New RAND study says what many of us have been saying all along

[CSM]

....
and I ask you: do you really believe that air dropped ordinance is so accurate that you can run 1700 bombing sorties on the city of Baghdad in three days and not necessarily take out a shitload of civilians?

we HAD to kill 'em to save 'em!!

About as accurate as flying planes into buildings to convert the infidel.... accurate enough to get a reaction and send the message.

 

[Warner]

Knowing what we know now? Of course it seems like a bad decision. You can't justifiably hold people accountable for their actions based on what you now know in hindsight, however. I am also a righty who believes that the U.S. being in Iraq simply is no longer worth it.

Several reason have been given as to why we should stay. It's in our best interests and we are liberating a country. The problem is I'm not sure the U.S. can morally claim both of those things at the same time. We may be doing what we think is in our best interest (where the war on terror is concerned it probably isn't the best option) and at the same time we're trying to couch that by saying we're liberating a country. We can't claim a lot of moral high ground when we only liberate those countries that our in our best interests to do so.

Grrr... Sorry to burst your ideological bubble but we invade Iraq for the oil, all the rest is just BS.

Have you spent even one day in an Arab country? Do you have even the slightest concept of how their culture works? I can tell the answer is no.

Islam is not compatible with democracy - simple as that. Under Islam any time there are 3 or more men in a group, one must be selected as leader and then he runs the show. There is never any voting - it is contrary to the Koran.

If you do not learn who it is we are fighting you have no chance of devising how we might find a way to live peacefully with them. Assuming they are basically like us is exactly the foolishness that got us where we are and continuing to do so will get us even deeper in this shit hole.

 

[Bern80]

That was definitely my understanding of carpet bombing in WWII, it was definitely my understanding of the firebombing of Dresden, it was definitely my understanding about Hiroshima and Nagasaki...it was definitely my understanding of call for fire missions in Vietnam where entire villages were taken out because there were VC inside some of the structures returning fire... etc. etc.

and I ask you: do you really believe that air dropped ordinance is so accurate that you can run 1700 bombing sorties on the city of Baghdad in three days and not necessarily take out a shitload of civilians?

we HAD to kill 'em to save 'em!!

No idea, that's why I asked a vet.

 

[CSM]

Islam is not compatible with democracy - simple as that. Under Islam any time there are 3 or more men in a group, one must be selected as leader and then he runs the show. There is never any voting - it is contrary to the Koran.

If the above quote is true...HOW THE HECK can we live peacefully with them and HOW THE HECK can they possibly live here without plotting the overthrow of the government of this country????

 

[Bern80]

Grrr... Sorry to burst your ideological bubble but we invade Iraq for the oil, all the rest is just BS.

Yes and no. Would it be nice to have another oil ally in the mid-east? Sure. They aren't exactley vital to our supply of it however.

Have you spent even one day in an Arab country? Do you have even the slightest concept of how their culture works? I can tell the answer is no.

Islam is not compatible with democracy - simple as that. Under Islam any time there are 3 or more men in a group, one must be selected as leader and then he runs the show. There is never any voting - it is contrary to the Koran.

Yes I get that. Has nothing to do with the point I'm makeing.

If you do not learn who it is we are fighting you have no chance of devising how we might find a way to live peacefully with them. Assuming they are basically like us is exactly the foolishness that got us where we are and continuing to do so will get us even deeper in this shit hole.

I really hope you're generalizing here and not presuming what I know or don't know.

 

[maineman]

About as accurate as flying planes into buildings to convert the infidel.... accurate enough to get a reaction and send the message.

I suppose it would have been more appropriate to rain down shock and awe on Saudi Arabia then, instead of Iraq, given the fact that the bad guys in the airplanes on 9/11 nearly all were Saudis and none were Iraqis. Who do you think we really sent a message to by constant bombing sorties on Baghdad for three days?

An analogy:

you kill my dog and in retribution, I go across the street and burn down our neighbor's house.

 

[CSM]

I suppose it would have been more appropriate to rain down shock and awe on Saudi Arabia then, instead of Iraq, given the fact that the bad guys in the airplanes on 9/11 nearly all were Saudis and none were Iraqis. Who do you think we really sent a message to by constant bombing sorties on Baghdad for three days?

An analogy:

you kill my dog and in retribution, I go across the street and burn down our neighbor's house.

The analogy works for me. While you are at it, I have a list of dogs and houses (and dog houses) so maybe we could cooperate a bit.

From a military PoV, three days of bombing the enemy is appropriate....of course, the debate is whether or not we were bombing the "right" enemy.

 

[maineman]

The analogy works for me. While you are at it, I have a list of dogs and houses (and dog houses) so maybe we could cooperate a bit.

From a military PoV, three days of bombing the enemy is appropriate....of course, the debate is whether or not we were bombing the "right" enemy.

I agree completely. If Iraq, the country, had attacked us, shock and awe for three days would have been entirely appropriate.... perhaps understated!

 

[Alpha1]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/02/11/rand.insurgencies/index.html

The Rand Corp. report characterizes "U.S. military intervention and occupation in the Muslim world" as "at best inadequate, at worst counter-productive, and, on the whole, infeasible."

I wonder if the hard core partisan republicans will denigrate the RAND Corporation as being surrender monkeys?

Why would anyone denigrate the Rand Corp. as being 'surrender monkeys"?

They are not advocating running away, or immediate pullout,,its only the Democrats advising that nonsense....

"Violent extremism in the Muslim world is the gravest national security threat the United States faces," said David C. Gompert, the report's lead author and a senior fellow at Rand. Because this threat is likely to persist and could grow, it is important to understand the United States is currently not capable of adequately addressing the challenge."

Can't argue with any of that

Looking at some 90 conflicts since World War II, the report concludes that establishing "representative, competent and honest" local government is the way to go.
Sounds like exactly what we are trying to do



"Foreign forces cannot substitute for effective local governments, and they can even weaken their legitimacy," said co-author John Gordon. The study says the United States would have more success if the insurgency were defused early and it must develop ways to interpret early "indicators and warnings."

Along with building "effective and legitimate local governments," the report says the United States must do a better job of organizing, training and equipping local security forces, and gathering and sharing information.

To beef up counterinsurgency efforts, local governments must develop "job training and placement of ex-combatants; an efficient and fair justice system, including laws, courts and prisons; and accessible mass lower education," it says.

"When it comes to building these and other civil capabilities abroad, the United States is alarmingly weak," Gompert said. "To fix this problem, the federal government will need a dramatic increase in civilian capabilities, new organizational arrangements, and more flexible personnel policies."

More money in foreign aid, more civilian professionals and help from U.S. allies and international groups are needed, the report said.

Not much new in the whole thing...I don't see them saying the US needs to pull completely out and run away, so it makes me think MM either didn't even read this or more likely didn't understand it...

 

[Alpha1]

I suppose it would have been more appropriate to rain down shock and awe on Saudi Arabia then, instead of Iraq, given the fact that the bad guys in the airplanes on 9/11 nearly all were Saudis and none were Iraqis. Who do you think we really sent a message to by constant bombing sorties on Baghdad for three days?

An analogy:

you kill my dog and in retribution, I go across the street and burn down our neighbor's house.

shock and awe on Saudi Arabia? ..............I guess that would make sense to you...obviously you must be part of the numbskull population that believes 9/11 and Iraq were connected....

 

[Alpha1]

No idea, that's why I asked a vet.

Well you asked the wrong one if he somehow imagines todays air ordinance is even remotely like the bombs of WWII or Vietnam.....obviously not perfection, but far cry from the A bombs on Japan...

 

[rayboyusmc]

Wrong as usual. What most of us do is remind you that once we crossed into Iraq the REASONS for invading became moot, pointless , irrelevant.

Not completely true. This simplistic approach then holds no one accountable for this screw up. It also helps US to repeat the same mistake again. Once we crossed the line, it did change things, but it didn't change the fact it was a screw-up to begin with. This war wasn't needed. Please don't forget that.


We need to be looking for the best solution now, which may be staying there a hundred years or getting out as soon as we are able to. This might mean waiting for the Iraqis to take over and it might not. Staying the course when the course is broken and you don't make any adjustments is just plain stupid and criminal.

No one has a real answer right now.

 

[rayboyusmc]

Notable RAND participants
David L. Aaron — Deputy National Security Advisor under Carter and drafter of the NATO treaty
Henry H. Arnold — General, United States Air Force — RAND founder
Kenneth Arrow — economist, Nobel Laureate, developed the impossibility theorem in social choice theory
Bruno Augenstein — V.P., physicist, mathematician and space scientist
Paul Baran — one of the developers of packet switching which was used in Arpanet and later networks like the Internet
Barry Boehm — software economics expert, inventor of COCOMO
Harold L. Brode — physicist, leading nuclear weapons effects expert
Bernard Brodie — Military strategist and nuclear architect
David S. C. Chu — Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, 2001–present
Samuel Cohen — inventor of the neutron bomb in 1958
Franklin R. Collbohm — Aviation Engineer, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder and former director and trustee
George Dantzig — mathematician, creator of the simplex algorithm for linear programming
James F. Digby — American Military Strategist, author of first treatise on precision guided munitions 1949 - 2007
Donald Wills Douglas, Sr. — President, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder
Daniel Ellsberg — leaker of the Pentagon Papers
Francis Fukuyama — academic and author of The End of History and the Last Man
James J. Gillogly — cryptographer and computer scientist
Cecil Hastings — programmer, wrote software engineering classic, Approximations for Digital Computers (Princeton 1955)
William E. Hoehn — Senior Policy Advisor to Senator Sam Nunn, Visiting Professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the Coca-Cola Foundation Eminent Practitioner in Residence at Georgia Institute of Technology
Brian Michael Jenkins — terrorism expert, Senior Advisor to the President of the RAND Corporation, and author of Unconquerable Nation
Herman Kahn — theorist on nuclear war and one of the founders of scenario planning
Zalmay Khalilzad — U.S. Ambassador to United Nations
Henry Kissinger— US Secretary of State (1973-1977); National Security Advisor (1969-1975); Nobel Peace Prize Winner (1973)
Lewis "Scooter" Libby — Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff
Ray Mabus — Former ambassador, governor
Harry Markowitz — economist, developed the Portfolio Selection model that is still widely used in modern finance
Andrew W. Marshall — miltary strategist, director of the US DoD Office of Net Assessment
Margaret Mead — U.S. anthropologist
John Forbes Nash, Jr. — Nobel prize-winning mathematician
John von Neumann — mathematician, pioneer of the modern digital computer
Allen Newell — artificial intelligence
Paul O'Neill — Chairman in the late 1990s
Edmund Phelps — winner of 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics
W.V. Quine — famous philosopher
Arthur E. Raymond — Chief Engineer, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder
Condoleezza Rice — former trustee 1991–1997 and current Secretary of State for the United States (as of May 2006), former intern
Michael D. Rich — RAND Executive Vice President, 1993–present
Leo Rosten — academic and humorist
Donald Rumsfeld — Chairman of RAND Corporation from 1981–1986 and Secretary of Defense for the United States from 1975 to 1977 and 2001 to 2006.
Robert F. Salter — advocate of the vactrain maglev train concept
Paul Samuelson — economist, Nobel Laureate
Thomas C. Schelling — economist, winner of 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics
James Schlesinger — former Secretary of Defense and former Secretary of Energy
Lloyd Shapley — mathematician and game theorist
Herbert Simon — Nobel prize-winning economist
Peter Szanton — the policy analyst and former President of New York Rand
Katsuaki L. Terasawa — economist
James Thomson — RAND CEO, 1989–present
Albert Wohlstetter — Mathematician and Cold-War Strategist
Roberta Wohlstetter — Policy analyst and military historian

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND

 

[Alpha1]

I don't know what your point was in posting that list....no one is denigrating the Rand Corp. or their conclusions about terrorism and Muslim fanatics...

"Violent extremism in the Muslim world is the gravest national security threat the United States faces," said David C. Gompert, the report's lead author and a senior fellow at Rand. Because this threat is likely to persist and could grow, it is important to understand the United States is currently not capable of adequately addressing the challenge."

As a matter fact, we should all agree with this...

These fuckin' fanatics ARE the gravest national threat we face....

And we are ill equipped to adequately dealing with their fanaticism.

Even the surrender monkey Democrats must see the danger sooner or later....and conclude that running and hiding will not bring us safety...
and before the morons suggest it....converting to Islam is not an option...

 

[maineman]

Well you asked the wrong one if he somehow imagines todays air ordinance is even remotely like the bombs of WWII or Vietnam.....obviously not perfection, but far cry from the A bombs on Japan...

I am well aware of the precision of today's air dropped, and launched ordinance... and we both know I have forgotten a hell of a lot more about the military than YOU'LL ever know.

The POINT was... it is ridiculous to claim that Iraq was a "humanitarian" mission when we start the whole shebang off with shock and awe with 1700 bombing sorties on the country's most densely populated city....when we blithely toss a cruise missile into a crowded restaurant in hopes of killing a man who wasn't even anywhere near the spot. Casually accepted collateral damage and humanitarian mission don't really belong together.

 

[maineman]

I don't know what your point was in posting that list....no one is denigrating the Rand Corp. or their conclusions about terrorism and Muslim fanatics...

"Violent extremism in the Muslim world is the gravest national security threat the United States faces," said David C. Gompert, the report's lead author and a senior fellow at Rand. Because this threat is likely to persist and could grow, it is important to understand the United States is currently not capable of adequately addressing the challenge."

As a matter fact, we should all agree with this...

These fuckin' fanatics ARE the gravest national threat we face....

And we are ill equipped to adequately dealing with their fanaticism.

...and our stupid war in Iraq is counterproductive to our efforts to GET READY.

 

[Alpha1]

...and our stupid war in Iraq is counterproductive to our efforts to GET READY.

Considering the fact that they've been killing our citizens for about 30 years, I agree...our efforts to "get ready" are sorely lacking, hence, we fight them with the same tried and true methods we've relied on since the beginning of time....
Have you noted what the Rand people suggest....?

1 establishing "representative, competent and honest" local government is the way to go.

2 "Foreign forces cannot substitute for effective local governments

3 building "effective and legitimate local governments," the report says the United States must do a better job of organizing, training and equipping local security forces

4 To beef up counterinsurgency efforts, local governments must develop "job training and placement of ex-combatants;

5 an efficient and fair justice system, including laws, courts and prisons; and accessible mass lower education

6 More money in foreign aid,

7 more civilian professionals and help from U.S. allies and international groups are needed
---------------------------

Aren't these the EXACT issues the Bush Admin has been trying to accomplish...? Our success is lacking, but we are already trying to do what Rand suggests.....

 

[maineman]

except... none of those recommended missions are ones best undertaken by a large occupying military force.

thanks for playing.

 

[Alpha1]

except... none of those recommended missions are ones best undertaken by a large occupying military force.

thanks for playing.

Sounds like you've no more to say.....
Don't you want to elaborate on that.....enlighten us all a little....

In the midst of the car bombs, murders, and just people in general killing each other.....what exactly do you suggest, other than a large occupying force?

I, for one can't wait to hear your recommendations....

 

[Alpha1]

I am well aware of the precision of today's air dropped, and launched ordinance... and we both know I have forgotten a hell of a lot more about the military than YOU'LL ever know.

The POINT was... it is ridiculous to claim that Iraq was a "humanitarian" mission when we start the whole shebang off with shock and awe with 1700 bombing sorties on the country's most densely populated city....when we blithely toss a cruise missile into a crowded restaurant in hopes of killing a man who wasn't even anywhere near the spot. Casually accepted collateral damage and humanitarian mission don't really belong together.

Casually accepted collateral damage and humanitarian mission don't really belong together.....?

Thats taking the high and moral road.....simplistic, unrealistic, and just plain disingenuous, but its the high road.

When Clinton was flinging 45 or 50 Cruise missles on their 4 or 5 hour journey into the darkness of Afghanistan, was that targeting casual...alot can change in 4 or 5 hours....
How about the factories of the Sudan? was that not casually accepting collateral damage?

I even remember the crack Arianna Huffington made about that....

"THE decision to send Tomahawk cruise missiles against the El Shifa factory in Sudan turns out to have been based on evidence so flimsy that even James Bond would have refrained from acting on it."

Was Bosnia a humanitarian mission?
Remember any high altitude bombing there?
Think anybody wearing a dress or holding a kids hand might have been at the wrong place at the wrong time.....

So lets our collective heads out of the clouds and face reality.....war is ugly...even with precision bombs, but not as ugly as we could make it ....if thats our aim....