Most profound statement from a military leader: Gen. Tommy Franks, refuting criticism of a "pause" in the ground war, said, "We have the power to be patient." Carl
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Yes evidently the much touted Rumsfelt war Plan A, code named Blitzkrieg-on-the-Cheap or Nazi-Lite for short, hasn't worked. So apparently we are changing to Plan B. Since Plan A, slaughtering their military and overthrowing their government failed to win the hearts and mind of the Iraqi people, then Plan B should work. Plan B. We will now proceed to carpet bomb them back to their senses, before we liberate them.
So then if Plan B fails, then what?
Plan C. We decimate Iraq using plain old fashioned dumb bombs and artillery leveling most of its cities, infrastructure, and poison the farmland and rivers, finally acquiesce to a cease fire, negotiating under UN auspices. Negotiations proceed to partition the country along the cease fire line with Baghdad as a partitioned city like Jerusalem and the US follows the Israeli lead in dealing with the `occupied' territories of the former Iraq. The residue of Iraq, now referred to as Occupied Iraq (occupied by Iraqis), cut off from Basra and its northern and southern oil fields is kept alive on subsidies from Syria, Jordan, Iran, and Russia, who help arm its re-grouped military into guerilla units who conduct ceaseless raids in the UN-US controlled sectors.
Dot, dot, dot. In twenty years Pentagon documents are finally produced under a new neo-neo-demicrap US regime that shows US war planners had understood partition would be the outcome and begged then president George W Bush to finish the job with tactical nuclear weapons. Fearing his one party election would fail to achieve its expected 80% rubber stamp from the public, he had a failure of nerve. It is now considered opinion the public would have gone along, if he had properly prepared them.
The neo-neo-conservatives angling against the neo-neo-demicraps for their own candidate during the 2020 one party elections claim George W Bush lost Iraq through tragic miscalculation and insufficient determination. Graying military generals who were mere grunts during the period nod in agreement. Yes if we had shelled them with nukes we could have won. Now look at us. We are nothing more than an aging one party totalitarian state confined to our borders to stew in our bitterness and regrets. Well at least we saved all the best. We still have McDonald's, Windows 20-20, and the urban combat SUV. Of course the newer models don't work without an Omicrom butt chip implant for the driver.
We could have been such a great empire!
Chuck Grimes