From: Ryan Gill (rmgill@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri Jul 01 2005 - 06:38:25 PDT
At 12:16 AM -0400 7/1/05, Stephen Grammont wrote:
>
>And they did a fantastic job. While our troops
>were guarding the Oil Ministry the museum was
>being looted. Kinda hard for the press to
>ignore that. Pretty much everybody agrees that
>we didn't have enough troops on the ground, nor
>a plan for the looting aftermath.
However, using the incident at the Museum is a
straw argument. It's generally accepted now that
it was an inside job and that the senior
management likely made a lot of the arrangements.
Vaults were open, not broken open, hidden vaults
were open as if the looters knew exactly where to
look. Some artifacts wer
> I've talked with senior officers that were
>there on the ground and they will tell you that
>set us back quite a bit in our reconstruction
>effort. Hindsight is of course 20/20. Not
>acknowledging our mistakes means we will likely
>make them again the next time we have to do
>something like this, so I'd not be so quick to
>blame real failings in military and political
>policies on a few people with cameras and
>microphones. All that does is put our service
>men and women of the future, not to mention our
>country's reputation, needlessly at risk.
We haven't occupied and rebuilt a large country
in 60 years, give the pentagon some slack. Some
people didn't expect the Iraqi's to loot their
country blind.
>
>Before the war I thought Iraq likely had some
>WMD of some sort, even if ineffective (i.e.
>shelflife had expired, not deployable, etc.),
>but the evidence accumulated since going in
>shows the contrary. Saddam was bluffing and we
>called his bluff big time. He should have come
>clean with the inspectors instead of playing
>games, but he thought he knew what he was doing
>(er... just like when he "knew what he was
>doing" when he attacked Iran and then Kuwait).
>I wonder if he thinks about this while sitting
>in his cell.
Does calling someone's bluff still sit as a valid reason in your book?
--
--
Ryan Gill rmgill@SPAMmindspring.com
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