Rice Concedes 'Tactical Errors' in Iraq

[PatrickHenry]

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/sto...tm&floc=NW_1-T

BLACKBURN, England (AP) - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice conceded Friday that the United States probably has made thousands of ``tactical errors'' in Iraq and elsewhere, but said it will be judged by its larger aims of peace and democracy in the Middle East. The U.S. diplomat met loud anti-war protests in the streets and skeptical questions about U.S. involvement in Iraq at a foreign policy salon Friday, including one about whether Washington had learned from its ``mistakes over the past three years.'' Rice replied that leaders would be ``brain-dead'' if they did not absorb the lessons of their times. ``I know we've made tactical errors, thousands of them I'm sure,'' Rice told an audience gathered by the British foreign policy think tank Chatham House. ``But when you look back in history, what will be judged will be, did you make the right strategic decisions.'' She said she remains firmly convinced that it was the right strategic decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq three years ago, and that it required an invasion to do it. Saddam ``wasn't going anywhere without military intervention,'' she said.

For a PhD, Rice sure can make some dumb statements. The tactics were wrong but the strategy was right...What a load of BS. Hundreds of $billions wasted and thousands of lives destroyed for a strategy that didn't protect the US from squat.

I take it back... She's not making an idiotic statement, she's a lyin' shill...

[popi]

unfortunately the world is not just about the U.S. there are other countries out there with different agendas. Look at France a country that is happy to sell arms to WHOEVER and when those arms are used to shoot allied soldiers they say "we told you so" most of the stuff found in Iraq was supplied by the French. Now the war in Iraq could do with intervention by the U.N. the french and to a certain extent other powers in europe would rather cut off their dicks rather than help to get it right

[Sonart]

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Quote by: PatrickHenry For a PhD, Rice sure can make some dumb statements.

It's her job. She's paid to make dumb statements.

Quote by: PatrickHenry I take it back... She's not making an idiotic statement, she's a lyin' shill...

There ya go.

As an interesting sidebar... I was listening to Fred Barnes the other day being interviewed on NPR by Terri Gross. Speaking of shills :rolleyes: Anyway, he's putting his best political spin on Boy George's current political doldrums and saying what a smart move it was that Andrew Card had resigned. In fact, Barnes went on, Bush needed an even bigger shakeup... you know, to convince America that they were back on course. Restore faith in the administration and all that. And what Bush's biggest problem is now, said Fred Barnes, is that he's too much a lame duck because he has no heir apparent to inspire Republicans to the polls this year and in 2008. You know, because Americans desperately want to continue the grand legacy of George W. Bush. So, says Barnes, since Darth Cheney obviously isn't going to run, Bush should sh!tcan.... errr... I mean accept Cheney's resignation and then immediately nominate... yep... Condoleeza Rice to be his next Vice President.

Whatta coup!!! Republicans would joyously rally behind the nomination and (reading between the lines) Republicans, the anti-woman party of the Southern Strategy, go into 2008, grinning ear to ear at the sickest, most outrageously cynical joke of all time, united to elect America's first Black/Woman President, while carrying on the glorious legacy of Dear Leader.

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[popi]

well said sonart just as an aside in the UK boy George is an ageing queer singer that wears makeup and is high on drugs.

[Sonart]

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:) Yes, Popi... I know. I'm being cute. Play on words and all that.


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[Sonart]

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Quote by: rdnor Imagine that , mistakes during warfare. I suppose we just walked through Europe and Germany threw their hands up in the face of the perfect enemy ?

Yep, Germany made a lot of mistakes in WWII... and they lost. Japan made the biggest mistake of all, the same one Bush made. They started the war in the first place.

Quote by: rdnor Sloganeering and empty platitudes are all I see from the left on this forum . But wait ! Isn't that the very thing that brought Herr Hitler to power?

Amazing that you can't see the irony in this statement, rdnor. One giant empty platitude about how we bravely won WWII and what a bunch of stupid bums the left is. We've filled page after page of detailed reports, analysis, sourced facts and rebuttles, and this is your pathetic counterpunch?

What was Rice's statement but a slogan, an empty platitude? 'Yeah, we've made a ton of mistakes, yeah, Iraq looks to be going to hell in a handbasket, but, by golly, we made the right decision to start this war.'

--“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”-- Joseph Goebbels

And you just blindly, uncritically lap it up. Well, that puts you in the dwindling 35% of Americans who still believe it.


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[Arawn-ap-Hywel]

What was amazing was her statement after she reflects on these mistakes from an historians point of view, how the decisions might prove to be valuable, this seemed to show the willingness of the US Government to let history judge them (as it will) but with no recourse or thought of reviewing the decisions and enabling an evolving stratergy to enhance and improve circumstances, their only reflections will be from the pages of books and newsreal! So sad.

You may listen to the video conference on this link.

[Sonart]

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Quote by: rdnor Man, back away from the computer ! Go outside and talk to PEOPLE , you may learn something . Your phony polls mean squat !

Oooo, and it's another devastating rebuttle! Dang, rdnor, you're way too good for me.

Here's the thing, though... I am talking to PEOPLE. For instance, I assume you're a person, right? In fact I'm having an intense, ongoing conversation with lots of people, right here, most of them vastly more articulate and informed than average.

But I can understand your frustration, rdnor. After all, it wasn't but a couple of years ago that you folks were all swaggering around, thumping your chests and gloating over Dear Leader's glorious 'Mission Accomplished' and election victory. And now to have to sit there and read our smirking "WE TOLD YOU SO!"s and realize we were right all along, that Bush's war has been a disastrous failure, has got to be devastating.

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[PatrickHenry]

Quote by: Arawn-ap-Hywel ... You may listen to the video conference on this link.

What link?

And rdnor isn't observant enough to recognize that most of us anti-administration types here aren't lefties at all but rather libertarians...Seventy-one posts and still no clue as to what makes this board tick...Snicker...

[Arawn-ap-Hywel]

oooops

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4866786.stm

[abub]

Quote by: Sonart But I can understand your frustration, rdnor. After all, it wasn't but a couple of years ago that you folks were all swaggering around, thumping your chests and gloating over Dear Leader's glorious 'Mission Accomplished' and election victory. And now to have to sit there and read our smirking "WE TOLD YOU SO!"s and realize we were right all along, that Bush's war has been a disastrous failure, has got to be devastating.

I'm sure that many ordinary people, not just folks like rdnor, were "thumping their chests and gloating" when the mission of removing Saddam from power was accomplished. When Bush gave that speech he said:

Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.

Hmm... I dunno about you, but that seems pretty clear to me. The mission was accomplished (Saddam was taken out of power and his military disintigrated), and now efforts to build up Iraq were to begin.

[Sonart]

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Quote by: abub Hmm... I dunno about you, but that seems pretty clear to me. The mission was accomplished (Saddam was taken out of power and his military disintigrated), and now efforts to build up Iraq were to begin.

Hi abub. The thing is, the mission was not accomplished, not by any stretch of the imagination, which is exactly why we're in the mess we're in today. And the fact the you're sitting there still believing that it was is the clearest demonstration of how the Bush League's incompetence misled the American people and failed this country.

The problem with invading Iraq was never taking it, it was occupying it. In the words of Colin Powell, "If you break it, you own it". Bush's own father understood that it was a bad idea, as he wrote in his book with Brent Scowcroft. Our military is the best in the world at defeating armies and taking ground. It's holding ground in a hostile land, surrounded by an invisible guerilla insurgency, that history has shown repeatedly we are NOT good at. Vietnam, the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan, Somalia. It's why I knew from the day Bush first hinted at a war that pinning our military down in a large, hostile country halfway around the world, surrounded on three sides by even more hostile populations, in a part of the world where insurgency and terrorism have become an art form, was a really, REALLY bad idea.

If we'd done everything right it would still have been a bad idea. But no, the Bush League has managed to do every damn thing it possibly could wrong, starting with their assumption before the war, and so falsely impressed on the American people that day on the carrier by Bush in his little flight suit, that we had won the war, when in fact the war had only just started.

As if starting a war by mistake, for clearly stated reasons that did not exist, against a sovereign country that was not attacking anyone, not mobilizing to attack anyone and not threatening anyone was not bad enough, the Bush League compounded one incompetent blunder after another. They had made no plan whatsoever for dealing with the problems their own intelligence services had clearly told warned them would be waiting -- an active insurgency, possibly alligned with foreign factions - spelled al-Qaeda -, waging a querilla war, an increase in sympathy across the Moslem world with active assistance from foreign states opposed to our goals, and deeply divided Iraq prone to internal sectarian conflict.

Bush's own senior military, led by Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, advised that we needed more than twice as many troops on the ground to deal with these problems, and for his pains he had his retirement date moved up a year and was promptly relieved. We made no provisions for securing the borders, which were promptly swarming with foreign terrorists, for securing the vast stores of conventional munitions stashed around the country, which to this day are still blowing up our soldiers, or for securing the basic institutions needed to get the country running, which were promptly looted, and to this day we have not been able to adequately restore basic power, water, sewage, or telephone service.

Of course, we did secure the oil fields... after a fashion. After three years, oil production is still below pre-war levels due to constant sabotage.

It was like Boy George was playing soldier.... Yaaay, we win! ....without the vaguest idea of what occupying a hostile country would involve. Cheney promised we'd be out and gone by Christmas of 2003. And Bush supporters like yourself were cheering when the statues came down, smuggling taunting us with. "Yeah? So where's the quagmire?"

Well, look around. We're in it, just like we told you we would be, and we're not getting out of it. 2,500 American dead, and counting, 10 times that many maimed and wounded, half a trillion dollars down the hole, and counting, our once undisputed and respected world leadership in tatters and Iraq spiraling down a toilet of civil strife verging on civil war, with no end in sight. We're screwed if we leave and we're screwed if we stay.

And to make Bush's failures that much more tragic, this is exactly what Osama bin Laden planned when he provoked us on 9/11. Hit us on our ground so we'd arrogantly go rushing off to pin ourselves down on his ground, the one way history has shown they could actually hurt us. Want to beat the Americans? Look to the little Big Horn.

Mission accomplished. What a goddam reckless, incompetent, negligent fool.

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[Rave7pt0]

Haha, that's a classic one. If you're against the war you're unpatriotic. If you're against the war you must not support the troops. How does it feel to be a victim of the same tired propaganda techniques used in countless previous generations?

Hi abub. ...[snip]... Mission accomplished. What a goddam reckless, incompetent, negligent fool.

Well said, that was pretty comprehensive in a soundbyte kind of way.

[Boetie]

Bush Jr has already openly declared he is going to pull a scam on the American People. The scam, which is dumping the problems he created onto the next President and the next generation. By dumping the problems onto the next President and generation Bush Jr leaves open what he is famous for, which is making up excuses.

If by any chance the next president should adopt this section of Senator Hoar's speech:

Our imperialistic friends seem to have forgotten the use of the vocabulary of liberty. They talk about giving good government. "We shall give them such a government as we think they are fitted for." "We shall give them a better government than they had before." Why, Mr. President, that one phrase conveys to a free man and a free people the most stinging of insults. In that little phrase, as in a seed, is contained the germ of all despotism and of all tyranny. Government is not a gift. Free government is not to be given by all the blended powers of earth and heaven. It is a birthright. It belongs, as our fathers said and as their children said, as Jefferson said and as President McKinley said, to human nature itself. There can be no good government but self government...

And decide to pull our troops out, Bush Jr will then use the excuse his illegal war could have came out with good results if not for the decision of that President.

If on the other hand the next President decides to keep our troops there and nothing good is coming out of it, Bush Jr will still blame the next President and claim that President isn't as good as a chief of commander as he(Bush Jr.) is.

I have already predicted that Bush Jr will commit the greatest sin by posting this statement from a Russian:

...the greatest of sins that any human being can perpetrate is to seek to transfer moral responsibility from his own shoulders to an unpredictable future order...

Bush Jr is committing that greatest sin as evidenced in his own words that he is transferring all problems he created onto the next Presidency and generations, in other words an unpredictable future order. In that way he can make excuses for himself.

[bishop]

big deal that rice came out and admitted to failures - is this something we didn't already know?? no, it sure as hell isn't.. the only "newsworthy" thing about it is that the administration is actually admitting that mistakes were made - rather than their usual line of blaming everyone and their grandmother for their own mistakes..

i distinctly remember the question posed to bush during the last presidential campaign where some woman asked him if he made any mistakes... good ol' bush almighty proudly said no, that he didn't make any mistakes..

and this bit about the tactics being wrong, but the strategy being right... way too early to say anything about the strategy.. the tactics were certainly wrong and deceptive, from the run up to the war to the occupation "plans".. the strategy will be decided by whether/not iraq can actually hold itself together, rather than splinter apart and descend into a civil war.. and if that doesn't happen, how about seeing iraq become a theocratic paradise, closely aligned with iran? (maybe one day they'll get some free nukes for their friendship.) i wonder if aunt rice will call that a victory. history already shows that the pubic/world were horribly mislead on WMD bullshit, and that the administration failed many times to secure iraq after the invasion.. and we'll get nice little examples of their stupidity like bush's "bring 'em on" garbage and his "mission accomplished" stunts on aircraft carriers.


bush is a lame duck, that's all that rice's comments prove. and now, supposedly, the policies at play are working - the only problem is that for most observers, it's too little, too late. what she's trying to do now is appeal to the lowest common denominators within our country - dead end bush supporters - to retain the last vestiges of support that bush still has..

[PatrickHenry]

Quote by: rdnor ...What it does is demoralize our military and makes their job that much arder . It also emboldens our enemies prolonging the war and causes more deaths . If you hate bush , good for you . Just be more supportive of our troops .

rdnor, your enemies and mine aren't the same. Yours are the residents of Iraq, seeking to oust foreign occupiers. Mine are the tyrants of Washington DC who layer debts upon me as a reluctant taxpayer while pursuing military adventures in the Middle East. My support for the troops, meaning individual soldiers, began before Bush's decision to invade Iraq. I carried signs on the local highway saying "No War For Oil". I still support them by insisting on their immediate removal from a combat zone where they are likely to be killed or maimed with devastating consequences for their families.

I do not support the US military in its mission to subjugate other nations for the New World Order. I live in a US-occupied nation, and am fully aware of the use of force to abolish self-determination.

But keep posting ol' buddy. It's folks like you that make life interesting on volconvo...

[Osborn F Enready]

Bishop said: big deal that rice came out and admitted to failures - is this something we didn't already know??

I say:
Who is WE?

Bush loyalists have been parroting the Presidents words since day 1.

"Stay the course, things are well, I'm a uniter not a divider"

*Reality however, we have stayed the course, to more casualties with little result. This isn't the fault of the troops who do OUTSTANDING work, it is due to the POOR LEADERSHIP AT ALL LEVELS OF THIS ADMINISTRATION.

*We have found that things indeed aren't well, while there are good things, the bad surely outweigh. Yes, Hussein is captured, big deal. Life in Iraq, from the mouths of many of the Iraqis is WORSE. They want Americans out of there so "insurgents" will stop crossing into THEIR land to fight US while their kids are out trying to play ball between the bullets. Before we came in, there were guns a plenty, and all that was needed to topple Saddam was a will of the people to amass and overthrow. Now they are only allowed one gun per household, IF they don't pose a security risk (????) since we collected all the civillian arms and DESTROYED THEM.

*HE has divided two major parties that were almost identical, farther and wider than any of the past bi-partisan lackeys. He has destroyed the faith of both parties, since he has forced the very few honest people in Congress out on to the platforms to proclaim the madness of the King, while his supporters like Spectre and Sessions kiss his toes while wiping their ass with the Constitution.

We need to start Senate and Congress reform by removing them all, and starting over.

Bush and his cronies have failed at every chance for leadership, and have made bad choices about almost every possible choice that has come up.

A true NeoCon Corporatist, daddies probably as proud as can be.



I think Rice was just trying to reprogram the PARROTS. :rolleyes:

[bishop]

unless they're complete retards, i think even the bushbots know and understand that there've been LOTS of failures throughout this entire ordeal.. from the pre-war bullshit, to the post-invasion debacle, to the misguided "democracy for islamists" mantra... in order to save face, however, they'll just continue to parrot whatever weak excuses the administration gives. ego is a very powerful thing, and it usually hurts to say you were wrong - to admit that they were wrong would shatter the little fantasy world that they've been living in over these past several years.

i look at the dead enders a little differently than the average joe..

[Sean]

rdnor, we do not take kindly to personal insults. They detract from the argument and it is just rude.

[Sonart]

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Quote by: rdnor Where's the oil ? If we are fighting a war for oil , where the hell is it ? I want some so I don't have to pay so goddamn much for gas ! So you can carry a sign , wow I AM impressed . If this was not such a sad state of affairs , it would be fucking hilarious ! Your "support" is killing our soldiers ! Please do not bother , we can do without it

It's not about just Iraq's oil, rdnor, it was about establishing U.S. dominance over the entire oil producing region.

I'm convinced beyond any doubt that the administration, after their silly daydream of quick victory and installation of a compliant puppet democracy catering to happy, America loving Iraqis, had intended to establish bases in Iraq to garrison a quick-response American military presence, to replace the one so problematic in Saudi Arabia. The infamous "14 Military Bases". From that central location, the U.S. would be poised to militarily and politically dominate the entire region -- Iraq and Iran on down to Saudi Arabia... the entire Gulf Oil producing region.

Exactly as Saddam had dreamed of doing when he attacked first Iran -- an Arab enemy -- and then, failing that, Kuwait, leaving him poised to sweep south to create his wet dream of an oil-wealthy Greater Arab Empire.

And no... any remaining possibility of him trying again had been thoroughly crushed by 8 years of war with Iran, Desert Storm and 12 years of sanctions. By 2003 Iraq was a hollow, toothless, impoverished shell of a nation, led by a castrated thug capable only of skimming cash, building himself palaces and tormenting his own people.

In other words, an easy target.

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