Lilly pads

[Plane]

http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/11/politics/military-considers-replicating-taqaddam-plan/

This seems to be a plan to send a small force of Americans to establish firebases, forts if you will.

This plan does not appeal to me, it is better to cut our losses and pull out of the fight entirely than to send about half enough.

If we are going to increase our strength there , why increase our strength a small amount?

What are these forts supposed to do really? Give the loyal troops a place to spend the night?

It might be good to honor our commitment and increase our support , but as Teddy Roosevelt was know to say -It is a crime to hit softly.

Perhaps we should decide to send the numbers and the resources enough to make a real difference and win.
Perhaps we should extricate ourselves and deplore the result , without casualties of our own.

But sending a weak force into the area , setting them up to loose, this is the charge of the light brigade.





The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.

 Theodore Roosevelt

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/theodorero117934.html#rQmYtillo0tiJOVX.99

[Plane]

http://www.army-technology.com/news/newsobama-authorises-deployment-of-additional-us-soldiers-to-iraq-4598366

The Pentagon will now deploy up to 450 soldiers to expand the US advise-and-assist mission at the Al-Taqaddum air base in Al Habbaniyah, in support of the Iraqi Government, taking the total number of US troops serving in the country to up to 3,550.

Some of the soldiers earmarked for deployment to the Taqaddum airbase are already in Iraq, and will be repositioned, while the rest will come from outside of the country.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I will withhold judgement until this has proven to the the right or wrong decision.
450 is rather a lot of people to train Iraqi soldiers.

[Plane]

  If you were about to be in a desperate fight , would you rather go into the fight with three friends or ten?

   The number is going to be three and a half thousand, 450 is just the amount of increase.

   Is this number high enough to defend itself?

[Xavier_Onassis]

I do not know that this is a "desperate fight", but as I understand it, the troops will be used to make the Iraqi Army, which certainly has the manpower and resources to defeat Dash, brave enough to not flee in the face of the opposition.

Again, time will tell if this decision was the proper one.  The government does not have the support of the people of this country to send in any huge force. And we have tried that, and it is only successful for as long as that huge force stays in place. The American people do not want any more permanent occupations of foreign nations, especially in the Middle East. At least the Korean arrangement makes it for Americans to buy Kias and Hyundais. Not much chance of Iraq turning into another South Korea.
The ideal Iraq would be something like a giant Kuwait or Qatar.

[Plane]

  The people of Iraq are not especially stupid, they can probably understand the workings of good government and productive industry as well as we do, and understanding better than we do is allowed.

    An hundred hundred generations of bad government does not extinguish hope.

   If there is a real hope that the people of Iraq can establish a government of the people and by the people are we not obliged to give help?

     If there is no hope , why is there no hope?

      Are they compared to us , less capable?

[Xavier_Onassis]

Iraqis are less capable of Americans by far when it comes to getting along with one another. Americans do not organize their various sects and tribes into private armies. Mohammad set a very bad example when it comes to governance. No Caliphate ever lasted more than a couple of generations. The idea is that religious figures are less likely to be corrupt than anyone else, that being descended from The Prophet makes a person superior, and that leadership is based on military victory.

When a religious leader is corrupt, defying him becomes not only treasonous, but sinful as well, and the corruption grows and grows, because only a few obsessed and secretive fanatics can be successful in overthrowing it.

It is easy for us to see what is wrong with Iraq.  They are pretty good at seeing what is wrong with our system as well, certainly better than we are, because the view from the outside looking in is generally better than when one is inside looking around at features they have always taken for granted.

If you have not lived outside the US for some period of time, you simply cannot see the fault lines in our government and society.

[Plane]

............................................................
They are pretty good at seeing what is wrong with our system as well, certainly better than we are, because the view from the outside looking in is generally better than when one is inside looking around at features they have always taken for granted.

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That is totally true !

I wish that this particular insight was more widespread and more easily applied.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I lived for three years, off and on, in Mexico, and have traveled to a dozen other countries.
In Mexico in the 1960's, the government suppressed the press and started a war with the university students, who they thought wanted to subvert the Olympics.
My university was almost the only one not on strike in Mexico City.  My friends and I used to hang out at the Turkish Embassy. We were a group of about 25 from 12 different countries, some the children of diplomats. The daughter of the Turkish Ambassador invited us whenever her father was out of town, which was very often. He was a politician that had fallen out of favor with the Army and they sent him away as an ambassador to get him out of their hair. Her feeking was that every nation needed an Ataturk, but only Turkey had been so blessed.

Turkish politics is even more Byzantine than Mexican politics.

I do not think that  most Iraqis believe that they have had 4000 years of bad government.
This may be true by American standards, but Iraqis are not Americans.
I hardly think that the UK had anything like a decent government until after WWII by American standards.
After the royalty had lost most of its influence, then there was the nobility, which had merged with the industrialists.