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Cheney: Stop ‘dithering’ on Afghanistan troops

Germany had a long tradition of democracy & western culture. Totally apples to oranges compared to the ME.

Well Japan is a good candidate in that regard. By the way, it took 4 years for Germany to become a democracy. We did it in 2 in Iraq.
 
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I think we're getting to the basic disagreement these things always boil down to:

Is war strictly military or is it political.
I think counterinsurgency wars are won or lost politically, not on any battlefield.

The battlefield is virtual. It is the population.
 
Well Japan is a good candidate in that regard.

Better but still not the same. Japan was a strong central government culture patterned very much on western societies.
Iraq & Afghanistan are not.
I'd bet that within one year of us leaving...Iraq will be back in civil war.
 
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An interesting read on Cheney's exact qualifications for making sound military judgments base on knowledgable people's recommendations. I recommend you read the entire article.

Troop Levels in Stability Operations: What We Don't Know | World | AlterNet


Troops Levels and Iraq
Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki set off a firestorm when he told the Senate Armed Services committee before the invasion that "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would be required to stabilize Iraq, a figure that began to approach 20 troops per 1,000 of the Iraqi population, the ratio that academics conventionally, if not universally, cite as necessary for successful stability operations. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called this estimate "far off the mark," as did Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who put the figure closer to 100,000 troops total for Iraq. As the war drags on, requiring orders of magnitude greater time, blood, and treasure than estimated by U.S. leadership, troop figures have become the foremost issue debated at all levels.

Shinseki was wrong, it only took 50,000 and those only got added late in the war.
 
Better but still not the same. Japan was a strong central government culture patterned very much on western societies.
Iraq & Afghanistan are not.

No, not the same. Did you require them to be the same in order to compare them? They are similar in some respects and different in others. We still managed to bring a stable democracy to Iraq and that's the point.
 
Shinseki was wrong, it only took 50,000 and those only got added late in the war.

He was not wrong if you remember the city was immediately looted along with all of the surrounding unguarded weapons bunkers..containing well documented weapons and munitions which were then turned on our troops by the pissed off Iraqies...He was right in every aspect.
 
I think we're getting to the basic disagreement these things always boil down to:

Is war strictly military or is it political.
I think counterinsurgency wars are won or lost politically, not on any battlefield.

You cannot win a war, without defeating the enemy on the battlefield. While I agree that there is a larger political aspect in an unconventional war versus a conventional war, it's impossible for that political objective to be achieved, if the enemy still possesses the combat power to destroy that new government after we've left the theater. In the end, all those political gains would be for naught.
 
Germany was a republic for many years b4 WWII

And yet it took longer to bring a Democracy to Germany than it did to Iraq. Imagine that. :2wave:
 
No, not the same. Did you require them to be the same in order to compare them? They are similar in some respects and different in others. We still managed to bring a stable democracy to Iraq and that's the point.

We haven't left Iraq yet! :lol:

That's MY point.:lol:
 
He was not wrong if you remember the city was immediately looted along with all of the surrounding unguarded weapons bunkers..containing well documented weapons and munitions which were then turned on our troops by the pissed off Iraqies...He was right in every aspect.

Aw, so what. The whole city got looted. 300,000 extra troops wouldn't have prevented that. Evidently, it is a part of Middle Eastern culture to loot. There were weapons caches everywhere, and they certainly didn't get moved during looting. We dealt with the situation. It does not mean Shinseki was correct.
 
We haven't left Iraq yet! :lol:

That's MY point.:lol:

Ok, we're going in circles. :lol: We haven't left Germany or Japan yet!

That's MY counterpoint!
 
Aw, so what. The whole city got looted. 300,000 extra troops wouldn't have prevented that. Evidently, it is a part of Middle Eastern culture to loot. There were weapons caches everywhere, and they certainly didn't get moved during looting. We dealt with the situation. It does not mean Shinseki was correct.


Reprint from an edit I said above:

I'd bet that within one year of us leaving...Iraq will be back in civil war.

I hope I'm wrong but fear I'm right. (Iraqi's are savages!....call me bigoted or whatever...but they love to kill eachother & are good at it!)
 
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Aw, so what. The whole city got looted. 300,000 extra troops wouldn't have prevented that. Evidently, it is a part of Middle Eastern culture to loot. There were weapons caches everywhere, and they certainly didn't get moved during looting. We dealt with the situation. It does not mean Shinseki was correct.

You are wrong those bunkers that surrounded Baghdad and elsewhere were immediately looted and they were taking semi tractor trailer loads of high explosives out of there as our soldiers had to stand there a watch it happen.

Are you telling me Cheney and his tiny group of planners couldn't have predicted that?

This was happening as Rumsfeld was telling our troops that the liberated Iraqies would be raining them with flowers...but it turned out that those very high explosives were use to rain IED's down upon our troops.
 
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Ok, we're going in circles. :lol: We haven't left Germany or Japan yet!

That's MY counterpoint!

We are going in circles......I don't think it's realistic to assume what happened in postwar Germany or Japan is an accurate model of postwar Iraq or Afghanistan.
& you don't really want to keep our troops there for another 60 years...do you?
 
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Cheney has ZERO credibilty in reguards to throwing criticism at this Whitehouse.
 
Reprint from an edit I said above:

I'd bet that within one year of us leaving...Iraq will be back in civil war.

I hope I'm wrong but fear I'm right. (Iraqi's are savages!....call me bigoted or whatever...but they love to kill eachother & are good at it!)

That is a real posibility. What can we do to help minimize that? Help as we can to get reconciliation to happen between the communities.
 
You are wrong those bunkers that surrounded Baghdad and elsewhere were immediately looted and they were taking semi tractor trailer loads of high explosives out of there as our soldiers had to stand there a watch it happen.

Are you telling me Cheney and his tiny group of planners couldn't have predicted that?

This was happening as Rumsfeld was telling our troops that the liberated Iraqies would be raining them with flowers...but it turned out that those very high explosives were use to rain IED's down upon our troops.

Yes, I thought it was stupid that we just stood there.

I don't know if Cheney and his tiny group of planners couldn't have predicted that. Obviously they didn't.

I still don't think 300,000 addition troops would have helped. Shinseki was wrong.
 
That is a real posibility. What can we do to help minimize that? Help as we can to get reconciliation to happen between the communities.

That's an excellent question & it involves nation building over there....& I'm not a fan of nation building.
I say......it's their country & let the chips fall where they will....We have our own problems!
 
That's an excellent question & it involves nation building over there....& I'm not a fan of nation building.
I say......it's their country & let the chips fall where they will....We have our own problems!

I'm a big fan of nation building. We need to ensure that the investment in blood and treasure is not wasted.
 
I'm a big fan of nation building. We need to ensure that the investment in blood and treasure is not wasted.

I simply disagree with the concept of throwing good money after bad. It doesn't work.
I think Iraq was a huge blunder & we need to admit it & not waste any more American lives or dollars over there.
 
I simply disagree with the concept of throwing good money after bad. It doesn't work.

What bad money? We build a new democracy! That does not happen every decade. What we have accomplished is a huge success!
 
What bad money? We build a new democracy! That does not happen every decade. What we have accomplished is a huge success!

If Iraq is still a stable democracy a year after we leave.....I'll say you're right. Right now ....we are still occupiers over there. We are keeping the lid on.
 
If Iraq is still stable a year after we leave.....I'll say you're right. Right now ....we are still occupiers over there. We are keeping the lid on.

Not so much. The Iraqi Army and Police are in the lead. We trained them well. We trained them to train themselves. That is a huge success.
 
Not so much. The Iraqi Army and Police are in the lead. We trained them well. We trained them to train themselves. That is a huge success.

Neither one of us can win or lose this debate until we see what happens after we leave. (Unless you think we should never leave & permanently occupy Iraq?)
 
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