An Average Joe On the Situation in Iraq

[Toad]

As wulfie points out Nash, the search for WMD is a long way from over.

Today's news organizations foster a "short attention span theater" approach to affairs.

"Jeez it's been three whole MONTHS already!"

[Arfann]

Originally posted by Toad
Talking about people who have higher clearances that know stuff they can tell you but can't tell you how they know.

In some cases the fact itself is unclassified. How the fact was discovered and verified is highly classified.

You can either believe them or not. But you simply don't know what they know or how they discovered and verified it.

There is a tremendous difference between someone with rank or higher clearance giving orders and instructions to subordinates and someone discussing issues on a public forum.

[Zippatuh]

Thanks Dowding.

As far as Uranium, that was always speculation as far as I am concerned.  That was an issue to be dealt with but not the main one.

So, did we go because of the WMD program?  Or did we go because of the amount of WMD�s they possessed?  It�s my impression that it was the amount but now since none have been found yet we want to say �well it was the program that we were after, not the quantity�.  One may be the same.

Toad, yes three months isn�t that long and as I said I�ll hold out until the end of the year to see how it all plays out.  What I have problems understanding is the level to which we were told, or rather the amount of chemical and biological weapons that were in their direct possession.

It seems logical to me that if the quantities were that large we would have run across at least an 8oz can somewhere.

The problem as I see it is in the end if we don�t find anything but have proof, documents and statements, that yes they indeed existed but were completely destroyed and scrubbed before or during the invasion that�s not going to help us at all with the political war.  It will immediately start with the evidence being somehow invented or falsified by us.  What�s the saying, possession is nine-tenths the law?  Well so is perception.

It will make no difference if in the end we cannot justify the statements made about the quantities and magnitude of the program if we are unable to show the physical evidence in the form of 1000�s of gallons of something.

Krusher, as far as the marriage thing, you�re right it was religious but picked up by the state.  So now actually it is no longer a religious process but a tax status.  I do not believe that the federal government should be that involved in how the state�s run their business from day to day.  The farther I can keep them out of my pocket the better.  It needs to be worked out in the justice system not the executive branch.  Let one state pass it and another ban it.  Let�s roll it up through the court system and let the Supremes finally hash it out if need be.  He should not have the power to dictate his own religious beliefs on the nation though.  That is my problem with it.

[GrimCO]

Hey there Zipp,

I for one appreciate the open hearted approach to your post.

Here's how I feel about it...  Saddam may be a maniacal murdering piece of dog dung, but he isn't stupid.

No country in the Middle East is particularly fond of Iraq. Saddam gained his support by playing the America vs. Middle East card. Had he used WMD's, much of the support and sympathy he garnered would have been lost, and also would have justified the United States decision to wage war.

By hiding any WMD's, the failure of the United States to find these weapons paints us as lying fools. I myself believe that Iraq had these weapons. I also believe that he had plenty of time to hide them. It's a big desert out there, and all it would take is a few bulldozers in the middle of the night to bury tons of drums containing chemicals out in the middle of nowhere.

This is of course only my opinion, and I could obviously be wrong about it. But the smartest thing Saddam could have done would be to hide the WMD's. If he did this, the outcome is obvious because we're seeing it in action right now. We look like fools.

[Toad]

Well, IMO, Wulfie's history here with respect to the accuracy of what he says is well above standard vis-a-vis the rest of the board.

So, I give his words a lot of weight.

You may choose to react differently.

[Toad]

Zip, as I 've also said many times, I'm willing to wait but there will come a time when responsibility and accountability come to the fore.

He's Commander In Chief. In the end it was his call that sent us to war. In the end, he should be judged on the accuracy of that call (amongst other things).

Now, we really can't do a thing about it until the next elections, can we?

So I can easily relax and see what develops between now and then. 90 days? It can be an eternity or a mere moment, depending on personal choice and attitude. For me in this case, it's a moment.

[Arfann]

Originally posted by wulfie
That must have been 'interesting' to say the least. I get the feeling you were in the field. Have you read any books by Vietnam veterans? If so, which do you think give the most accurate portrayal?

Mike/wulfie

p.s. I may be offline for a couple of weeks before you reply to this. If you have a book recommendation send it to me via personal message on the AH BBS please.

It is hard to reccommend one book over another on this subject. The problem is that there were so many different experiences. One might have flown close air support, another FAC, another helicopter ops, another in the mud for a year, another in an air conditioned office in Saigon. All you can do to get the overall picture is read all you can find that are written by vets. Even then, a remf office weenie might write a "historical novel" about ground pounders and be totally off the mark. Also, many times the up-front participant actually knows very little about "the big picture", and what he does know is what he's told by "the man".

P.S. The private message function seems to be disabled.

[-dead-]

Originally posted by Zippatuh
So, did we go because of the WMD program?  Or did we go because of the amount of WMD�s they possessed?  It�s my impression that it was the amount but now since none have been found yet we want to say �well it was the program that we were after, not the quantity�.  One may be the same.

Toad, yes three months isn�t that long and as I said I�ll hold out until the end of the year to see how it all plays out.  What I have problems understanding is the level to which we were told, or rather the amount of chemical and biological weapons that were in their direct possession.

It seems logical to me that if the quantities were that large we would have run across at least an 8oz can somewhere.

The problem as I see it is in the end if we don�t find anything but have proof, documents and statements, that yes they indeed existed but were completely destroyed and scrubbed before or during the invasion that�s not going to help us at all with the political war.  It will immediately start with the evidence being somehow invented or falsified by us.  What�s the saying, possession is nine-tenths the law?  Well so is perception.

It will make no difference if in the end we cannot justify the statements made about the quantities and magnitude of the program if we are unable to show the physical evidence in the form of 1000�s of gallons of something.

Have any of you guys listened to the Scott Ritter interview linked in another thread? I'm still not sure if he's telling the truth or not - but he claims that by 1996 Iraq's WMD manufacturing capability was totally destroyed. An interesting bit in the interview, which can I'm sure be verified by someone on this BBS, was when he claimed that Iraq's VX agent has a viability of 1-8 days (I've seen estimates of 14 days on the net) and the liquid bulk anthrax - the last documented batch was 1991 - has a shelf life (in optimal storage conditions) of 3 years.

He further reckons the much vaunted missing WMDs may actually never have been produced - the Iraqi's never claimed they had produced as much as the US claims they did, but their production facilities were capable of producing that amount and UNSCOM had to assume that they had produced much more than the Iraqis claimed - to be on the safe side. After all - politicians do have a habit of indulging in "terminological inexactitudes" a lot.

He does also present a plausible reason for why the Iraq blocked UN Inspectors:
According to Ritter, the 2% of inspections blocked by the Iraqis were not places where weapons could be stored - they were presidential palaces and C3 and Intelligence facilities. UNSCOM  weren't even looking for weapons there - they were looking for documentation to clear up where the missing WMDs were or if they actually existed. The Iraqi government alledgedly refused only until UNSCOM provided them with a reason why they wanted to search those facilities and guarantees that the information gathered there would not be used to attempt to kill Hussein. Certainly the Iraqis were proved not to be being paranoid when they claimed (correctly) that UNSCOM was packed with US & UK spies. Ritter argues that they may also have been more than justified in questioning UNSCOM's motives in searching these non-WMD facilities: According to Ritter, in the December 1998 bombing campaign of the 112 targets bombed - 96 were "intelligence targets related to the security of Saddam Husein" and directly derived from UNSCOM inspections. Of course, verifying those bombing stats would be an enormous pain - and probably unfeasible without some sort of security clearance, so to all intents and purposes this may be uncheckable. Which is why I still can't fully believe him, but he makes for an interesting and plausible-sounding alternative to the Whitehouse's version.

[Toad]

forwarded to me by an old superior that held a much higher clearance than mine.

Just a differing view of what's going on, something to compare and contrast to the daily news.

I hope all will understand it's not my intent to offend. I'm sure some of what is said here will raise some hackles. I'd hope though that it is viewed rather as a "report from the front" and as such will carry some non politically correct personal views from the writer. A person that perhaps HAS a much different view due to being in the action rather than 3000 miles away behind a TV tube.

(I edited out the proanity and the personal details)

******

Subject:Message From Iraq.

It Ain't Necessarily So.

Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003, 11:09:09 GMT

Hey Guys, sorry it's been so long since I've sent anything but a quick note to you individually. However things have been pretty hectic since the end of hostilities and the start of the real war. Despite what the *******s in the press like to say over and over:

1) We did expect some armed resistance from the Ba'ath Party and Feydaheen;

2) It isn't any worse than expected;

3) Things are getting better each day, and

4) The morale of the troops is A-1, except for the normal squeaking and griping.

My brief love affair with the press, especially the guys who had the cajones to be embedded with the troops during the fighting, is probably over, especially since we are back being criticized by the same Roland Headly types that used to hang around the Palestine Hotel drinking Baghdad Bob's whiskey and parroting his ridiculous B.S.

I'm in Baghdad now, since SpOpComm 5 relocated here from Qatar. It looks, sounds and smells about the same but at least you can get Maker's Mark at the local OC. We came up in mid-June to help set up operation Scorpion and Sidewinder. It represents a major (and long overdue) shift in tactics.

Instead of being sitting ducks for the ragheads we now are going after the worthless pieces of fecal matter. [O.D. NOTE: VERY understated!] I'm no longer baby-sitting the pukes from CNN and the canned hams from the networks, but have a combat mission coordinating a bunch of A teams, seeking, finding and rooting out the mostly non-Iraqis that are well-armed, well-paid (in U.S. dollars) and always waiting to wail for the press and then shoot some GI in the back in the midst of a crowd.

The only reason the GIs are pissed (not demoralized) is that they cannot touch, must less waste, those taunting bags of gas that scream in their faces and riot on cue when they spot a camera man from ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN or NBC. If they did, then they know the next nightly news will be about how chaotic things are and how much the Iraqi people hate us.

Some do. But the vast majority don't and more and more see that the GIs don't start anything, are by-and-large friendly, and very compassionate, especially to kids and old people. I saw a bunch of 19 year-olds from the 82nd Airborne not return fire coming from a mosque until they got a group of elderly civilians out of harm�s way. So did the Iraqis.

A bunch of bad guys used a group of women and children as human shields. The GIs surrounded them and negotiated their surrender fifteen hours later and when they discovered a three year-old girl had been injured by the big tough guys throwing her down a flight of stairs, the GIs called in a MedVac helicopter to take her and her mother to the nearest field hospital. The Iraqis watched it all, and there hasn't been a problem in that neighborhood since. How many such stories, and there are hundreds of them, ever get reported in the fair and balanced press? You know, nada.

The civilians who have figured it out faster than anyone are the local teenagers. They watch the GIs and try to talk to them and ask questions about America and now wear wrap-around sunglasses, GAP T-shirts, Dockers (or even better Levis with the red tags) and Nikes (or Egyptian knock-offs, but with the "swoosh") and love to listen to AFN when the GIs play it on their radios.They participate less and less in the demonstrations and help keep us informed when a wannabe bad-ass shows up in the neighborhood.

The younger kids are going back to school again, don't have to listen to some mullah rant about the Koran ten hours a day, and they get a hot meal.

They see the same GIs who man the corner checkpoint, helping clear the playground, install new swingsets and create soccer fields. I watched a bunch of kids playing baseball in one playground, under the supervision of a couple of GIs from Oklahoma. They weren't very good but were having fun, probably more than most Little Leaguers.

The place is still a mess but most of it has been for years. But the Hospitals are open and are in the process of being brought into the 21st Century. The MOs and visiting surgeons from home are teaching their docs new techniques and one American pharmaceutical company (you know, the kind that all the hippies like to scream about as greedy) donated enough medicine to stock 45 hospital pharmacies for a year.

Safe water is more available.

Electricity has been restored to pre-war levels but saboteurs keep cutting the lines. And  the old Ba'ath big shots are upset because they can't get fuel for their private generators. One actually complained to General McKeirnan, who told him it was a rough world.

The MPs are screening the 80,000 Iraqi police force and rehabbing the ones that weren't goons, shake-down artists or torturers like they did in East Berlin, Kosovo and Afghanistan. There are dual patrols of Iraqi cops and U.S./U.K./Polish MPs now in most of the larger cities.

 Basra has 3.5 million inhabitants.

 Mosul is a city of 2 million.

 Kirkuk has 1 million.

How many and hundreds of other small towns have not had riots or shootings?

The vast majority.

The six U.K. cops were killed in a small Shiite town by the ex-cops they were re-habbing. According to a Royal Marine colonel I talked to, the town now has about twenty permanent vacancies in its police force.

Mick, he's a big potato eater from Belfast named Huggins and knows how to handle terrorists after twenty years fighting with the IRA. He sends his regards and says he'd love to have you here. Thinks you'd make a great police chief, even though the cops would be more frightened of you than the local hoods (then he laughed) I heard one doofus on MSNBC the other night talk about how "nearly 60" Gis have been killed since 01 May.

The truth is that 21 GIs have been killed in combat, mostly from ambush, from 01 May through 30 June, Another 29 have been killed by accidents or other causes (two drowned while swimming in the Tigris).

The MSNBC turd is the same jerk who reported on the air that "dozens of GIs" were badly burned when two RPGs hit a truck belonging to an Engineer Battalion that was parked by a construction site. The truck was hit and burned, three GIs received minor injuries (including the driver who burnt his hand) and three warriors of Allah were promptly sent to enjoy their 72 slave girls in Paradise. Hell of a way to get laid.

A mosque in that ******** Fallujah blew up this morning while the local imam, a creep named Fahlil (who was one of the biggest local loudmouths that frequently appeared on CNN) was helping a Syrian Hamas member teach eight teenagers how to make belt bombs. Right away the local Feyhadeen propaganda group started wailing that the Americans hit it with a TOW missile (If they had there wouldn't have been any mosque left!) and the usual suspects took to the streets for CNN and BBC. One fool was dragging around a piece of tin with blood on it, claiming it was part of the missile.

The cameras rolled and the idiot started repeating his story, then one of my guys asked him in Arabic where he had left the rag he usually wore around his face that made him look like a girl. He was a local leader of the Feyhadeen. We took the clown in custody and were asked rather indignantly by the twit from BBC if we were trying to shut up "the poor man who had seen his mosque and friends blown up." I told the airy-fairy who the raghead was and if he knew Arabic (which he obviously didn't) he'd know he was a Palestinian. I suggested we take him down to the local jail and we'd lock him and his cameraman in a cell with the "poor man" and they could interview him until we took him to headquarters. They declined the invitation.

Guess what played on the Bull**** Broadcasting System that evening? Did the Americans blow up a mosque? See the poor man who is still in a state of shock over losing his mosque and relatives? Yep. Our friend the Palestinian.

Our search and destroy missions are largely at night, free of reporters and generally terrifying to those brave warriors of Allah.

The only thing that frightens them more is hearing the word "Gitmo". The word is out that a trip to �Gitmo� is not a Caribbean vacation and they usually start squealing like the little mice they are, when an interrogator mentions "Gitmo". No wonder the International Red Cross, the National Council of Churches and the French keep protesting about the place.

They know it has proven to be very effective in keeping several hundred real fanatical psychopaths in check and very frankly would rather see them cut loose to go kill some more GIs or innocent Americans, just to make W. look bad.

We have about 200 really bad guys in custody now and probably will park them in the desert behind a triple roll of razor wire, backed up by a couple of Bradleys pointed their way, if they decide to riot. Maybe a few will get to Gitmo but most are human garbage that wouldn't take on your five-year old grandson face-to-face. The more we go after them and not vice-versa I think we will see the sniper attacks go down. Yeah, they'll get lucky now and then, but it's showtime, fellows.

[Toad]

Our first objective is to get the die-hards off the street (or make them too scared to come out in them) and destroy their caches of weapons (we have collected more than 227,000 AK-47s and that is only the tip of the iceburg; Curly bought nearly a million of them from our pal Vladimir), then cut off their money supply, mostly from Syria and Lebanon. We must continue to get public services up and running, so the local families can get water, sewage and garbage service; electricity, public transportation; oil fields and
refineries working and a dinar that won't halve in value every month.

It's going to be a long haul (remember it took 10-15 years in Japan and West Germany) but if we don't stick with it, nobody else will, and we'll have some other looney running the place again.

This place has greater potential than Saudi Arabia (bunch of ******** who struck black gold) or Iran (weird dudes who can't run a rug bazaar much less a major country).

Armageddon, here we come. Remember, it's located on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

Enough of that cheery speculation. The good news is that General Schoonmaker is going to appointed ChiefArmy and the old man is coming to Tampa to run the SpOps desk at CentComm. He's tops and will be getting his second star.

To me it means that SpOps will be more predominant in future operations and after 18 years as a GB maybe I'll have a shot at a bird-level combat command.The old man asked me to come to MacDill and be his ACS but I told him after I spent four months changing the diapers of the media types, I wanted to go back to action. Hence, my current gig.

As the movie quoted old General Patton, "God help me, I love it." I do. Nothing more satisfying than working with the BEST damn soldiers in the world, flushing real human poop down the drain and giving some folks a chance at trying freedom for a change.

They may learn to like it and then my great-great-grandson won't have to worry about some maniac trying to destroy the planet.

My tour is over at the end of August, and I plan to return to ******, brief the old man, then head to ************ and see my two sweethearts. I'd like to visit my parents in ******** and my brother in ************, before taking on a trip across the country. Just like any other family. It will charge my
batteries before I end up back in some other ********* ... er, interesting and challenging location. I hope to see most of you and ask for some advice, no support. I know I've had that all along. Thanks.

Now about that Maker's Mark.

God Bless America.

"War doesn't determine who wins, war determines who is left"

[Maniac]

An big to you Zippatuh!

Seeing Americans think like this gives me hope!

[Suave]

Basically Zip, it came down to two choices .

1. Containment. Keep the gun to his head (an armored division) while UN inspections go on permenantly, and Saddam continues to show the world how peacefull western countries can be manipulated and played for the rest of his life, and maybe his sons' .

2. Removal and reconstruction. Expensive in both economic terms and humanity . But cheaper in the long run imo, in both economic terms and humanity .

Analyze the situation over and over and you will keep coming back to these choices. We made the right one .

[Arfann]

Originally posted by Toad Blah, blah, blah. . . . raghead. . . . . . .fecal matter . . . . . . . . blah.

Yeah, right. Sounds like it's written by someone who reads too much Soldier of Fortune. Never seen actual battle, but did stay at a Holiday Inn Express once. If real, it is obviously written for who it was sent to and not for distribution on a public forum.

[Toad]

Actually, I was encouraged to distribute it widely.

While you were in VN, did you ever use the word "gook"?

But obviously, it couldn't possibly be true. After all, it doesn't fit your idea of what's going on there. You've been closely watching CNN after all.

[Maniac]

4) The morale of the troops is A-1, except for the normal squeaking and griping.

Yesterday on Swedish TV they showed U.S troops complaining about the situation in Irak, and wanting to go home allredy...

Dont want to start an fight here, i dunno wich news agency interviewed the troops...