Wow..., just wow. I was going to try to wade through a BeAChooser post, but just two paragraphs in I see this gem of self delusion and revisionist history.
There was no significant Al-Qeada presence in Iraq prior to the invasion. If Obama had been in charge back in 2002 there would have been no Al-Qeada presence to kill. And your fantasies about WMD and Al-Qeada bases are nothing more than fantasies. In fact most evidence would argue the opposite.
Daredelvis
Here is a little out of the box thinking that's been bugging me since the middle of 2004. It sometimes seemed to me that the "fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" was more than rhetoric, it was a strategy, with a non obvious aim: deliberately attracting those inclined to join in the Jihad to flock to Iraq, easy to get to, and then killing wave after wave with the intent of showing that "resistance is futile" or something like that, or even to create a body count that could be used to show the world that taking that path -- particularly what we used to call foreign fighters (non Iraqis who came from Jordan, Lybia, Egypt, Saudi, elsewhere) -- was a dead end.
The results on the ground showed that a heck of a lot of them came, they fought, and they died quickly. Many were quickly recruited and not particularly well led, and when running into the disciplined troops and firepower left mostly bloody spots on the ground.
Was that intentional? I sometimes wonder. It was certainly the result, but I don't think that even if this was part of the strategy, the head shed in Washington realized just how many would come, and how many would adapt and fall in with competent cells, thus being far more effective than as target practice for American and Coalition soldiers.
One of the most interesting reports I ever saw was a summary of captives interviewed after a short and bloody clash near Karbala. (2004) They were all foreigners: not Iraqis. Over three dozen had died in a very brief fire fight. One of the common themes the initial interviews with the captives showed was, basically: ''My recruiter lied to me." These guys were smuggled across the Syrian border, given some arms and fake papers, brought down to Karbala and pretty much tossed into the fight (by either a Sunni tribe or an Al Qaeda faction, I don't know) with little training and prep.
Lambs to the slaughter, when they ran into professionals.
Further along this line of "is that what they were really thinking" I don't think the head shed ever grasped how many Iraqi Army and Iraqi police would keep switching sides over the first three or four years. That internal recruiting cycle, and the number of pissed off ex soldiers available for any number of factions to draw upon as fighters, struck me as taking the leadership off guard, as it broke their initial assumptions, thanks in part to the decision at Bremmer's level (I assume endorsed by Bush and his group) to virtually disband the Iraqi Army rather than bring them into the circle right away after Saddam fell.
It's a bit more complex than your post suggests, even with the understanding of the number of lethally poor decisions made in Washington and elsewhere.
Klein said:
People in the military familiar with the process tell me that we should be down to about 30,000 troops in four years.
That assumes that politically there is an agreement to keep anyone there. The logistics of getting 140 K, while hard, does not require a four year timeline. Yes, I am familiar with how that works.
DR
