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Title: Bush Administration Offers Paul Wolfowitz Top State Department Job
Source:
Newsweek | Michael Isikoff
URL Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/ ... inistration-offer_n_74981.html
Published: Dec 2, 2007
Author: Newsweek | Michael Isikoff
Post Date: 2007-12-02 15:04:41 by angle
Keywords: None
Views: 78
Comments: 7
Don't ever say the Bush administration doesn't take care of its own. Nearly three years after Paul Wolfowitz resigned as deputy Defense secretary and six months after his stormy departure as president of the World Bank--amid allegations that he improperly awarded a raise to his girlfriend--he's in line to return to public service. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has offered Wolfowitz, a prime architect of the Iraq War, a position as chairman of the International Security Advisory Board, a prestigious State Department panel, according to two department sources who declined to be identified discussing personnel matters. The 18-member panel, which has access to highly classified intelligence, advises Rice on disarmament, nuclear proliferation, WMD issues and other matters. "We think he is well suited and will do an excellent job," said one senior official.
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#1. To: angle, hammerdown (#0)
The war according to David Hackworth {snip} "For many weeks your Web site has described conditions in Iraq as being far more chaotic and unstable than generally reported. Why did the Pentagon try to downplay the problems instead of playing it straight and saying this is a long- term problem for America? Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz made a very horrible estimate of the situation. They concluded that the war would be Slam Bam Goodbye Saddam, followed by victory parades with local Iraqi folks throwing flowers and rice and everything nice, then the troops would come home. When I examined the task organization, my estimate was totally contrary to this asshole Rumsfeld, who went in light and on the cheap, all based upon this rosy scenario. I never thought this would be a fight without resistance. And there was another guy who thought the same way I did; his name is Saddam Hussein. He looked at the awesome array of forces being set up against him and said, "Wait a minute, no way can I prevail, I tried that in '91 and just saw in Afghanistan what happened to Taliban and Al-Qaida, I will run away for another day." Saddam is saying, "I am going to copy Ho Chi Minh and the Taliban and go into a guerrilla configuration." It [the invasion of Baghdad] did go Slam Bam Goodbye Saddam, but we are in there so light that we don't have sufficient force to provide the stability after the fall of the regime. We can't secure the banks, the energy facilities, the vital installations, the government, the ministry, the museums or the library. The world was witness to this great anarchy, the looting and rioting that set over Baghdad. There was that wonderful quote by Rumsfeld. "Stuff happens," he said. He flipped it off. Do you see any similarities to the U.S. engagement in Vietnam? The mistake in Vietnam was we failed to understand the nature of the war and we failed to understand our enemy. In Vietnam we were fighting World War II. Up to now in Iraq we have been fighting Desert Storm with tank brigade attacks. The tanks move into a village, swoop down, the tank gunner sees a silhouette atop a house, aims, fires, kills and it turns out to be a 12-year-old boy. Now, the father of that boy said, "We will kill 10 Americans for this." This is exactly what happened in Vietnam; a village was friendly, then some pilot turns around and blows away the village, the village goes from pro-Saigon to pro-Hanoi. What kind of weapons would you be using in this war if you were running it? Would you trade the pistols for grenade launchers? Would you bring in more Apache helicopters, more snipers, what? You have to use surgical weapons, not weapons that can reach out and strike innocents. The American Army is trained to break things and kill people -- not the kind of selective work that is needed. You don't use a tank brigade to surround a village; instead, you set up ambushes along the route. It is all so similar to what I saw in Vietnam, this tendency to be mesmerized by big-unit operations. But if you fight like a G (uerillas), everything is under the table, in the dark, done by stealth and surprise; there is no great glory -- except the end result. America has never been capable of fighting the G; from [Gen.] Custer who fucked it up, you can fast-forward to today. [In Iraq] they are proving it again. The U.S. military never, never learns from the past. They make the same mistake over and over again. What other changes would you say need to happen in Iraq? Get rid of the conventional generals; these guys in Iraq are tank generals, but they don't have any experience in fighting an insurgency. Reminds me of Vietnam when the artillery commanders wanted to build bases everywhere to fire their cannons. These tactics do not work against the G. I said in a recent piece: "Fire these fuckers and get a snake eater." Snake eater -- where does that term come from? That is an old expression from the beginning of Special Forces. They would have demonstrations at Fort Bragg [U.S. Special Forces headquarters in North Carolina] to demonstrate their animalism and they would bite the head off a chicken or bite a snake in half. {snip}
You must be registered with the correct party to vote for Ron Paul in states with CLOSED PRIMARIES. Click Primarily Paul and scroll down to the State by State chart. War drums?
omg Just in time for an invasion of Iran? Remember this? "We have no idea what we will need until we get there on the ground," Mr. Wolfowitz said at a hearing of the House Budget Committee. "Every time we get a briefing on the war plan, it immediately goes down six different branches to see what the scenarios look like. If we costed each and every one, the costs would range from $10 billion to $100 billion." Mr. Wolfowitz's refusal to be pinned down on the costs of war and peace in Iraq infuriated some committee Democrats, who noted that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the budget director, had briefed President Bush on just such estimates on Tuesday. "I think you're deliberately keeping us in the dark," said Representative James P. Moran, Democrat of Virginia. "We're not so naïve as to think that you don't know more than you're revealing." Representative Darlene Hooley, an Oregon Democrat, also voiced exasperation with Mr. Wolfowitz: "I think you can do better than that." Mr. Wolfowitz, with Dov S. Zakheim, the Pentagon comptroller, at his side, tried to mollify the Democratic lawmakers, promising to fill them in eventually on the administration's internal cost estimates. "There will be an appropriate moment," he said, when the Pentagon would provide Congress with cost ranges. "We're not in a position to do that right now."
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no surprise. this administration rewards incompetance and corruption. I wonder what would happen if anyone ever actually performed as a good and true public servant. no, I'm joking.
; )
Damn...just what we need...another neocon dumbcrap to keep the insanity going.
nc Good to see you here. The inmates are NOT in charge here.
Thanks out to Hammerdown:
#2. To: angle (#0)
#3. To: angle (#0)
"We think he is well suited and will do an excellent job," said one senior official.
Mr. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, opened a two-front war of words on Capitol Hill, calling the recent estimate by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq, "wildly off the mark." Pentagon officials have put the figure closer to 100,000 troops. Mr. Wolfowitz then dismissed articles in several newspapers this week asserting that Pentagon budget specialists put the cost of war and reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion in this fiscal year. He said it was impossible to predict accurately a war's duration, its destruction and the extent of rebuilding afterward.
#4. To: angle (#0)
#5. To: Peppa (#1)
#6. To: angle (#0)
#7. To: ncObserver (#6)
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