Tshaitanaku said:
Nope, I call them irrelevencies/red herrings because they are in no way related to, or accurate reflections of, what we are talking about. But, please, do point out how the Russian armies responding to a German invasion that penetrated deep into Russia, by pushing back into German territory in WWII, and the civilian casualties that resulted from this are in any way similar in circumstance or causation to the Iraqi civilian casualties caused by the US invasion and occupation, if you feel that I am mistaken about this being an irrelevant conflation made in an attempt to side-track the discussion.
They are pertinent because your original question equated to this: “If the third order cause of civilian deaths (US invasion) had not occurred, would the immediate cause (car bombings, et al) have happened?” You address the second order cause (US mismanagement of the occupation) in your follow-on restatement of the question.
The implication is clearly that the chain of cause and effect is more than just temporal; it reflects a spectrum of moral culpability with the car bombers being on the lesser end simply because the bombing is a response. If my inference is off base, I will retract, but only if you say it plainly.
In regard to my Russian-German question, I began to compose an explanation of how it applied, but have—to my chagrin—discovered it doesn’t fit in the manner that I thought it did. So I will withdraw it on grounds it is a poorly thought argument, but not on grounds it was a red herring; I do not intentionally engage in those. Ever.
TShaitanaku said:
You brought up Bremer, Rumsfeld and Franks, not I.
I am being especially sloppy in this thread. My apologies again.
TShaitanaku said:
Gen. Petraeus seems to be fairly competent in the area, or at least he seemed to have been prior to actually having to deal with such and being made a fall-guy by this administration. Col. Thomas Hammes likewise seems to have a pretty good grasp of the topics. Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, Col. Chet Richards, Maj. Don Vandergriff, Lt. Col. H. Thomas Hayden, Richard Kohn, and John McCuen (though technically, neither of the last two are military, they did author definitive texts on counter-insurgency that are, I believe, still required academy reading). Heck, the Marine Corps own
"Small Wars Manual 1940." seems to have a much better grasp of what to do and not do, than the plan this administration used operationally.
Thank you, but this doesn’t satisfy.
Your original statement was:
TShaitanaku in Post #72 said:
If we had not disbanded the civil and military authorities and used sufficient occupation forces (as per the suggestions and general mandates of all the military experts familiar with occupation and insurgency issues) to pacify and maintain order in Iraq after the war was won, are these events likely to have occurred?
It is clear that your comment meant specific suggestions by specific experts directed specifically at the Iraq invasion/occupation prior to it all falling apart. Your list does not include such people. In fact, at least one person on it (Van Riper) was quite happy with the way the invasion was going until he realized there was no plan for the occupation.
I am quite familiar with the works of both Petraeus and Hammes. Boyd, too, though you didn’t mention him in your list.
Van Riper (again) was critical of Rumsfeld’s transformation plans, or rather the lack of plans and the reliance on buzzwords. His opposition to the invasion itself was stated after the war and predicated on his trust in Zinni’s certainty regarding the lack of WMDs in Iraq; it had nothing to do with a military consideration.
Vandergriff wrote
Lessons Learned from Iraqi Freedom in 2004. On the first slide under “Still Room for Improvement” he writes “Obsolete planning process required unnecessary force levels.” This comes after he extols the military’s ability to defeat a larger force with a superior smaller force.
To be fair, he points out in the next slide that the Army still plays 2GW (as opposed to 4GW), but that is not in the context of having opposed the Iraqi invasion to begin with. In this slide show, as in most of his stuff, his major focus is on the need to revamp the personnel system.
Chet Richards also says the US wasn’t prepared for 4GW. Where did he make the suggestions you say he did?
From
H. Thomas Hayden: “I do not believe that President G. W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction; everyone thought he had them, and Saddam Hussein needed to be removed. But President Bush certainly had bad advice on the invasion “force ratios” and there most certainly was no Plan B for the post occupation, pacification and reconstruction of Iraq.” Hmmm… that’s him talking about advice other people gave and clearly stating that the advice itself was for smaller force ratios.
Kohn, though, did say that invading Iraq would be a mistake without solidly tying them to 9/11 or demonstrating a plan by Saddam to attack the US. He said so soon after 9/11 and long before an invasion of Iraq became the topic du jour. I have not, however, read “Supreme Command.”
I have less knowledge of McCuen than I do of Cohn and have not read his book, either.
Are you seriously suggesting that writing on the subject of counter-insurgency equates to making suggestiongs to not disband the civil and military authorities in Iraq?
TShaitanaku said:
I see your first response quite clearly, though what you believe it demonstrates seems to be at serious odds with supportive reasoning for your prior claims and assertions.
You’re right. It was a bad example.
TShaitanaku said:
LOL, even if I were so inclined, it seems that you have cornered the market on such and driven the price of straw well beyond my meager means.
Nope. It’s another practice in which I do not engage. I frequently err, but I do not intentionally misrepresent what others say.
TShaitanaku said:
The equation of the US invasion of Iraq to the Russian pushback against the German invasion of Russia during WWII and the implied similarity in causation between civilian Germans in that war and Iraqi civilian casualties under the current US occupation.
If there is a strawman there, it is only the one with your fingerprints upon it.
Strawman means I ascribe a position to you which you do not hold, then I proceed to attack that position as if it were yours, declaring victory when I destroy it. I did not ascribe my Russian-German analogy to you; I used it as an argument from my side. I have now admitted it’s an argument without merit, but there was nothing dishonest in it.
TShaitanaku said:
I see no evidence indicative of it (the Lancet-2 baseline) not being representative of conditions that were at least consistent over the last decade.
I am not capable of performing the statistical analysis myself, but I think the mere absence of the Anfal and the plight of the Swamp Arabs immediately following Saddam’s draining of the southern lands is suspicious in itself.
TShaitanaku said:
Unfortunately, such speculations without some measure of supporting evidence, are largely specious and without merit, more often serving as a better measure of the speculator's bias than providing any sense of an objective and reflective of reality analysis.
You asked for a reason and I gave you a plausible one. I was honest enough to admit it that I lack evidence to support it. If you find that biased or argumentatively weak it’s no skin off my nose, and I suggest you brush up on burden of proof. When Lancet-2 chooses a one year baseline that excludes known atrocities in the not-too-distant past, it is incumbent upon Lancet-2 to defend its reasoning.
As I have said, I am unqualified to actually debate statistical methodologies (or the methodologies of the survey), but that does not mean I am incapable of following the debate, and I find the side questioning Lancet-2 to be more convincing.
TShaitanaku said:
"Claimed to be so" (political ploy - presumably) by whom?
In this instance, you.
TShaitanaku said:
Arguing that good things may eventually come about due to circumstances created by illegal, immoral and/or incompetent actions, is not a proper nor acceptable defense of those actions.
And begging the question wins you no points here. (I refer to the “illegal, immoral” part; I will grant, for sake of argument, “incompetent.”) But thanks for confirming my earlier inference about your assignment of moral responsibility.
TShaitanaku said:
It can be argued that without the holocaust, there would have never been a state of Israel nor many of the current international conventions against similar actions. And yet, that hardly seems a valid argument that the holocaust was a "good thing."
Shall I dismiss your example as a red herring? It would be only fair, I think. It falls apart when you consider intent.
TShaitanaku said:
The first piece seems to be nothing but an opinion piece based upon other opinion pieces with very little in the way of solid data and real comparison to pre-surge figures.
A briefing from April 2007.
An
AFIS article quoting Rear Admiral Smith in November 2007.
The
slides from Petraeus’ briefing to Congress in September 2007.
TShaitanaku said:
And the second piece seems to contradict your assertion
You should read more than the headline:
From my link that TShaitanaku references said:
However, the group also concludes that the number of those killed in Baghdad, where the majority of American reinforcements for surge operations were deployed, has fallen significantly during the year.
IBC compiles its data from official sources, including the Pentagon, and found that between 22,586 and 24,159 civilian deaths were documented for 2007, with the vast majority of those killed between January and August.
TShaitanaku said:
Funny, that doesn't seem to have been the reason for given for invasion, if that case was strong and legitimate, why was that not the primary pitch made to congress and the american people to invade Iraq? As far as I can tell this had little or nothing to do with why the "door was kicked in."
From
here:
President Bush on March 22 said:
And our mission is clear, to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.
But I’m not arguing about what reasons Bush and company gave for the invasion at the time, nor about whatever their hidden reasons may have been. Your analogy gave a scenario but with insufficient facts to make it comparable to the facts of pre-invasion Iraq. I don’t even need to include the chimera of WMDs to demonstrate that your analogy is in an intentional vacuum that demonstrates your own bias. Not that it bothers me; everybody's biased.
