So in return, please provide me with proof of this Iranian Regiment that has been captured. I'm not questioning you here, I'd just like to know what your sources are if that's alright with you!
The proof is difficult to find since it is so old. I did not save or bookmark the sites I just read them. Other information I can’t go into at this point but it dovetails the published reports. I will point to CNN news reports of Iranian troops being captured. CBS reports of Iranian generals captured. I gave a total of the people captured, I did not mean to imply that they were all captured in one or two operations. To date we have three Iranian General Officers in custody. We have the equivalent of on Iranian regiment. This boils down to three thousand troops, and many officers leading them as well as the three general officers which suggest that there are more troops running around the country since a general officer commands a minimum of 10 thousand troops. None of them can be shipped out of Iraq because of the Geneva Conventions. Since most had just enough documentation to prove they were not terrorists we could not shoot them or ship them to Gitmo. According to international law Iran has declared war against America, Great Briton, and Iraq by having uniformed troops in that country fighting us. If Mr. Bush wanted an excuse to go to war with Iran it is there and publicly documented with the Geneva Conventions, as well as the international Red Cross and Red Crescent he had it and no legal authority could stop him. I state this because the conspiracy theorist keep bringing up that the President wants to go to war with Iran and is looking for a reason to do so with nuclear weapons as the reason. Three years ago we had more than enough legal justification to invade Iran. That is not our goal.
You state that shortly after the invasion things went wrong when AQ and Iranian Forces moved in and started terrorist operations. The fact is that AQ didn't establish a formidable presence in Iraq until almost a year after the U.S took over- the truth is that most of the insurgency was and still is comprised of local Iraqis, many of whom WERE in the Iraqi army but after Bremmer disbanded it they were angry and unemployed. It's easy to say that freedom-hating terr'ists came in and decided to ruin everyone's fun, but even if that's true, the U.S is still responsible for that as they were responsible for post-invasion security and ALLOWED AQ and Iranian infiltration. Speaking of which... you have asked me for proof on my points and I provided you with a book: "Fiasco" By Thomas E. Ricks. Another good one is "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein. There is also the "Empire" trilogy by Chalmers Johnson and several works by Noam Chomski- "Failed States" is one- which are full of interesting little publicized facts about the lead up to the war. You should be able to get most of these books from your local library and can be found in two seconds on Amazon.
What you say here has been widely reported and has also been retracted. At first it was thought that the fighting was from Iraqi soldiers but that only lasted a week and then it faded. What we were really facing were Iranian troops in civilian clothes attacking our troops, as well as Syrian troops, and AQ terrorist. Filling in were also some former soldiers and others, what made it difficult for us to weed to the truth was the fact that it was not a coordinated effort. So we would capture an Iranian and an AQ and a Syrian person in the same attack and nobody knew who was who and they were not working together. Only after years of interrogation did we start to put the pieces together what happened. In that mix you also had people that just felt the need to fight America from many other Arab nations. Only after we captured the first Iranian general and his staff along with their documents as well as the top AQ guy in Iraq, did it start to shed some light on what was happening.
The military technical term for what we had was a “Chinese cluster fuck”. Everyone was getting into the act and that muddied the waters for us. The press reports did not help us as they would get information from one source that only dealt with one type of person captured and another news person would get information from another source that gave slightly conflicting information wild our own government was trying to tell the truth but had a jumble of information that would not fit in a 20 second sound bite. It made the press think they were being lied to because they had independent sources that conflicted with what the official position was. It was not that anyone lied it was that each was getting a picture of a puzzle and no one knew what the picture looked like. This mislead the people at home and the anti-war people clung to the parts they liked as the pro-war people clung to the parts they liked. The only picture that made since was that this was a massive civil war and we should not be involved in that.
The reality was that Iran wanted ciaos, to weaken the democracy that was building. AQ wanted ciaos to rally support and fresh troops. The soldiers wanted ciaos to get their jobs back. The religious nuts wanted ciaos to further their cause of one religion, theirs! Only there were three different sects, and Turkey wanted ciaos because of the Kurdish problem they had within their own borders. They all had a goal of ciaos for different reasons. Which it why you had hundreds and thousands of attacks all around the country at once. Once the surge started to take hold we saw this dwindle because as I said they were not coordinated. Hunting down the little groups is harder than one large group, and once we discovered that we changed our tactics and the fighting stopped for the most part. We have attacks that are the same as our own domestic crime stats. AQ is in one area, Iran is in another area and that is all we have as bad guys.
The president said that the war on terror would last a long time. The war in Iraq and following occupation was supposed to be mostly wrapped up within 6 months. This was widely publicized.
Yes, it was widely publicized but it was also widely denied by the administration. The press put that out there not the administration. Read the press reports and they say things like; “sources close to the administration believe that the war will not last long.” A janitor mopping floors in the Pentagon is a source close to the administration. The drycleaner in CIA headquarters building level 2 is a source close to the administration. But you don’t have any direct quotes from the administration that say we will have this wrapped up in 6 weeks or six months. Every time it was suggested to an administration official on camera they denied such claims. I agree with you that it was all hype but it was not hyped by the administration, it was hyped by the fourth estate to gain readership and viewers. Strategically did we want the enemy to think we would destroy them in months? You be the judge. It took two weeks to defeat the nation of Iraq, that included three days of replenishment and replacement of material and food.
The attack was based on the Nazi Blitzkrieg translated as lightning war. This is where you attack as deeply as you can and then resupply and continue the attack. Naval War College classes I took on this back in the 70’ and 80’s say the deepest you can go is about three to five hundred miles before you run out of supplies. The press not having been to a war college did not know this and started to back off the we will be victorious in 6 months, and started with the military is bogged down in a quagmire. The only way to stop this talk on the news is to tell them the strategy which they would promptly tell their viewer, like Saddam. So they had to keep their mouths shut or risk lives because the Blitz only works if the other side does not know what you are doing. Once they know the Blitz is on there is a tried and true method of defeating a blitz that has not been countered over time. The Soviets used it against the Nazi blitz and it worked grinding them to a halt and then destruction.
The war was over in two weeks. Mopping up started after that and then the so called insurgents came in to play. Now that has been mostly defeated and we still hear how there were miscalculations and the incompetence of the military planners. Yes some miscalculations occurred, but none that were out of the ordinary.
Even going with your logic, the war in Iraq has been a dismal failure- the presence of AQ in Iraq was minimal to nonexistent before the war. The only reason they were able to take hold there was because of a massive vacuum in security and government (which the U.S was responsible for rebuilding as they destroyed it in the first place) that was caused directly by the U.S and co's actions.
The training for 9/11 was done in Iraq. Saddam might not have known what they were planning but it was practiced in Iraq, that part has been established after we went into Iraq. AQ was there, they went there for medical help when we invaded Afghanistan. When Afghanistan became untenable they flocked there until the invasion. They took action as soon as things calmed down from the war because that is how terrorists work.
If AQ had been sliding in and out of the country since 1997-98 how is our taking over the country going to stop them since they know the area better than we did? Remember the planning for 9/11 took three years and another 5 to put the people in place once they were trained. That means they were working for the attacks on 9/11 since the end of the Gulf war, it also means they had to have training staff in Iraq for years and people being trained flowing in and out of the country for years. It is not unreasonable to say that there were a lot of AQ in Iraq at the time of our invasion. Each trained AQ terrorist was an officer supposed to build a terror network outside of AQ which did not expect to survive once 9/11 happened. They had no place left to go. Had not Zarqawi not been arrested they would have had more time to plan. Credible intelligence reports say that 15 to 25 planes were supposed to be hijacked that day, only four made it into the air and only three reached their targets. News reports of that day speak of groups of Arab looking men getting off the grounded planes leaving their luggage behind because they did not wait for the FBI to interrogate them. Some of them have been captured in Iraq and are now at club Gitmo spilling their guts.
All of this is common knowledge and has been published and reported contemporaneously. It is not new, it is not something that someone made up to answer an accusation it was in the press and ignored for more agenda driven news.
No, the stated goal was to pre-emptively attack a "rogue" state that was threatening the western world with substantial stockpiles of advanced WMD's (and supposedly had some tie in to 9/11 which was used as a fear tactic to say we had to hit someone before we got hit again) Hence Bush's speech about Iraq obtaining uranium from Nigeria (which turned out to be completely false, hence, the valerie plame affair which was a standard case of trying to silence any dissent) Also Collin Powell's little dog and pony show with the satellite pictures of all the bunkers and advanced facilities for building all kinds of nasty stuff (which also turned out to be a complete lie). I actually believed that speech and was pro-war because I believed the constant propaganda that Iraq had re-armed and was a real threat. Nothing could be further from the truth!
If you paid attention at the time there were several stated goals, not just one.
WMD’s was one threat that the president was not going to ignore after the attacks on September 11, 2001.
The violations of the cease fire agreement signed by Saddam at the end of the Gulf War.
The violations of the cease fire agreement signed by Saddam at the end of the Gulf War pertaining to the UN supervised destruction of WMD stockpiles that were listed in the agreement he signed. What I mean to say is he was told to make a list of what he had and how much he had. Based on that list, not some secret intelligence that some say was skewed by the administration to justify the war, on that list alone there were tons of unaccounted for WMD with intelligence reports from ours and other nations like Germany, and France that he was re-starting his WMD programs.
With AQ proving that you don’t need a missile to drop bombs on the US why would we want to have Iraq running around with any levels of WMD and at the same time AQ members being supported by Iraq?
The violation of the Bush Doctrine that stated that any nation state that supported terrorist, gave them safe harbor, or helped them evade or elude capture in any way would be treated as if the nation was a terrorist that attacked America.
Any one of the above was legal justification for the US to invade Iraq, and there were more public statements and goals for Iraq to avoid invasion.
Saddam said publicly that he had no WMD, that it was all destroyed. What he said did not match his own list that he said he had at the end of the gulf war, and what the UN destroyed. After the invasion we found 500 tons of chemical weapons not on his list. Then we found a few hundred chemical weapons shells that were badly degraded. This has morphed into 500 chemical weapons that were badly degraded. Two separate reports became one weak excuse to invade.
Saying after the fact that we went in to spread freedom and democracy is all fine and well but that is a revisionist statement. Fact is there are plenty of dictators and governments around the world who are supported by the U.S and yet they are just as bad or worse to their people than Saddam and his Baath party. Present day examples would be most of the "stan" countries like Kyrgystan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan etc. Why haven't they been invaded so we can spread freedom and democracy to them? Because they're playing ball with us economically and allowing us to build pipelines in their countries
This will most likely make you and others like you angry.
America will side with any petty thug and dictator that will provide us with an ounce of protection. Se supported the shah of Iran because he let us put listening posts on the Soviet Iranian border. We backed Marcos and his corrupt government because the alternative was to lose the only place in the pacific where we stored our nuclear weapons. The idea is that as our friend we can slowly influence them and make them less brutal while serving our needs and goals. It worked in the Philippines I know I was there when it happened. The people rose up and got rid of him. We are still loved and respected in that country. On the other hand when we try to force a dictator to do the right thing we lose and have a nation as an enemy for decades. Iran is an example of that. When President Carter refused to support the Shah all it did was say that we were weak.
Both countries have Muslims both countries are dealing with terrorists. After we left them both one is a democracy the other is a dictatorship. Based on that it seems that our way of dealing with dictators works and the other way does not.
So can you tell us why those "local Iraqis" who are apparently "angry", presumably at the US, target market places and mosques with their attacks, killing mostly Iraqis and most prominently Shiites?
Because Iran wants it to look like a civil war so we can leave and they take over. Oops sorry I was not supposed to see that one.
