Rumsfeld cutting to the chase

Discussion in 'Politics' started by hapaboy, Mar 18, 2003.

  1. ROFL... nice one...
     
    #11     Mar 19, 2003


  2. :D LOL,,,,,,
     
    #12     Mar 19, 2003
  3. Let's smoke Mo out and give him justice... :D
     
    #13     Mar 19, 2003

  4. ...you can't , muslims aren't allowed to smoke!
     
    #14     Mar 19, 2003
  5. ROFL...
     
    #15     Mar 19, 2003

  6. Why is it that when white guys try to impersonate Muslim Arabs, they always make the same basic mistakes?

    Tips for 'Mohammedarkram' and the Anthrax mailer:
    Speaking in English peppered with simple Arabic words like 'Jihad' and 'Allah' shows that you don't know Arabic. An Arab terrorist speaking in English will say 'God', not Allah.

    In order to sound like a real Muslim, you can't just call western Democracies 'evil' and 'satanic' without playing up your victim role, peppered with exaggurations & flat out lies. Get lots of fatcs wrong too, and pretend there's such a thing as Palestine... Good sample sentence:
    _____
    You are starving the Iraqi children! Five million innocent Iraqi children have starved because the evil warmonger Bush has imposed sanctions against the people of Iraq. You starve the Iraqi people while letting the butcher Sharon brutally occupy Palestine. The zionists are shooting tank shells at children, and bulldozing people's houses, while you supply the bulldozers.
    End the oppression of Palestine of Iraq!
    ______
    Thank you, and good luck with your Arab impersonation efforts.
     
    #16     Mar 19, 2003
  7. munich

    munich

    #17     Mar 19, 2003
  8. Wild?
     
    #18     Mar 19, 2003
  9. #19     Mar 19, 2003
  10. no-nonsense dictators are great, as long as they are right. seems the military guys are setting up an escape, ready to jump ship on rumsfeld if the ground fighting turns ugly....

    =============


    Rumsfeld's War Strategy Under Fire
    By Joseph L. Galloway
    Knight Ridder Newspapers
    3-25-03

    WASHINGTON - Five days into the war, the optimistic assumptions of the Pentagon's civilian war planners have yet to be realized, the risks of the campaign are becoming increasingly apparent and some current and retired military officials are warning that there may be a mismatch between Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's strategy and the force he's sent to carry it out.

    The outcome of the war isn't in doubt: Iraq's forces are no match for America and its allies. But, so far, defeating them is proving to be harder, and it could prove to be longer and costlier in American and Iraqi lives than the architects of the American war plan expected.

    Despite the aerial pounding they've taken, it's not clear that Saddam Hussein, his lieutenants or their praetorian guard are either shocked or awed. Instead of capitulating, some regular Iraqi army units are harassing American supply lines. Contrary to American hopes - and some officials' expectations - no top commander of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard has capitulated. Even some ordinary Iraqis are greeting advancing American and British forces as invaders, not as liberators.

    "This is the ground war that was not going to happen in (Rumsfeld's) plan," said a Pentagon official. Because the Pentagon didn't commit overwhelming force, "now we have three divisions strung out over 300-plus miles and the follow-on division, our reserve, is probably three weeks away from landing."

    Asked Monday about concerns that the coalition force isn't big enough, Defense Department spokesperson Victoria Clarke replied: "... most people with real information are saying we have the right mix of forces.

    Knowledgeable defense and administration officials say Rumsfeld and his civilian aides at first wanted to commit no more than 60,000 American troops to the war on the assumption that the Iraqis would capitulate in two days.

    Intelligence officials say Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and other Pentagon civilians ignored much of the advice of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency in favor of reports from the Iraqi opposition and from Israeli sources that predicted an immediate uprising against Saddam once the Americans attacked.

    The officials said Rumsfeld also made his disdain for the Army's heavy divisions very clear when he argued about the war plan with Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the allied commander. Franks wanted more and more heavily armed forces, said one senior administration official; Rumsfeld kept pressing for smaller, lighter and more agile ones, with much bigger roles for air power and special forces.

    "Our force package is very light," said a retired senior general. "If things don't happen exactly as you assumed, you get into a tangle, a mismatch of your strategy and your force. Things like the pockets (of Iraqi resistance) in Basra, Umm Qasr and Nasariyah need to be dealt with forcefully, but we don't have the forces to do it."

    "The Secretary of Defense cut off the flow of Army units, saying this thing would be over in two days," said a retired senior general who has followed the evolution of the war plan. "He shut down movement of the 1st Cavalry Division and the1st Armored Division. Now we don't even have a nominal ground force."

    In addition, said senior administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, Rumsfeld and his civilian aides rewrote parts of the military services' plans for shipping U.S. forces to the Persian Gulf, which they said resulted in a number of mistakes and delays, and also changed plans for calling up some reserve and National Guard units.

    "There was nothing too small for them to meddle with," said one senior official. "It's caused no end of problems, but I think we've managed to overcome them all."

    Dorff and others said that the nightmare scenario is that allied forces might punch through to the Iraqi capital and then get bogged down in house-to-house fighting in a crowded city.

    "If these guys fight and fight hard for Baghdad, with embedded Baathists stiffening their resistance at the point of a gun, then we are up the creek," said one retired general.

    Reports from the field said virtually every one of the estimated 30 to 40 Apache Longbows came back shot full of holes, as the Iraqis fired everything they had at them. One did not come back, and its two-man crew apparently was taken prisoner.

    "Every division should have two brigades of MLRS launches for a campaign like this," the general said. "They do not, and the question in the end will be why they don't."

    He said the Air Force was bombing day and night, but its strikes have so far failed to produce the anticipated capitulation and uprising by the Iraqi people.

    One senior administration official put it this way: "'Shock and Awe' is Air Force bull---!"
     
    #20     Mar 25, 2003