You really need to do a little research before you assign crass political motives to Bush re Falluja. Their were sound reasons on the ground in Iraq, both political and tactical, for delaying Falluja II. Do a little reading on comments from Sanchez and Abizaid from the period. Also remember the vacuum at State during the period with either Negroponte or no ambassador in Iraq and Powell asleep at the switch.

I don't see where Fallujah made much difference in the overall scheme of things. Even if there had been no insurgency in Iraq, we wouldn't be further along the political process than we are now. Remember soverignty was only returned in summer 2004. Three elections in 2005 alone? However, I must admit we'd be further along with the reconstruction.

The House is gerrymandered so that the republicans will probably lose a couple of seats but not control. Bush should support those that have supported him.

Vote for Harks, not party?

That would be...um, John McCain?

BARF!!!

Sharpshooter
Arizona

I don't believe Ralph Peters knows what he is talking about, his personal hatred for Don Rumsfeld clouds his judgment. How does Peters know what is the "right" level of troops in Iraq? The ciilian leaders of the military, not the military brass, decide what the mission is. If it were up to the military leaders, they would not fight any wars, even if they had 20 million soldiers in the army. (If they did decide to fight, they would want the entire economy and the policy-making turned over to them.) So spare me the rantings of these armchair "generals", they have to opine meaningless drivel to get paid for their tv and newspaper gigs.

I can't vote for Lieberman in Pennsylvania. Are there any other Dems even remotely related to the raptor family?

Hmmm.

Actually I disagree with your assessment of Fallujah. If you look at Fallujah, Ramadi and all of the other cities that were once bastions of support for "insurgents" you'll find a very simple common thread.

Specifically that each were allowed close up and personal contact with these "insurgents" for a protracted period of time. During which these "insurgents" showed themselves to be abominable people with no redeeming qualities. I.e. the popular support was for an image and not the reality. Once the residents of these cities were confronted with the reality vs the image, they realised how despicable the reality was and the support dried up.

In every single instance the "insurgents" murdered, robbed, raped and assaulted residents with impunity. Businesses, which provide both jobs and services, were systematically either forced to close or looted. All commerce ended and many of the leisure activities were completely circumscribed by extreme fundamentalists given free rein.

Giving the residents of Fallujah an opportunity to experience this may have made the subsequent battle more difficult. But it can also be argued that this experience has also evaporated much of the support for "insurgents" there which very likely would not have happened if the battle had taken place immediately.

"Vote for hawks, not for parties."

I absolutely agree! In 2004 I was for the very first time a single issue voter: Win the War!

I don't see that changing in 2006 or 2008.

I realize there are other legitimate issues. But they all take a back burner to killing those who are trying to kill us. We can work the other things out as we are able.

Totally agree - but besides Joe, who are the Dem Hawks? After all, the media relentlessly informs us that Murtha is "hawkish" - snort! Repubs may be squishy sometimes, but the Dems are almost pure goo. Vote Republican, they don't suck quite as bad as the other guys!

RE Peters - very smart, often good analysis, but his judgment can be clouded by his visceral loathing of Rummy, as noted above.

Always vote character. Then whatever issues may come up, he or she can be trusted to do, not the hawkish nor the dovish thing, but the right thing.

Nothing would convince me that Bush would do anything unethical never mind interfere with the war effort for his own personal gain.

It's unthinkable.

Also unthinkable is McCain in the White House.

I will be voting for Liebermannin CT. He continues to impress me with his strong stance on the War on Terror.

Debbie, if you can sneak back in a second time vote for him in my name, too. :)

Tefta writes: Always vote character.

I agree wholeheartedly with your premise and your post. My problem is how do you define character in a politician at the national level?

Almost always has to come down to a few hot topic issues where they are forced to take a firm position. The war, abortion, marriage issues, social security, etc.. What else do you have to go on? You hope if they support your side of these core issues, they'll also support other (in your opinion) common-sense issues.

This is from a noob who strongly supports President Bush and the GWOT and supports McCain as an outspoken Senator but absolutely our worst choice for Prez. I could almost vote for Hillary before Mcain for CINC.

If Bush did delay a campaign to reassure his re-election, well, there is a political front to every war as well as the military front. Lincoln did similar things.

I think Bush has more integrity than any President I can recall since Reagan. Bush's faults are that he is just too nice to blast his critics, and doesn't like to toot his own horn, traits his Father had.

I don't think Bush will draw the troops down to dangerous levels just to be politically expedient for those running in 2006. His legacy as President will be the gamble he took in the Middle East. He'll do all that is within his control to see that venture succeed.

I would certainly consider a Democratic hawk if I wasn't sure that it would be a vote for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker or Robert Byrd as President Pro Tem. The thought of those two in line for the Presidency is too awful to contemplate. Republicans are a poor bargain, but at least there's an outside chance they'll believe in the war.

Not finishing Fallujah the first time was the mistake. I agree too many decisions were made by politicians and diplomats instead of being left to the military. It must be remembered we are in the country of a friend not an enemy, and the wishes and opinions of the Iraqis must be considered. Not all decisions were made or will be made because of our election cycle. Americans tend to see only the American view.

I agree with the comments made by all of the above.

Bush is a man of honor. He s 'basically' fighting the Iraq Campaign as it shold be fought(ie-- let the MILITARY do the job). Politics is playing no appreciable role in this.

Likwise there are no Democratic Hawks (if you take out Lieberman and a handful of others), therefore these is but 1 way to vote if you want to WIN.

The thing wrong with Bush is that he refuses to call the MEDIA what they really are. I would give it a shot myself, but I am trying to improve my vocabulary ,and avoid the kind of words required to do the job properly.

I would like to add that all the talk about troop withdrawl in 2006 has already been discussed. Wasn't it known that we would keep troop levels around 150,000 throughout 2005? Only to go back to around 120,000 after the series of elections?

Do people not listen to what is said months before what has already been said will happen?

I always wonder if Bush would have ever convinced himself of the importance of shaping the Middle East to our liking if 9/11 had not happened. But that does not matter anymore. Hence, I totally agree that voting for hawks at least for as long as the war on terrorism is going is vital. I don't despise the Dems, it's just that only a tiny handful of them understand that the world is full of nasty regimes, vicious tyrants, and murderous terrorists that we have to kill sooner rather than later. I also think that the best way to fight them is not by engaging them directly all by ourselves, but by planting the seeds of democracy and free markets in their countries, even coercively if need be, that will allow them to be respectable members of the world community, the type that actively counters the growth of the cancerous movements that produce terrorism. Iraq just happened to be the best testing ground for this theory, and I commend Bush for having the resolve to show it to the world, we need more politicians with this kind of guts and vision, in the Bush case I think he was forced to have this kind of worldview, but we should vote for people who think this way without having to be woken up by a 9/11 kind of event. Reagan and Thatcher were like that, sadly I don't know who else is that courageous today

Don't forget that perhaps the best thing GWB did for the Iraqis was to be elected and reelected in the first place. Given a choice between Fallujah as it occurred or Kerry in the White House, which would you prefer?

By the time the primaries hit Michigan last year Lieberman was out of the race. He was still on the ballot. I looked at the remaining choices, figured what the hell, and voted for him anyway. I'm glad I did.

I used to describe myself as part of the Lieberman wing of the Democratic Party. Apparently I am the Lieberman wing of the party. Anyone else remotely OK on the war issue?

I am a life long Democrat, former precinct delegate nd county committee representative...and I have no idea what I'm going to do in 2008.

Re posts about character...if one does the homework, it is, from my point of view, easy to judge character. Look at what the bloviator has done, not what he says he will do once in office. I realize that there are many counter examples, but the general rule still applies. Too many of us, on both sides, are wooed by beautiful words, and fail to look behind the smokescreen.

Too bad the time frame is off. Bush attacked Samarra and Fallujah during the height of the campaign, not after. Indeed, most people thought he would wait until after he war reelected.

Instead, he made his own "October Surprise" by pressing forward with the assault.

To put it another way, one is hard-pressed to find a WORSE time for him to have attacked if he was afraid casualties and media coverage would cause him political damage.

Conar:

You asked "Do people not listen to what is said months before what has already been said will happen?"

By my observations over the last 30 years, the answer to that is "No, not really." They may listen, but they don't remember. Anything that was said 6 months back isn't going to be remembered, and a whole lot of politicians have used that to their advantage over the years.

I've watched that with Democrats through many election cycles - they latch onto an issue before the election, shine it up until it dazzles and is "The Most Important Thing To Be Taken Care Of" and will campaign like hell promising they're 'The Only Ones' who can take care of it, because "The Other Side" is not only clueless about it, but is actively evil. Much rhetoric and hot air is expended - and then the day after elections the problem is turned off and put back up on the shelf. Very, very rarely will ANY Democratic politician actually attempt to solve the problem he was labeling the "Worst Thing Ever" before election day.

After all, if a problem is solved, how are you going to use it as a tool to get yourself elected? Better to keep the status quo - those damn fool voters won't remember the promises anyway...

Except, with the Internet it's all too easy to keep track of how a politician's not performing.

J.

Hmmm. Assuming you found a lot of Democratic Hawks to support, you'd still have to consider Leadership (we're fighting about this on our blog now).

Vote for a hawk D and put Carl Levin n charge? Not very hawkish...

Second Fallujah was needed because of other factors than politics. If we will recall that alSadr clown and his 'militias' started acting up during first Fallujah. We had the Marine infantry up in Fallujah to finish the job but not enough of the support and combat support units to clean up alSadr and Fallujah at the same time, we didn't have the armor and, more important, units like medivac helos and field hospitals to do both at the same time. Perhaps if everything had gone perfectly they could have run alSadr and first Fallujah at once, military professionals do not bet on everything going perfectly.
Like it or not, we are trying do do this whole fight with only ten active duty divisions in our whole army. That is ninety battallions, gang.
Actually it was a political decision, Iraqi politics. The brass decided that the Shia were more important to take care of first. It was a good decision, although as a man who once wore the bird on the ball, it pissed me off at the time. Had we stayed with Fallujah first there is no telling what the Shi'ites would have done.

What I've gleaned from these comments is that war is complicated and no matter what you've done, there will be someone saying that you could have done it better.
Despite growing up with a brother who probably contributed 5% to Avalon Hill's net profits, I've never been much of a tactition. Add to this the vast changes in military operations since WWII (heck, since Gulf War I), I take most criticism of the current operation with little regard.
For the record, I thought that estimates of 10,000 U.S. dead before the invasion was accurate. I didn't think the Iraqi military would go down faster than a crack whore in Thailand, nor did I think that the WMD's weren't there (I thought Saddam would use them). So, given my stand point before the invasion, I think the U.S. military has proved itself as an awesome force that dictators SHOULD fear.

I never thought Saddam would use WMDs against Americans. What could he have gained? He was going to lose militarily, even if he gassed the crap out of our lines, and doing so would probably (at that time, anyway) only have inflamed American public opinion such that rather than a cautious and studied and surgical invasion, we would've been calling for a bloodbath. Seems to me he had to assume he'd be fighting a war of attrition from the get-go, with the attrition on our side being determined by the American stomach for casualties, and on his side by actual armed warm bodies.

I was a little surprised that the WMDs didn't turn up in short order, but I'm still good with OIF anyway (nor is it all that surprising, in retrospect, given how much time it took us to get in-country). Saddam was a frequently underestimated menace and Iraq was low-hanging fruit for a long-term Middle East-stabilization-through-democracy mission. So it seems to me.

According to the information I can find, Second Fallujah happened right after the election.

IMHO, if Bush had been "playing politics" with the war, he would have had the attack going in in October (like Clinton began bombing Iraq during politically hard times for him). Nohting helps a US President like having the troops in action, and getting the old "rally around the flag" going (see "Wag the Dog").

As for "Vote for Hawks, not party", any Democrat "Hawk" you vote for is going to vote to put the Democrat (very non-Hawk) leadership in charge of Congress (remember, Zell Miller provided the final vote necessary to make Tom Daschel Senate Majority leader, and Ted Kennedy a Committe Chair, instead of the "Ranking Member"). So unless you're convinced that control of Congress isn't going to change hands, a Republican wimp is better than a Democrat hawk. :-(

And will be, until the Democrat Party decides that America is a great country, more worthy of their support than is the UN.

"Much rhetoric and hot air is expended - and then the day after elections the problem is turned off and put back up on the shelf."

Which reminds me, do you think the Al QaaQaa weapons depot story, the single most important issue facing the American public (if you believed the New York Times) prior to the election but which mysteriously disappeared without a trace the day after the election will reappear in 2008? LOL