Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., is understandably getting a lot of attention for opposing President Bush’s plan to send more troops to Iraq. But what do our other delegation members think of the plan?
Sen. Pat Roberts said his support was conditioned upon Iraqi forces stepping up efforts to end the violence. “At this point, I believe it is the only realistic choice given the regional instability and danger we face,” he told Associated Press. Rep. Todd Tiahrt said in a statement that he was pleased that the plan “includes moving Iraqi security forces to the front, with U.S. troops serving in a support role.” Rep. Jerry Moran was skeptical, telling Associated Press that it doesn’t make sense to send more troops if the Iraqi people aren’t willing to set aside sectarian differences. Rep. Dennis Moore, D-Lenexa, said that “the president’s troop escalation plan will not create a stable Iraq,” adding that the “new strategy is more of the same.” And Rep. Nancy Boyda, D-Topeka, didn’t take a definitive position after the speech but said that she had “deep concerns.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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21 Comments
Where Are The Republicans For Peace?http://www.antiwar.com/bandow/?articleid=10307
As you can tell, I have no brain at all. I’m just a hater. I have the solution to all the problems. I’m just not smart enough to put it into words. So, I just copy and paste.
Will the ARI takle over the fighting?
U.S. unit says Iraqis ‘not ready to stand up’Troops in Baghdad frustrated with lack of progress in passing the baton
“They’re kicking a dead horse here. The Iraqi army can’t stand up on their own.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16587347/
So. almost 4 years into this SNAFU and we put the guy who was in charge of creating and training the ARI in charge of the entire mess.
Regardless of whether you are left or right, you have to agree that the War on Iraq is one huge mess. Almost four years after “Mission Accomplished” we are still watching the body count grow with no foreseeable end in sight.
The question remains, although no one wants to answer it, is why wasn’t this plan in place years ago?
The answer cannot be that Maliki would not let us attack al Sadr, since Maliki has only been PM since last June.
Chalabi was supposed to take over with ease. Didn’t you get the memo?
Tiahrt agrees with a Bush plan? Gee, there’s a shocker. Bush could say his plan was to strap grenades to flamingos and Tiahrt would see that as brilliant.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/12/poll.iraq.plan/index.html
CNN Poll says Two Thirds Against Bush’s plan.
I read down the poll results a bit farther and only 43 percent of those polled watched the telecast or saw any party of the Bush Speech.
Some interesting data there. heh
I don’t see what the problem is with training the Iraqis to fight for themselves. Hell, these people were born fighting. They’re living in the Middle East and they are not used to fighting? I just don’t believe it is taking 4 years for their OWN people to stand up and fight.
If it is just matter of making them wear clean uniforms and march in lockstep, then don’t have them do that stuff. Let them fight like the insurgents do – undercover and stree-like fighting.
I think the problem lies with the Iraqi government. Malaki cannot be trusted – I think he is playing both sides of the fence. The Iraqi police have corruption widespread within. And we are surprised at this? The whole Iraq war was mismanaged from the start and has continued to be mismanaged to this day.
And our Kansas delegation are watching out for their butts on this one. Brownback knows that 2/3 of the voters oppose this war – he is not about to turn his back on that many possible voters.
Tiarht is just watching his butt by sitting on that fence – but I guess the last election showed him that he is no longer in the cat bird seat.
JM – aren’t you one of those who chose not to watch the address?
Meanwhile, at least some Republicans are seeing the light:
“Several leading GOP senators have also come out against Bush’s “New Way Forward” — some in blistering terms. Sen. Chuck Hagel, an increasingly outspoken critic of the administration, called it “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam” and promised to oppose it.
“To ask our young men and women to sacrifice their lives to be put in the middle of a civil war is wrong,” Hagel told Rice during a Foreign Relations Committee hearing. “It’s, first of all, in my opinion, morally wrong. It’s tactically, strategically, militarily wrong.”
hmmm…
If they would have polled me late Wednesday night, I haven’t watched it.
I did watch it later. :)
OK. I watched it live – I always try to do that. I don’t like to have someone else tell me what was said; I want to hear it for myself. Ane BEFORE any analysis.
I’m less than impressed with Boyda sitting on the fence. Why does she think she was elected?
BTW guys.Do you realize that the prez-nut is setting us up for a BIG war in the middle east?Iraq was only supposed to be a launching pad into Iran and/or Syria.All the signs are there.Hold your kids tight.If dickhead keeps us on this path like a snowball to hell, there will be a draft before the next election.
TRACY,
Indeed. Word on the street is that Bush has already declared an ‘undeclared’ war on Iran, to be staged for the time being through the CIA.
This is also the rationale for putting a Navy guy (Admiral William Fallon) in charge of CENTCOM: combined land/air/sea attack on Iran.
***********************************
Thursday, January 11, 2007George W. Bush: Decider, Divider, Escalator
Jeff Huber
“We’re about to send two of our least effective instruments of power to the Middle East: Patriot Missile batteries and Condi Rice.
And oh, yeah, 21,500 more troops.
No one seems to seriously think Mr. Bush’s escalation strategy will work, including, one gets the distinct impression, Mr. Bush himself.
The Works
That depends, of course, on what your definition of “works” is. If you mean something along the lines of “restore order to Iraq, disband the militias, unify the government and rebuild the country,” no, that’s not going to work.
If you mean: “escalate and expand the war throughout the region,” yeah, that will work. It’s working already.
The “surge” is underway. ABC reports that elements of the 82nd Airborne Division arrived in Baghdad on Wednesday.
U.S. forces have raided the Iranian consulate in the Iraqi city of Erbil and arrested five members of its staff. It looks like that’s as close as we’re going to come to conducting direct diplomacy with Iran.
Mr. Bush has ordered an additional carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf region.
We’ve conducted air raids in Somalia, ostensibly in an effort to kill senior al-Qaeda members suspected of being responsible for the 1998 bombing U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. CBS reports that none of the intended targets were killed. U.S. Navy ships are intercepting maritime traffic of the Somali coast, searching for al-Qaeda members attempting to flee the country.
We’ve begun to deploy F-117 stealth bombers to South Korea. An Air Force spokesman says the deployment is “part of ongoing measures to maintain a credible deterrent and presence in the West Pacific.”
Yeah.
The House and Senate are holding hearings today on the Iraq policy that Mr. Bush announced last night. I’m more than a little concerned that Congress seems so fixated by Iraq right now that they’re not paying any attention whatsoever to the escalation that’s already taking place.
Military pundit Ralph Peters of the New York Post finally figured out that the assignment of Admiral William Fallon to take charge of Central Command was all about getting tough with Iran. You know something is obvious to everyone if Peters gets it.
Here’s what gets me. Bush backers warn us that withdrawal from Iraq will cause the violence there to spread into a regional war, yet everything Bush is doing seems purposely designed to ensure that a regional war–one that spans the Horn of Africa to the Korean Peninsula–is precisely what happens.
And nobody in Congress or the mainstream media seems to be on to that yet.”
http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/2007/01/george-w-bush-decider-divider.html
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.
I have to think the Bush approach is to stir the hornets nest with Iran and Syria, provoke both into “acts of war”, commence military action against both, then back Congress into a position where they have to fund all three wars.
Actually, make that all FOUR wars. The one we were supposed to be fighting – Afghanistan – and then the other Bush wars of choice.
All of this Surge and Puke stuff is just cover for what is coming – and all out regional war in the Middle East that will escalate into World War III.
WSClark,
Yep. That’s Cheney’s game. The only question is whether we can get ‘em impeached in time.
Yes after reading this, which I came upon quite by accident, thought it might provide some insight as to why GW wants to drag this on forever. Of course HIS first prize will be control of Iraq oil however this will provide some other details.
==============================Jeffrey Garten, dean of the Yale School of Management and former economic and foreign policy official in the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Clinton administrations, warns that the increases in spending on war and homeland security are “aggravating an already acute fiscal problem, eroding economic vitality” and creating “the kind of politically paralyzing guns-or-butter debate that characterized the Vietnam era.”
Maybe so for Garten and everyone to his left, but not for Bush and his constituency. The direct impact of the war on the economy gives us more guns and less social butter, a constructive outcome for the right wing oligarchy now ruling this country.
http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/Content/2003-04/13du_boff.cfm
I have this sick feeling that George W. Bush will be like that character in the old Peter Sellers movie where he is riding the missile and yeehawing like a drunken cowboy.
But, really, we all know GWB is not about to risk his own hide for this war. He is ready, able and willing to sit back and send other people’s children, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and etc. into a war that he knows is a big fat mess.
George W. Bush is proud to be the war president. That’s how much he cares about the rest of us.
WSClark and CF, you may may very well be 100% correct. Unfortunately.
From Zbigniew Brzezinski’s excellent anaylsis of Bush’s less than satisfactory speech Wednesday night:
‘ยท The decision to escalate the level of the U.S. military involvement while imposing “benchmarks” on the “sovereign” Iraqi regime, and to emphasize the external threat posed by Syria and Iran, leaves the administration with two options once it becomes clear — as it almost certainly will — that the benchmarks are not being met. One option is to adopt the policy of “blame and run”: i.e., to withdraw because the Iraqi government failed to deliver. That would not provide a remedy for the dubious “falling dominoes” scenario, which the president so often has outlined as the inevitable, horrific consequence of U.S. withdrawal. The other alternative, perhaps already lurking in the back of Bush’s mind, is to widen the conflict by taking military action against Syria or Iran. It is a safe bet that some of the neocons around the president and outside the White House will be pushing for that. Others, such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman, may also favor it.’
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/11/AR2007011101572.html
Two options, and I think we all know which one Bush is far more likely to pick. A likely heuristic: which of the two options leaves the more attractive legacy, “blame and run” or “open up new fronts”?
ANS: When it comes to war making, history, that newfound friend of the president’s, irresistibly casts a fairer halo — a nimbus — above those who open new fronts than on those who retreat clumsily from old fronts. Those who retreat clumsily are portrayed in a far less graceful light. Notable exceptions to the first include Hitler and Napoleon; those to the second include …. nobody I can think of.
It seems we live in extraordinarily grim times.
The Bush clan of Islam haters extends out to Bechtel as well. War profiteering is one area of expertise:
Bechtel, More Powerful Than The US Army( Remember George P.Shultz and Caspar Weinberger = Bechtel)
On the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Bechtel, the gargantuan global construction firm bBechtel, More Powerful Than The US Armyased in San Francisco, issued its revenue numbers for 2005. While the situation continued to deteriorate for the US military forces in Iraq, Bechtel reported more fragrant news.
Although the privately-owned company doesn’t disclose its profits, Bechtel did announce that its income was soaring to new heights not seen since the 1960s when the company was damming some of the world’s most glorious canyons, building some of the most dangerous nuclear plants and constructing military bases for the staging of the war on Vietnam.
For the year 2004, Bechtel brought in more than $17.4 billion, a record haul for the company. That makes two record years in a row. Last year Bechtel earned more than $17 billion for the first time. Both peaks were all the more impressive given the senescent condition of the economy.
Much of that robust income stream is coming from its operations in Iraq, where Bechtel is the king of contractors. A few days after the war began, the US Agency for International Development handed Bechtel a $680 million contract for the reconstruction of Iraq infrastructure, a by-invitation-only deal awarded in a secret process. That number has been jacked up twice and now totals more than $1.8 billion and may eventually reach as much as $50 billion.
Under the terms of the deal, Bechtel got $515 million to rebuild Iraq’s power generating stations; $33 million for rebuilding roads and railroads; $44 million to dredge the seaport at Umm Qasr; $45 million to rehab the Iraqi telephone network, covering 240,000 phone lines; $52 million for repair of the Baghdad airport; $208 million to rebuild sewage and water treatment plants; and $53 million for the reconstruction of Iraqi schools.
For this initial round of contracts alone, Bechtel was also guaranteed another $80 million for company profits.
The obliteration of Iraq’s civic buildings, roads and power plants proved to be a billion-dollar bonanza for Bechtel. To build you must first destroy.
More on this story:http://iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/50181
I see Bush is going back to if you don’t have a solution to the problem I created, then you shouldn’t criticize my leadership!