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That Guy · 05-21-2008, 06:52 AM

oh yeah, and iraq is craptastic now since we made a bunch of errors (which were well known BEFORE they happened, but were ignored).

1. no contingency planning (shit, that's basically all war is)... well, actually there was contingency planning, and an awful lot of it too. rumsfeld just decided he was smarter than the entirety of the us military and didn't need to listen to any of it. i mean, who needs common sense when you alone, by sheer force of will, can demand an entire country of millions to greet a foreign army as liberators? oh, right.

2. relied on bad intelligence without proper fact checking (discounting the WMD thing completely), and they picked a poor initial leader candidate who was a complete liar.

3. disbanding the army and the entire government structure overnight and basically blacklisting all former employers who actually knew how to run the country. you can go back 3000 years and find people who had already figured out this was a bad idea... the best conquerers in the world (caeser, alexander the great, xerxes, saladin) all knew that keeping the local governors and army was important. ensuring employment and stability saves a lot of problems, and it's easier to integrate non ba'athist into an existing army etc than it is to create an army from scratch with no leadership experience (and it'll take 20 years before that army is worth anything - you can't teach experience in a classroom).

4. not the greatest effort in government formation after the mistakes above. honestly sadr looks like the best choice due to his street cred and ability to self organize and enforce his own policies among his followers. he's also willing to drop guns for politics, is very wary of iran and even though he's not a big fan of america, it's probably better in the long term for us (makes him more electable, and then he can warm up later as the country gets put back in better shape). of course, skipping out of the first elections was a huge mistake for him. you can't know what the end results would be though, and there are valid reasons to go in a different direction, but it never needed to get this bad in the first place.

not that it matter's at this point.

05-21-2008, 06:52 AM	#24
That Guy Living Legend Join Date: Jun 2004 Location: VA Age: 42 Posts: 17,620	Re: Perspective on Iran oh yeah, and iraq is craptastic now since we made a bunch of errors (which were well known BEFORE they happened, but were ignored). 1. no contingency planning (shit, that's basically all war is)... well, actually there was contingency planning, and an awful lot of it too. rumsfeld just decided he was smarter than the entirety of the us military and didn't need to listen to any of it. i mean, who needs common sense when you alone, by sheer force of will, can demand an entire country of millions to greet a foreign army as liberators? oh, right. 2. relied on bad intelligence without proper fact checking (discounting the WMD thing completely), and they picked a poor initial leader candidate who was a complete liar. 3. disbanding the army and the entire government structure overnight and basically blacklisting all former employers who actually knew how to run the country. you can go back 3000 years and find people who had already figured out this was a bad idea... the best conquerers in the world (caeser, alexander the great, xerxes, saladin) all knew that keeping the local governors and army was important. ensuring employment and stability saves a lot of problems, and it's easier to integrate non ba'athist into an existing army etc than it is to create an army from scratch with no leadership experience (and it'll take 20 years before that army is worth anything - you can't teach experience in a classroom). 4. not the greatest effort in government formation after the mistakes above. honestly sadr looks like the best choice due to his street cred and ability to self organize and enforce his own policies among his followers. he's also willing to drop guns for politics, is very wary of iran and even though he's not a big fan of america, it's probably better in the long term for us (makes him more electable, and then he can warm up later as the country gets put back in better shape). of course, skipping out of the first elections was a huge mistake for him. you can't know what the end results would be though, and there are valid reasons to go in a different direction, but it never needed to get this bad in the first place. not that it matter's at this point.