Long week

Hello,

This has been a long week. Ramadan is in full swing, and the natives have decided they're going to get a little restless at night. It's not as dangerous as it is annoying. So, during the day they can't eat, drink or smoke at all. After sunset they eat. I guess after they get a full tummy they decide to go out and make some mischief. It will be nice when it's all over.

It's also been a long week because I spent all of last week giving a technical review to a bunch of proposals. Some of that was some dense reading. And at night, after I was done, I had to come in to the office and catch up on stuff I couldn't do during the day. This week has been like two weeks packed into one. And while it is cooling off at home, we are still having daytime highs hovering around 110 degrees. I know I've said this before, but I don't know how the Iraqis can stand it. They get power for a few hours a day if that, and have to sleep in the humid, hot night air. It's cool at night now (at least it feels cool; it could be 85 degrees for all I know) so it's not as bad as July and August, but still. At least when Saddam was in power they had that much.

Speaking of Saddam, I am finishing up a book called, The Generals War, by Bernard Trainor. It's amazing to read it now since it was published in 1995. There are names in there from the Bush Administration (Failure #2) like Powell and Cheney, but also people like Paul Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad. I just got through the last chapter and I'm reading into the Epilogue, and I'm serious, it's hard to read the last two chapters. Trainor didn't have a Magic 8-Ball, but he ties a lot of the "problems" we faced through the '90's with Saddam to the indecisive conclusion of the war. Reading that book, you really get a whole different sense of what happened during the war than one got reading the papers or watching the news at that time. Then, you knew the Air Force had done a lot of damage, but you got the idea that the Army had been fighting tooth and nail to get up into Iraq near Basra. It was actually the Marines who did most of the ground fighting. Furthermore, because Schwarzkopf was such a rigid thinker he didn't pick up clues along the way that should have told him the enemy wasn't going to stand and fight. That assumption guided his entire approach to the ground piece of the war. His objective was to destroy the Republican Guard. He never achieved it. He stopped the war--or allowed it to be stopped--before that happened, and it allowed Saddam to recover a lot of his fighting capability. That enabled him to hold on to power. We also stirred up the Shiites in southern Iraq, and they thought we'd come help them rise up. Problem was, when Bush was saying that he hoped the Iraqi people would rise up and topple Saddam, he really meant that he wanted to see someone in the military topple him; he didn't want the Shia to do it. So there was never any thought given to helping them as they got crushed by the units that streamed out of Kuwait and were reconstituted. By the way, 12 years later, these were the same Shia that Vice President Cheney said "would welcome us as liberators." He must have hoped they had one hell of a short memory.

Schwarzkopf comes out in the book as an interesting individual. He seemed to lose his spine when he had to confront Powell at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Another thing that probably had negative effects at the end of the First Gulf War, and DEFINITELY had negative effects in the second one, was the military's absolute insistence that they were the ones who decided when they would leave the battlefield. This is what I mean: CENTCOM, commanded by Schwarzkopf, had every intention of getting the soldiers out of the Middle East as quickly as possible. That makes you incapable of really asserting yourself after the cease-fire. If things go wrong, you're already shipping personnel and equipment home, and the military had no intention of sticking around to enforce the peace. This group of officers were of the Vietnam-generation officer corps, and felt that the civilian leadership had abused them. They weren't going to allow it again. Well, because of the itch to get outta Dodge, Saddam stayed in power and we invaded 12 years later. And, oh by the way, when we invaded this time, again, the military had no plan to stick around to enforce the peace. The "Generation V" officers, after being subjected to a war they felt the civilians had lost for them, AND a decade (the 1990's) of peace keeping missions, felt a revulsion towards anything not directly related to the prosecution of war. The whole "we don't do peace-keeping" attitude ended up blowing up in their faces. If they did a little more peace-keeping they would have had to do a lot less war making.

And look where we are now. We have The Decider, a man utterly devoid of ideas and credibility, shooting off his mouth about a newspaper ad from MoveOn.org. I guess running off at the mouth about something like that keeps him from having to come up with a solution for the way out of this war. And again, going back to the book, when I see names in there like Wolfowitz and others it just makes my skin crawl. You know, we're still here and clowns like that are long, long gone. The Decider will transition from a completely broken president to a completely broken ex-president in about 16 months.

Anyway, I highly recommend the book. I'll blog some more shortly, and I promise I'll have some good pictures.