The original name, “The Forever War”, was already taken.

That is the longest BS press docet I’ve ever seen.

Basically it doesn’t address any issues, and paints the whole thing as if it’s gone off without a hitch, and been the plan all along. A long bit on how the invasion of Afghanistan went, then Iraq? Covered by “we liberated them, and now they’re free!”, then on to “so we’re training the security forces..” Nothing about insurgencies, bombs, terrorist factions, anything. And every other page has some “really wants to be a news printing” photo op of peaceful operations with loving liberated people.

*sigh* The point of this mandated report was to give everyone an accurate view of how things are going. All the report wound up being is a very long “everything’s fine, we’re not having any problems!” designed not to piss off anyone who backed the war effort.

And more reading: Lessons learned didn’t include a single thing about better intel, verifying infantry equipment, or chain of command issues?

Four years of a botched invasion that wasn’t supposed to take more than a year, prison abuses, infantry without armor, and messed up long term deployments and last minute deployment changes (people have been on the tacmac in an airplane to go to iraq, and had their orders canceled), discipline issues in our own ranks, and you can’t think of anything we could do better or work on in those regards?

God damn this is frustrating. It’s not even talking to a wall, they’re either releasing this in hopes of snowing the public, or releasing it because they’re blatantly unable to admit things may not have gone as they planned.

Ayup, part of the administration’s pitch of the war was that it would be dirt cheap, have no complications, and be over in less than a year.

Five years later, they don’t seem to think they may have had flawed planning on that aspect. It was dismissed when people kept pointing out that nobody’s ever invaded a country and settled all dissent in a few months.

The problem is they had this really wierd thought that we’re the good guys, and would be greeted by flower parades and liberated women, not seen as invaders for, go figure, invading. No matter how much people dislike the republican administration right now, if someone invaded and toppled them, there wouldn’t be a huge breath of “thank gawd you deposed our leaders!”, there’d be bitter fighting for years over it.

This is a botched war. We’re stuck in another permanent police action in a country we invaded with a terrible long term plan (we fired ordinance specifically at water treatment plants. While a good idea to force a surrender, a bad idea when you intend to occupy and rebuild), our troops are spending far more than their initial commitments over there, they’re poorly equipped and poorly trained for urban warfare, and we’ve got a huge problem with sexual assault by our own troops against our own troops.

Basically, the invasion? Nearly flawless. We only hit one unexpected bit with a force we weren’t prepared for. The intel leading to the invasion: Still no WMDs. We’ve just changed why we invaded. Now it’s human rights violations, though that wasn’t even kind of the pitch used to sell the invasion. Occupation? We’ve sucked at that hard. More losses during the occupation than the invasion. What was sold as a short and cheap war is a long and brutal conflict. Human rights violations on our side of the fence as well, accusations over the whole sole source contract to rebuild, terrible PR with the rest of the muslim world for the whole thing, the saddam trial is a joke, somehow we ended up with fewer combat ready iraqi police after three years than we had when we started the program, and we’re trying to bill it as flawless in this report? Our biggest issue in the whole thing was that we need to be friendlier with other countries so we can perform operations out of their turf? Seriously, there’s a LOT that’s gone terribly wrong, and this could be a learning experience to shape things up and do better if it ever comes up again. Instead it’s turned into patting themselves on the back and taking their successes and spinning them as things that need improvement, while totally ignoring all the actual flaws of the operations.

We’ve known the US armed forces are not built, equipped or prepared to hold ground. We knew that before we ever invaded. We’ve known for years that our huge weakness was urban warfare (hence all the R&D that’s been going into that area). But knowing that, we still stood up, said it wouldn’t take long at all, and we could do it easily.

Now yes, we have untrained infantry in iraq, and our holding ground is still abysmal. We weren’t prepared to do this, but did it anyways. The US armed forces have always been built to go in and take out a target and leave. We’ve become very very good at it.

But that report is not supposed to be “what we want to do in the next few years”, that report is legally mandated due to the iraq war. It was mandated because the Senate decided they were not getting any information on the progress of the war and occupation, or what the real issues were. What we want to do is part of the budget bills, we already know the army wants to refocus, and the air force wants newer long range intercepters.

I’m offended because I know a lot of these people serving, and they are stuck in a shitty situation with no end in sight, and the people running the show are so detached that they seem to think not addressing an issue will make it go away. The response to reports of rape of our own troops? A proposal to have a meeting to discuss the matter, and setting up a 9-5 (EST) hotline people can call. Brilliant.

And I’m fine with rebuilding if they admitted it up front. They told us a pricetag, that’s how they got approval to do this in the first place. A timeline and a price for the total invasion, rebuilding and occupation. They weren’t even CLOSE, and knew it when they origionally stated the goals. It was a huge lie just to get the public to agree with it until they were too far in to pull out. It offends me that even knowing all this, no one in any branch of government will suffer any form of punishment for lying to the public, and putting our armed forces in a situation they simply were not prepared to handle safely. If it was a need to invade due to a pressing threat to our safety, fine, we would have been pressed into it. But as it turns out, we had intel stating he wasn’t a threat, and Iran was a bigger issue. We now are in there, and see that he wasn’t a threat to us, and we could easily have waited until we were in a better position to do this without becoming bogged down in a war we aren’t built to fight.

Do we need to rebuild it? Sure. We blew it up. We should never have blown it up in the first place, but since we did, we’re rebuilding it. Should it be sole source? No, not really. I’ve done enough government purchasing to know that it requires a LOT of justification paperwork to go sole source on anything, to do so on such a large scale project is simply unheard of. This entire thing is full of stuff history books will be talking about for decades, once enough people are out of power that all the information is finally freely available. For now? Anything can just be buried under the power of a single party. Heck, just today: Secret wiretapping hearings? Nah, we’re cool, we’ll talk about it again later. Voted down.

The saddest thing about all this? I’m a conservative, and I’ve had enough of this mockery of a government. At this rate we’d be just as informed if they banned all press from entering DC.

But that’s just it, Iraq wasn’t sponsoring AQ, we’ve gone in and looked. Saddam hated them as much as we did, because they wanted Him out of power, too. We didn’t go into Iraq to stop terrorism, we went into Afghanistan for that. Our long term strategy has been almost reliably inaccurate intel reports. We thought they had WMD. We thought they were supporting AQ. We thought we knew about all their armed forces. We thought we knew HAMAS was going to lose the election. We’re basically wrong constantly. When we are right, we don’t even tell people (the CIA attacking one of AQ’s leaders in pakistan? Denied until we got proof we hit terrorists, then admitted to).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7336-2004Jul22.html

As everyone said before the iraq invasion: Iran’s the threat with terrorist links and a desire to burn things, Iraq is just petty and not worth the losses or money.

But you’re right, I have the QDR confused with the other report they’re supposed to be giving congress soon about what their plan in iraq actually is, and how it’s going. Though I stand by this being a worthless press piece that basically reads exactly like every employee yearly evaluation form I’ve ever read, where nothing bad has happened at all during a year, and they couldn’t do much of anything better. “I show up on time, but I could show up on time with doughnuts on fridays!” kind of thing in the Needs Improvement sections. Pure Fluff.

That wasn’t a comment about the press being bad, it was a comment about the information being given to the press is just as bad as if nothing was being given to them.

Oddly, I can’t find any of the transcripts those blogs are talking about, as far as the whole “pesticides! weapons! omg!”. We’ve founds lots of stuff that wasn’t banned explicitly as far as WMDs were concerned. Iraq was guilty of plenty of violations (long range attack drones, long range missiles, owning mobile weapons labs they said they destroyed), but no actual weapons, and no real evidence the mobile labs had been used since they were decommissioned post first war. The news isn’t covering it because it’s a conspiracy? What? Of all the bootlickers, do you really think FOX wouldn’t have a segment on weapons of mass destruction being found? At the very least Orielly? Seriously, those aren’t liberal media, those are people who are digging left and right to PROVE the administration is flawless, they’d have covered this left right and forward if there was anything to it.

Anyways, the CIA has flat out stated “dur, wait, he wasn’t in cahoots with AQ”: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9831216/site/newsweek
Left and right, the evidence that they did anything but go “hey, support us” “no” “please?” “no” is coming out, and it’s pretty obvious now that we were looking for something that wasn’t there.

The last link.. coverup? The basic concept of it was that Saddam was a terrible person. Nobody’s going to deny that and paint him as some civil rights leader. But he wasn’t supporting the terrorists who attacked us, and he wasn’t stockpiling WMDs to use against us. He was a brutal dictator, but so are plenty of other people. We invaded iraq under false pretenses, and that should bother people. If they sold the war from the start as “dude’s a jerk, we’re taking him out”, I’d not be nearly as pissed off. I mind when good friends die because of a lie.