 'tactics' within this Republican led fiasco is nothing short of horrific and appalling. They should ALL be held accountable for the injustices they've committed!

[SuperScout]

GEN Shinseki was not relieved of his post as Chief of Staff of the Army, or replaced because of policy dispute, but simply because he had served the designated tour of duty for that position. And what if DoD had employed a larger ground force structure? Doubtless there would have been even more casualties, since there would have been more targets, both of 'door-kickers' and their logistic tail which usually runs ten times the actual number of door-kickers. How much more would this greater footprint cost us, and would it have produced concomitantly better results?

All that is promised with a larger force is pure conjecture, a simple game of "what if?" To imply the Zinni and his band of bellyachers are the only source of truth, decency, vanilla ice cream, and unfailing war strategy is as productive as spitting into a tornado.

And kindly remember that it was Shinseki and his brilliant strategy that is costing us millions of $$ per month for our continuing presence in the Balkans, where another bright shining example of mediocrity, Wesley Clark, met his military demise.

[Gimpy]

Originally posted by SuperScout GEN Shinseki was not relieved of his post as Chief of Staff of the Army, or replaced because of policy dispute, but simply because he had served the designated tour of duty for that position. And what if DoD had employed a larger ground force structure? Doubtless there would have been even more casualties, since there would have been more targets, both of 'door-kickers' and their logistic tail which usually runs ten times the actual number of door-kickers. How much more would this greater footprint cost us, and would it have produced concomitantly better results?

Well..................I'll guess we'll never know, huh? But.......I'd sure as HELL put more 'faith' in the expertise of former Generals Shinseki, McPeak, Zinni, Barry McCaferty, and many, many others rather than folks like Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld and company!

They went into this thing with ALL the wrong ideas and piss poor planning, and are STILL doing it till this day!

The article below best describes the situation more accurately than I can.

####START####

"The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy." July , 2005 ---AP wire services

The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.

The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong , there was no Plan B.

Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle.

The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming even though Saddam Hussein has been captured, unlike Osama bin Laden, who is still at large. The White House now says the occupation is costing nearly $5 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, recently Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.

America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America.

They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."


Much has been made recently of exaggerations and misinformation used in building the case for war. It now seems that the postwar plan was predicated on similar misinformation, if not outright self-delusion . "They knew what Iraq was like and nobody could argue with them about it, including the people in the intelligence agencies," says Lang. Just as administration hawks took over intelligence gathering during the prelude to war by creating the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, they also dominated the postwar planning, refusing to let any evidence enter the discussion that contradicted their ideology.

That's why "there doesn't appear to have been" a contingency plan, according to Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "It's scary but true. An underlying assumption of this whole campaign against Iraq and the larger campaign to remake the whole Middle East was that all we had to do is knock off Saddam Hussein and everything else would fall down obediently at our feet. The Iraqis themselves would welcome being liberated, the Syrians and Iranians would be cowed and start doing what we want, Israel would be able to impose a peace on the Palestinians because they'd be intimidated, and all will be for the best in this best of all possible worlds."


Official policy was to treat this scenario as inevitable. Lang says the war's architects "simply didn't allow" anyone to plan for an outcome that didn't match the one they envisioned. "If you think back, the word was you didn't have to worry about this, there wasn't going to be any occupation," he says. According to Pentagon hawks, he says, "this wasn't an occupation, it was a liberation.

The Iraqi people would simply take charge of their own affairs and we could go home almost immediately. They didn't think [retired Lt. Gen. Jay] Garner's people were going to be in Iraq for more than three months. That's why there are so few troops in the plan. The assumption was that all you had to do was defeat the Iraqi military, liberate it from Saddam Hussein's henchmen and these people would immediately take charge of their own affairs. There was great disdain for those who thought otherwise."


In fact, those who thought otherwise were cut out of the process altogether. Humanitarian NGOs that would be doing postwar work in Iraq were kept in the dark, says Kevin Henry, advocacy director for CARE, and the groups within the government that they usually work with were marginalized.

"One of the really amazing things for us," Henry explained, "and this does account for some of the failures in planning, is that the interagency process within the U.S. government for planning for the humanitarian response and reconstruction was being co-chaired by the [White House's] Office of Management and Budget and the National Security Council. These are not the agencies of the U.S. government that have the greatest experience in relief and reconstruction. The State Department, U.S. AID, the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance ? they're the organizations that we and all the other humanitarian organizations have a history of working with."


In July 2003, Knight Ridder newspapers reported that the Pentagon ignored the State Department's eight-month-long "Future of Iraq" project, which involved Iraqi exiles and government agencies preparing strategies "for everything from drawing up a new Iraqi judicial code to restoring the unique ecosystem of Iraq's southern marshes, which Saddam's regime had drained. Virtually none of the 'Future of Iraq' project's work was used once Saddam fell."


"Those with greatest expertise were not completely sidelined, but they certainly weren't at the center of the planning process," says Henry, who prepared testimony about planning failures that CARE had delivered to a congressional committee last year. "Every time we would ask for more information, essentially we'd be told, 'Trust us, don't worry, we know what to do.'"The administration continues to stand by its war plan .

In a speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies last year, Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy, noted that none of Iraq's worst-case scenarios have materialized. (Huh????? What fantasy world is he in??---Gimp)

"Had we decided that large numbers of forces ? large enough to police the cities to prevent the immediate post-regime-collapse looting ? were the top priority, we could have delayed the start of the military action and lost tactical surprise, but then we might have had the other terrible problems that we anticipated," Feith said. "War, like life in general, always involves tradeoffs. It is not right to assume that any current problems in Iraq can be attributed to poor planning."(Can you belive that crap??????.....Gimp)


Other officials, though, say that planning wasn't just poor ? it was virtually nonexistent. "In the aftermath of a quick war, we find ourselves in the deplorable situation of having no planning, very few allies, and no burden-sharing," says U.S. Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee.


And burden-sharing is crucial, because right now, there aren't enough troops in Iraq to keep order. Many commercial buildings in Baghdad are protected by U.S. forces, says David Andrus, director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Southern California School of International Relations, who recently returned from Iraq. But with only 138,000 American soldiers on the ground, there isn't enough manpower to guard schools, hospitals, utilities and neighborhoods.


"The security situation in Iraq is getting worse, not better," CARE reported last July. "It is the biggest impediment to delivering effective humanitarian aid. Murders and carjackings are common. The frenzy of looting that followed the war is over, but theft is still a serious problem for aid agencies."


Lack of security, which is most acute in the Sunni triangle around Baghdad, hinders efforts to repair Iraq's infrastructure. A month ago, the electricity situation was improving ? every day, it seemed, there was power for a few more hours. Since then, though, electrical components have been looted and Iraqis working to restore electricity have been attacked, reversing gains. "Water, waste treatment, hospitals and factories in Iraq all depend on electricity," says CARE. "The risk of a health crisis grows as clean drinking water remains scarce, temperatures routinely exceed 40 degrees [Celsius, 104 Farenheit] and hospitals and healthcare centers struggle to provide treatment to sick people."


Administration officials recently have blamed the lack of electricity and water on Saddam's failure to upgrade infrastructure over the years. According to Gen. Carl Strock, deputy director of operations for the Coalition Provisional Authority, the electrical system is antiquated.

For Baghdadis, access to electricity largely depends on where they live. In the richer neighborhoods, most households have generators ? so even if the power goes down, they can still sit in air-conditioned rooms on 110-degree days. As has always been the case, the people most affected by the lack of electricity in the heat are the poor. But for them, the lack of electricity and adequate water supply is nothing new ? they didn't have them before the war either. "There's never been enough electricity to go around," says Strock. "Saddam definitely used the provision of utilities as a political tool to reward those he wanted to reward and punish those he wanted to punish."


For the people living in the areas surrounding Basra, this means that nothing has really changed. In the cities of the south about 60 percent of the people in the urban population have access to drinking water ? in rural areas the figure is closer to 30 percent. This is approximately what they had before the war, and levels are expected to rise.


But according to Johanna Bjorken of Human Rights Watch, who returned to the U.S. from Baghdad recently, the electricity situation in the Iraqi capital actually got worse in June. "When the month of June started," Bjorken told Salon, "electricity levels were at roughly half of what they were before the war. By the end, there were entire days where Baghdad was completely without power."


There's no doubt that many Iraqis welcomed regime change, and there's still a reservoir of goodwill toward U.S. forces. Though some Iraqis working with American troops have been assassinated, many continue to risk their lives to cooperate with the occupation, eager for the opportunity to rebuild their country.

In Baghdad and the Sunni areas of central Iraq, though, patience is evaporating amid a growing sense that life has gotten even worse since the Americans arrived. On the streets of Baghdad, there's a mounting conviction that the U.S. invaded to plunder Iraq's resources rather than to free its people. "We have moved from victorious liberator to hated occupier very quickly," says Tauscher.


Nor is the insecurity limited to central Iraq. Though there's far less resistance in Shiite southern Iraq, "the climate of fear and insecurity is overwhelming in Basra," Amnesty International reported these past few months. "The widespread looting and scavenging of public buildings, witnessed in the first days of occupation, has decreased, but crime, often involving violence, remains much higher than before the occupation ...

The U.S. and U.K., as occupying powers in Iraq under international law, have a clear responsibility to maintain law and order, and to protect the Iraqi population. The occupying powers have clearly failed to live up to this obligation. They have shown a lack of preparedness ? in terms of political will, planning and deployment of resources ? to bring the lawlessness under control, and millions of Iraqi men, women and children are paying a terrible price."


It didn't have to be this way . In February 2003, when Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki (since retired) told the Senate that several hundred thousand soldiers were needed to subdue Iraq, he was derided by hawks at the Pentagon. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz called his estimate "wildly off the mark" and said, "I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down."

Now, though, many experts say that the worst of the chaos in Iraq could have been contained if there had been enough troops on the ground from the beginning. There's a growing consensus that something close to what Shinseki suggested might be necessary to turn the situation around.


"Certainly the short-term problems that we faced could have been prevented if there had been proper planning and a very careful assessment of what the postwar situation was likely to look like," says professor Walt at Harvard. "If we had gone in with a much larger force, the way former Chief of Staff Shinseki wanted, and a very generous aid package that was ready to roll at the moment of victory, you probably could have put off a sort of day of reckoning. This more than likely would have ultimately prevented problems from emerging down the road."

War planners apparently believed that, since their precision bombs would largely spare the Iraqi state's infrastructure, the country could operate more or less normally as authority was transferred from Saddam's regime to someone like Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress. Though some in the administration grew disenchanted with Chalabi, Wolfowitz and his coterie never stopped pushing him.


"One of the assumptions was that they could knock off the very top of the Baath party but leave the rest of the regime intact," says Walt. "They were going to install Ahmed Chalabi on top of the regime, but the rest of the state would still be functioning. What happened instead was they knocked off the top and the rest of the state disintegrated."

As soon as Baghdad fell, government ministries and public utilities were stripped by looters. "It's ironic that the hospitals and water treatment plants and electrical infrastructure was virtually spared from the bombing," says Henry, "and then completely devastated by the looting that followed."

Some of this could have been foreseen. "When Hurricane Andrew struck the Florida coast in 1992, it destroyed an airbase, destroyed towns, and Florida went into anarchy," says professor Andrus of the University of Southern California. "People were hiding in their houses with guns to protect themselves from roving bands of thieves and rapists. It was a horrible place. Now if you take Iraq, that's been under this very tight dictatorship for decades, and all of a sudden the U.S. comes in and sweeps aside this very tightly controlled political and civil structure, you have a huge vacuum and the people aren't prepared to deal with it, so it deteriorates very quickly."


Lacking the manpower to stop the deterioration, troops simply stood by as the foundations of civil society burned. "If we had had 250,000 troops, the targets of looting might have been secured," says ex-Marine Lou Cantori, an expert in military policies in the Middle East at the University of Maryland who has taught at West Point, the U.S. Air Force Academy and the U.S. Marine Corps University. "We were shorthanded because of the Rumsfeld team's preconceptions, and therefore the troops stood around and watched as the infrastructure of Iraq was destroyed.

"Americans cannot enforce order in the society," Cantori continues, "and because order cannot be enforced, reconstruction cannot take place, and because there's no order and no reconstruction, there cannot be an American withdrawal. This is a quagmire and a situation that is deteriorating, and it's about time that somebody started saying this."

Meanwhile, Iraqis, having seen the American military crush Saddam, the most powerful force in their universe for decades, can't believe that these same soldiers are incapable of getting the lights to work, and many believe the hardships they're suffering stem from American indifference. Their hostility makes the situation even more volatile for the Americans, who anticipated a grateful populace that would shower then with rose petals.


Many experts predicted such Iraqi animosity, but the war planners dismissed their warnings. "I know from lots of discussion and debates with these guys that they believe so deeply in the power of the democratic idea, and in people's view of the United States as benign, that they just assumed that we would be seen as liberators," says Bruce Jentleson, a former senior foreign policy advisor to Vice President Al Gore and author of 1994's With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush and Saddam, 1982?90.


Thus none of the troops sent into Iraq were prepared to be occupiers. The strain of doing a job they were not trained for while under siege from people they expected to welcome them is increasingly obvious.


"If Donald Rumsfeld was here. I'd ask him for his resignation," Spc. Clinton Deitz of the 3rd Infantry Division told ABC News last year!. A 3rd I.D. officer told the Christian Science Monitor last year that the troops "vent to anyone who will listen. They write letters, they cry, they yell. Many of them walk around looking visibly tired and depressed ... We feel like pawns in a game that we have no voice." The hawkish Weekly Standard reported in a cover story that week that "the soldier story now is that the 3rd Infantry is 'black' ? meaning critically short ? on Prozac supplies."


The intensity of the 3rd I.D.'s outspoken criticism of its leaders iwas unprecedented, says Lang. "You're getting professional, noncommissioned officers in the U.S. Army complaining to media people about the leadership," he says. "I can't remember an instance when a sergeant first class with 20 years of service says the same kind of stuff" he's hearing from such soldiers in Iraq. After all, such complaints are actually illegal under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which, says Lang, "forbids active-duty military personnel from publicly holding up to ridicule people in the chain of command above them."


It's a dangerous spiral, Walt says. "We are being forced to take much more aggressive action against potential resistance. The more you go out and have to search people and search their homes and their mosques, the more angry they get. There's a lot more friction between American forces and the society than we'd like."

Cantori says the only way the situation can be stabilized now is by raising troop levels to those suggested by Shinseki , but doing so would be politically disastrous for Bush. "American public opinion is that troops should be coming home," he says. "If they send two divisions of troops right now, it's an indication that their policy has failed."


Besides, there simply aren't enough soldiers available. Lang points out that forces were scaled back during the early ninetys in the first Bush and Clinton administrations, and that there are only three divisions available to be rotated into Iraq, two in the Army and one in the Marines. "We are stretched way too thin," says Tauscher.


Unfortunately for the administration, other countries aren't rushing to send their own contingents. According to a Wall Street Journal article in early 2004, "even allies who supported the war have failed to follow through with major commitments. Hungary pledged a truck company for Iraq. But defense officials later learned the Hungarians were willing to send 133 drivers, but no trucks or mechanics." That same week India refused to send 17,000 of its troops to Iraq without a U.N. mandate, despite American pressure and India's eagerness to improve its relationship with Washington. Even Britain has reduced its contribution, from 45,000 troops during the war to less than 15,000 now.


"India was very telling," says Jentleson. "There's a lot of discussion about a strategic partnership between the U.S. and India," he says, and for many Indian officials, helping the U.S. in Iraq makes sense as a way of gaining U.S. support against Pakistan. The Indian population, though, is viscerally opposed to "supporting American unilateralism, so even with expert foreign policy opinion behind it, they have to abandon it," he says.
"It's just like what happened in Turkey before the war," Jentleson continues. "The government said, 'Let's make a deal, because we're going to get a fair amount of money and U.S. support,' and their own parliament said no. The administration is really underestimating how pervasive is this concern about American unilateralism."


Many say the neocons have been blinkered by an essential inability to grasp others' opposition to their designs. "One of the things that seems to be a thread that runs throughout all of their thinking is a sort of big-stick view of the world, that the world tends to jump on the bandwagon and follow whoever the big dog is, that you can cow people and intimidate them and get lots of respect, that power generates its own respect," says Walt.


In this case, though, America's assertion of power has generated primarily resentment and Schadenfreude. "The Indian decision is not so much a serious blow in and of itself, but it's an indicator of world opinion that, having gone to war in defiance of the wishes of most of the international community, the rest of the world is not going to be in a hurry to bail America's chestnuts out of this fire," Walt says. "In fact, some countries are likely to be eager to let us stew in these juices for quite some time."


The situation can still be salvaged, but many say that to do so, the administration will have to let go of the bombastic unilateralism that brought it to war in the first place. They say Iraq can only be saved by appealing to the United Nations and giving up the dream that Americans can fashion the country into a beacon of pro-Western democracy in the Middle East that would undermine regimes like Syria's and Iran's. "That was always a goofy dream," says Walt.


"You have to be willing to accept the fact that the United States is not going to run Iraq," says Col. Lang. "Until you give up the idea that this was our victory and this is our occupied territory, the situation is not going to be stabilized."


To do this, though, would require a profound attitudinal shift in an administration that has clung stubbornly to its own assertions, whether or not the facts cooperate. "We may have to sit down and have a meal of humble pie, followed by a little crow, in order to deal with the loss of credibility that we have worldwide," says Rep. Tauscher.


Yet many think that behind the scenes, the neocons are scrambling. "I believe that they've been shocked by what's happened," says Col. Lang. "From all indications, they should have listened to General Shinsheki, it's obvious that the occupation would have gone much better if they had." He went on, "The architects of this war did not want American troops to be there in large numbers for very long, for two reasons. First, they understand that if you had to occupy the country for a long period of time, you were going to look like an imperialist power, and that was going to cause a lot of trouble."

Secondly, he says, "if you have to tie up a lot of your forces in Iraq for a long period of time, you can't go off and threaten others. The whole idea was we were going to teach the Iraqis a lesson and that lesson was also going to be learned by the North Koreans and the Syrians. It's much tougher to threaten North Korea when much of your army is sitting in Iraq."

"Even given their own objectives," he says, "they blew this one big-time."


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