Bill C said:Kurgan Gringioni said:Dumbass -
Quoted message said:A couple of things.
Quoted message said:1) From 1992-2003, the policy re: Saddam was containment. I will post
links stating this if you wish, by the people in power who were in
charge of the containment.
You'll admit though that a lot of the things that were done went far
beyond what was needed for simple containment, and were meant to
accomplish other things.
Dumbass -
Disagree. It was containment. Here is someone who is an authority on
the subject. The chief of CENTCOM prior to Franks. He specifically
calls it "containment".
From:
http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?DocumentID=2208
<snip>
I think the first mistake that was made was misjudging the success of
containment. I heard the president say, not too long ago, I believe
it was with the interview with Tim Russert that ... I'm not sure ...
but at some point I heard him say that "containment did not work."
That's not true.
I was responsible, along with everybody from General Schwarzkopf to
his two successors, that were my predecessors, myself, and my
successor, General Franks, up until the war, we were responsible for
containment. And I would like to explain a little bit about that
containment, because I thought we did it pretty well, given the
circumstances. And it began with Bush 41 accepting the UN resolution
to conduct the war, staying within the framework of the UN resolution,
and not after the war, going to Baghdad, breaking the coalition,
ending up inheriting a country that I think he clearly saw would be a
burden on us, our military, our treasure, and would break relations
around the region, and would put him outside what he considered his
international legitimacy for doing this - the resolution by which he
operated and conducted the war, and the resolution by which we
established the sanctions.
Administering those sanctions was done pretty effectively I thought.
In the entire U.S. Central Command, in my time there, on any given day
we had less troops in the entire region than show up to work at the
Pentagon any morning. Think about that. Soldiers, sailors, airmen,
marines, carriers, squadrons, battalions. On any given day ... on an
average day in CENTCOM, we had about 23,000 troops, soup to nuts.
Logistics, fighters ... and we ran that with these 23,000 troops, the
whole region. To top it off, those troops were not assigned to
CENTCOM. In other words, that structure wasn't created to be part of
CENTCOM, like the troops are in the Pacific Command or in the European
Command, these were troops that were on rotation. They came from
other places, from the United States, from Europe, from the Pacific
region. And they rotated through. Ships rotated through, battalions
came in and out, squadrons came in and out. So we never created a
structure. We did it with borrowed troops, so we could up the
rheostat or lower it when we needed to.
It was in my view, what we would call in the military, an "economy of
force theatre" without these assigned forces. We had no American
bases out there. We were sharing bases with allies in the region who
provided for us. Any given year, those in the region ponied up
$300-500 million to support our presence out there. What we called
"assistance in-kind." They provided the fuel, the food, the water,
the things we needed. The Saudis built a $240 million housing complex
for our troops. Never once when we decided to take action against
Saddam, when he violated the sanctions, or the rules by which the
inspectors operated under, never once were we denied permission to use
bases, or airspace, or to strike from those places. We built a
wonderful coalition, without any formal treaties, without any
particular arrangement.
During that time, when we asked allies in that region to join us in
other conflicts, like Somalia, they came. Egyptians came. Pakistanis
came. The Saudis came. The Kuwaitis came. The Emirates came and
provided forces. They joined us in the Balkans. They joined us
elsewhere on operations when we needed them. We ran the largest
military exercises in the world ... in this part of the world. In
Egypt we did "Bright Star." We built a magnificent coalition of
forces, without ever once signing a piece of paper. And we contained
Saddam. We watched his military shrink to less than half its size
from the beginning of the Gulf War until the time I left command, not
only shrinking in size, but dealing with obsolete equipment, ill-
trained troops, dissatisfaction in the ranks, a lot of absenteeism.
We didn't see the Iraqis as a formidable force. We saw them as a
decaying force.
<snip><end>
thanks,
K. Gringioni.
