Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
Debriefing points made by a returned Soldier:
1- Things are going very well, especially with the Iraqi National Guard taking over checkpoints and raids and gathering intel with the confidence of the citizens. He is very proud of them and says they are extremely effective. Says they are bragging to American soldiers that they are getting more caches and bad guys than the Americans — which of course is exactly what the American soldiers want to hear!
2- The universal feeling with both Iraqis and Americans is that Zarqawi is a certifiably insane murderer, has largest, best-financed organization in the country.
3- Some “brainiac” in Baghdad thought up the money for guns program for Sadr which means his guys bring in their grandfather’s decrepit piece and get enough money to purchase two new Chinese AKs. Army tried that program early and discontinued it for that reason. Fortunately program not countrywide.
4- There have been no instances of US civilian command meddling in operations to call them off for political reasons. On the contrary, any reported “pull backs” have been at the request of military commanders on the ground balancing — their rightful judgment call — need for force against desire not to embitter the potentially friendly.
5- Najaf and Talafar both were highly successful operations from which US forces withdrew as planned because they succeeded. Sistani did not settle the matter at Najaf. He was brought in by the Army to take over after military mission succeeded. SOP. Talafar — a 3rd SBCT plus others mission — also highly successful, got rid of all the bad guys and established the ING and local police, who are handling well. Again, SOP.
6- The onset of the insurgency was no surprise, only the ING had not had time to train up sufficiently to meet it but is now doing that, which is a remarkable success both for them and for Petraeus and his team. The ING is fully reliable, many old Iraqi Army commanders who were not committed Baathists but are committed to Iraq as their mother nation and were actually British-trained from before 2003.
7- Also, the insurgency was not underestimated so much as its extent and sources could not have been foreseen by anyone but God — or a theologian, and none of those was consulted. The Army did not know and could not have known what was needed until the dust settled after the invasion. There was no way to know because there was no way to anticipate what would be left to work with. Basics were known to be needed — infrastructure repair and renewal, security force replacement, etc, — but until the work actually began on these aspects there was no way to tell how much and of what kind of work would be needed. They had to find out first what they had to work WITH and only then could they make a realistic plan to do what is prudent and necessary. And they made such a plan and it is working, very well in fact. Fortunately much infrastructure remained for immediate use but so much of it also had to be replaced. The needs of recruiting and training a new security force could not be foreseen until boots were on the ground and the effort itself actually commenced with what was at hand for a start. The accomplishments in these fields of rebuilding Iraq have been just magnificent.
8- On the question of whether more troops were need to start with and for a little while into the rebuilding, he thinks that it could be argued theoretically that more were needed but that actually most of them would have had nothing to do or an impossible task to do. In other words, they would have been wasted. One such impossible task is sealing the borders. There is no way to do this. A huge earth berm is being built along the borders to keep out vehicles, but there is no way to keep out the people. We cannot do that here, even with a huge force of human and machine assets stationed on the borders. So actually, more troops would have been wasteful of resources. For example, when the insurgency hit a year into reconstruction there could have been no fresh troops to rotate into the theatre — exactly when they would have been needed since everyone would have been there a year. He feels the troop strength turned out to be just about right, which of course is what the ground and theatre commanders have been saying also.
9- He has seen no sign that senior civilian or military command in Washington is out of touch or micromanaging. On the contrary, military command is very much in charge and especially Civil Affairs should be extremely praised and credited for the work they have done. The Army is now a CA force with convince-ability (my compound for what he was describing).
10- Operational linkages of types of fighting units (SOF, Stryker, Ranger, Delta, ING) are superb and extremely effective and operational linkages of those with mechanical aids (drones, sniper weapons and teams, 50cals on joy sticks inside Strykers, etc) are also superb. BTN TOC watches targets from drones and calls in Strykers at 65mph, other American assets and local ING units with extremely rapid and decisive effect. His last op, a day or two before he left, was a classic of this new and now common genre, easily integrating elements from all of the assets just mentioned to nab a “cleric” and his militia at a remote mosque they had been watching via drone. He said it was great fun, a super way to end his time in country and also a mission success. He said there was a “squirter,” a guy who ran from the scene at 90mph in a vehicle. A drone followed him to a home in Mosul, 20+ KM from the operation, and Strykers near there moved in and took him down.
11- Reporters are making up stories, reporting statements of dissident Iraqis as truth, without cross-checking, staying in their hotels rather than riding with the units, fantasizing what their editors want to hear, taking their stories, as truth, from Al Arabia and Al Jazeera, and the media here are retailing a totally inaccurate sense of what is going on, including not acknowledging the great accomplishments of the Iraqis themselves. I mentioned that the media are not so much retailing inaccuracy as calumny. They are political arms of the Democratic National Committee and they hate the President. Anyhow, he really had a lot of fun there and is confident of great work that the Army and the American military — he even praised the Marines! — and especially the Iraqis are doing, especially the ING (Iraqi National Guard).
Update 1: ” … far from having any insight into world affairs, he’s a slave to conventional wisdom.”
Let’s say he is, what insights SHOULD he have, that do not conform to conventional wisdom (which usually goes unwise after its moments of applicability)? What would you, Paul, do right now in, say, MENA were you Oval Office Occupant?
Which of us should check clean for honesty? Self-evident answer. So, that’s a relative, not an absolute, measure of fitness for office. Useful but not determinative.
What should be done? Can you develop answers to that question in lieu of nipping at heels?
In 2002-3 there was but one official national voice warning about insufficiencies in the coming invasion: CSA Eric Shinseki, who argued for 600K invasion and *occupation* force. He was right. Not a few lesser lights feared another half-measures invasion and outcome. Even the surge, proving Shinseki’s urgings, was half-measures politically made successful, tenuously, by the skill of certain leadership serendipitously in the AO simultaneously.
The quote to Stern has Trump less than enthusiastic for fear of more half-measures (as in Desert Storm). In the event, his anticipation was accurate. OIF succeeded just barely and without sustainability, and the reason for that was the political decision, by the White House, to not take the whole country to war. They — White House and their commercial backers — wanted a politically cheap war. They got the opposite.
So, Paul, what would you do today in, say, MENA? What’s it look like outside the arm-chair?
Update 2: This is evergreen: YEP: After boasting for three years that he “ended” the Iraq War, [The Fraud] says it was Bush’s fault
Update 3: Murphy’s Law: The Lessons Of Iraq
Update 4: How Desert Storm Destroyed The US Military
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
