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Obama Sets End of Iraq Combat For August 31st
eldavojohn writes "President Barack Obama has announced that on August 31st the United States will cease all combat operations in Iraq, although 50,000 troops will remain until the end of 2011. It's been a long seven-and-a-half years, with no guarantee of this announcement actually signifying the end of violence. Pundits are already speculating on whether or not this withdrawal speech is 'Mission Accomplished 2.' It's possibly the most significant confirmation of and commitment to a withdrawal the world will hear from the United States in Iraq."
The war, over there, has been over for years. Now, they are just working as cops. Not the type of job the military was ever cut out to do.
On the contrary. You announce the date and pull out sooner. When the little shits come out of hiding you nail them.
Real Americans don't give up so easy. A measly 7.5 years? Puhlease... If McCain had been elected we'd be there for another 7.5... along with 30 years in Iran and who knows how long on the Korean peninsula. I mean really, which party would you rather have in office?
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Yeah, right! Because if you don't notice it one month ahead, then insurgents would never notice that Americans have left and will stay home. They are that dumb you know.
You make it seem as if Iraq is going to be completely undefended or something. In reality, there's the Iraqi military and police forces, right?
Let's have a little bit of faith in them, okay.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Let's hope the insurgents and other ne'er-do-wells get the message they're supposed to stop blowing people up on August 31.
From TFA: "While the US has been scaling down its troop presence in Iraq it has been stepping up its military commitment to Afghanistan, with the president ordering a surge of 30,000 additional soldiers there. " So, we're pulling our armed forces out of Iraq, just to send them to Afghanistan. A couple of nukes and they can all come home! I'm just saying...
We shouldn't have been there in the first place.
You mean when Saddam invaded Kuwait? We've 'been there' since that time. Just the level of troops and mission changed.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
You're kidding, right? It guarantees that the few remaining insurgent groups will prepare for the date, and then attack with whatever they have left.
That was the criticism in the article based on two car bombs and a drive-by killing eight in Iraq today -- the day of this announcement. I guess a better question should have been "will Iraqi security forces be able to contain the unavoidable violence following this withdrawal?"
That's why you *don't have a specific date* nor do you release your plans to the enemy.
Or perhaps you gamble and show the world that the situation is under control by releasing your "plans" of withdrawal showing that those now in charge are very capable hands. Otherwise what do you do? Sit there and then just magically disappear one day? And when that happens, you think you're not in the same scenario you just mentioned? No matter how you cut it, it's a delicate situation.
My work here is dung.
>> You announce the date and pull out sooner. When the little shits come out of hiding you nail them.
Is this a military tactic, or a birth control method?
This probably just means we can now devote more of those troops to Afghanistan. *sigh*
I wonder how much we're spending on all those troops in Germany, South Korea and Japan? Bring all the troops home from everywhere, cut the military budget in half, and we'd have no economic woes, and still have a gigantic military.
You missed the "Stuff that matters" part of Slashdot's motto up there.
I was thinking something similar (that it's easy to declare you will leave on a certain date, but hard to do it if the situation on the ground doesn't match at the time), but I think the way they are doing it is actually good.
They aren't declaring the specific date to leave, they are planning on the specific date to stop fighting. Basically on August 31st they are going to turn everything over to the Iraqi government (who at this point can probably handle anything the insurgents throw at it), but they are going to stick around, just in case. That way if the insurgents do throw everything at them, there'll still be troops around to help deal with it if they really need help. If they can handle themselves for a year, it is a sign we can safely remove the troops. The Iraqis still won't be alone, we can give them air superiority almost instantly if any insurgency gets too bad, and we can easily re-conquer the country within a month if necessary.
Obama did well on this one. Let's give him credit.
Qxe4
Jesus Christ. Not only are you trying to play the race card, you're trying to play it in a game of marbles.
So, we are ending "combat operations" but keeping the soldiers with guns there? It's only slightly comforting to hear that nothing has changed in the military since I got out (Only in an "at least it isn't me" way). This used to be the trick they would pull on all the missions I was on. When people get tired, just tell them it's almost over, whether it really is or not. Since I'm allowed to think now, what does an end to combat operations really mean? It sounds like they are just going to end combat pay.
Speaking as a liberal ... yes. The surge worked. I thought it would be too little, too late, and that the Washington politicians would find a way to micro-manage it into failure. I was wrong. And I'm happy I was wrong. :-) And happy to admit it. I still don't think the invasion was a good idea in the first place -- but the surge was probably the best choice that could have been made given the circumstances.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
More like just in time for the November elections...
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Starting a war (even a war with collateral damage) is not a war crime; the idea of a war crime is simply to state that one's legal means to wage war is not unlimited. Deportation of entire populations for deprivation and/or genocide, for instance, is right out. To compare US conduct in Iraq to such things is histrionic nonsense.
It's a cynical attempt to try to do something to try to stop the spiraling poll numbers for him and the Democrats. Yet we're still leaving troops there--commitment is "changing," not ending--and the war in Afghanistan is bloodier than ever (worse than it was under Bush) so it's not really going to do anything. It's also an attempt to distract people from the ethics trials of two Democrats in the House.
Some pundits are predicting the biggest GOP majority since 1946. We'll see. All I know is, this Democrat supermajority fucking sucks, obsessing over socialized healthcare for a year instead of jobs. And now, our buddies in the UK are decentralizing their healthcare because the quality of their socialized healthcare sucks. Obama's whole first year was a pointless waste.
It's like the last two years have been an example of how idealistic liberalism fails in practice. Obama flies around the world apologizing to everyone for our existence to match the image of the enlightened intellectual, yet people in the rest of the world continue to hate us and are openly making nukes. Spends money on stimulus packages that do little except increase the debt, furthering our financial troubles. Constantly goes back on promises made during his campaign. And on and on.
Most people, when times are tough, tighten their belts and lower their expenses to save money until things get better. Why Obama chose to expand government and increase spending in a recession is disappointing but not surprising.
Soldiers grow back, forests don't.
You've never planted a tree? Seriously, you put a seedling in the ground when it is small, and years later you come back, and it is actually bigger. Plant a soldier and come back in a few years, and all you have is the same small stone with the name of someone's kid on it.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
More like almost exactly the timeline Obama campaigned on.
Iraq's oil production capabilities are around $20B/year. We're spending $300B/year on the war. There literally isn't enough oil in the ground there to pay us back for the last 7.5 years, and it would take a century even if they tried. Can we please do some basic math and stop the stupid "it's all about oil" line of attack - it makes you look like an idiot.
Do you have ESP?
How long have we maintained 40,000 troops in Korea?
You do realize that Obamacare is neither socialized nor centralized, right?
I have trained the Iraqi security forces (military and civilian) and they are pretty much not trainable by western standards. You have grown men/working professionals who don't know their right from their left. You spend one week trying to teach them military drill that takes the average 8th grader 20 minutes to master. Add a loaded rifle and an "Insha Allah" attitude, and you only make everything worse.
Granted, they have pretty severe brain-drain in that country. All the smart ones left years ago (in the 80s, then again in 1990, then yet again in the 2000s). If security ever improves, I have several friends and colleagues that would go back. The problem is, security won't improve without the likes of them returning and bringing their advanced degrees back to their homeland. It's a total "chicken-or-the-egg" conundrum.
yah but i find it very interesting that an election is right around the corner its more like he plained it to be this way
So what you're saying is... you're distrustful of America having a president who can actually plan more than a year ahead of time?
Isn't that a minimum standard we should be, if not proud of, appreciative of?
Obama did well on this one. Let's give him credit.
Obama did well? Obama opposed everything that allowed Iraq to be in this position now. Obama had no plan for Iraq except a campaign promise (and like all of his campaign promises, it comes with a expiration date). Bush, and Patraus more so, deserves the credit here. They put all Iraq on this path, all Obama did was follow the blueprint given to him by Bush. A plan that called for the removal of troops in late 2010. Obama had no plan of his own
As a conservative I'd like to point out your argument about the Afghanistan war becoming bloodier under Obama and this surge of troops is the same argument many liberals used during the Iraq Surge. Guess what, when you send more troops in to take and hold ground and fight the enemy more troops get hurt. But that doesn't mean the strategy is a failure. It's a war, if you want to win people end up dying before that happens.
It's absofuckinglutely ridiculous that the vehement liberals razed Petraeus for the surge under the Bush administration and now the right wingers want to make the same mistake and go AGAINST the commanders on the ground just so they can bash a Dem President. Keep your political bashing out of war strategy, the lives of our troops and future of those countries is more important than scoring political points.
if bush i in iraq i had decided to push on to baghdad and topple saddam in the early 1990s after racing across the desert unimpeded, then the world would have seen that as justified
Bush 41 had build a true multinational coalition including many Muslim middle eastern nations, and in negotiating the coalition, had agreed not to change the regime in Iraq, only to liberate Kuwait. Pushing to Baghdad would have been a stab in the back to our allies at the time. And it was believed that after the war, Saddam might fall from power on his own, or at least would have been far less powerful / more cooperative than he ended up being.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Don't forget to mention that you didn't read it.
"Lame" - Galaxar
How is it NOT socialized?
It doesn't matter. GP is being sucked into an argument which is unwinnable because the premise depends on an agreed to definition for what is an extremely ambiguous (in the U.S. at least) term.
Takes money from society as a whole and redistributes. Um, that's socialized.
You've just describe every nation that collects taxes.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Rachel Maddow made some interesting points on her week in Afghanistan a few weeks back. Some things I hadn't heard or read elsewhere.
1) The distribution of wealth is nonexistent in Afghanistan. All the war money is making a few Afghan nationals wealthy. There's a great clip of her walking with Richard Engel outside of these huge gaudy mansions. The mansions were all built by folks who got rich off of the war. Yet the streets outside them are unpaved, and there are trash heaps everywhere and open sewers. Government services are nonexistent even in this neighborhood full of mini-castles.
2) Although the war has dragged on, and we haven't made much progress since 2002 / 2003ish, much of the blame may lie in the fact that the U.S. was distracted by, and had vital resources diverted to Iraq. Much more progress in training the Afghans has apparently been made in the past year than the previous five years. Lots of mistakes were made in the prior years, in both training, counterinsurgency strategy, and general winning of hearts and minds.
The biggest question behind the second point is "is it too late now?". Let's assume for a minute that the folks Maddow talked to are right. We now have the secret sauce that eluded us for years under bush. We now know what to do in Afghanistan, where as before, we just hadn't figured it out yet. If we could go back in time and tell ourselves this plan in 2002, I'm sure this would be helpful. But that's not the case. We now have to implement this plan, not under a blank slate as we had in 2002, but in a country that's been occupied by us for 8+ years now. With all the bitterness and resentment that comes from all the mistakes we made in the past.
If we have the secret formula, can it work, or has the public opinion of the Afghan population turned so far as to be irreversible?
There's one more interesting thing, also from Richard Engel on Maddow's program. This is an exchange from October 9, 2009:
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.