courtesy of Digby:

"Richard Perle said the following on PBS in October 2001...

...Because having destroyed the Taliban, having destroyed Saddam's regime, the message to the others is, "You're next." Two words. Very efficient diplomacy. "You're next, and if you don't shut down the terrorist networks on your territory, we'll take you down, too. Is it worth it?" Of course it isn't worth it. It isn't worth it for any of them."

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2003_02_23_digbysblog_archive.html#89861210

worth reading Digby's comments, too (as always).

"Rather than simply keep this power in our back pocket for use when circumstances clearly warranted it (as in Afghanistan) there was a palpable desire to make an example out of Iraq to send a message."

First of all, Afghanistan did NOT warrant it. We turned a repressive regime into a failed state there for a bogus reason just as we have in Iraq. No significant difference except that the blowback from Iraq may be worse than Afghanistan - but even that remains to be seen.

Second, there's no "message sending" involved here. Both these operations were undertaken with the FULL INTENT to conduct even MORE such operations against Iran, Syria, and even Saudi Arabia.

Go back and read the neocon diatribes and documents. People are blowing up this toss-off of Ledeen's as some kind of policy statement. It isn't. While such a procedure may be part of the neocon view, the fact of the matter is that they intend to dominate the Middle East and they intend to do it directly by military force, not just intimidation. They've been trying intimidation for the last half century and it's not working anymore. So in these days of Peak Oil, they need to move directly. And so they are.

Afghanistan was just a side issue - and that's how they treated it. They wanted the pipeline, the heroin, and to put pressure on Pakistan and possibly Iran. The primary goals were always Iraq, Iran and Syria - and probably Jordan and Saudi Arabia as well at some point, the former for the Israelis, the latter for the oil.

They've destroyed Iraq - and now they're going to move on Iran.

They're not trying to "send a message" to Iran - they're trying to destroy it and take the oil just as they've destroyed Iraq and are TRYING to take the Iraq oil (or if Greg Palast is right, take the Iraq oil OFF the market). Only the insurgency isn't letting them get the oil (or perhaps they actually want a civil war there to insure the oil stays off the market, if Palast is right.)

Of course, it won't work - Iran will use the Vietnam strategy and bleed the US for the next ten years until the US economy, society and military collapses.

But then it's likely the neocons want that, too - the best way to establish a permanent dictatorship is after a major defeat and social upheaval - Hitler was the result of WWI and the resulting economic disaster.

Anybody with any sense of history can see the whole nine yards played out over the next ten, twenty or thirty years quite easily. The US is and will continue to be a fascist empire - until it is destroyed by revolution, civil war, or attack by external forces.

It's a historical inevitability. There's absolutely no way any such major power has ever been reversed from this course by "liberal" means absent a major upheaval.

Sigh, of course rereading your comments again I think I shouldn't have bothered. You seem to be a few pickles short of a happy meal. Anyone who describes America as a "fascist empire" automatically loses on hyperbole.

It's unclear to what post you are responding, and also how you define "equal". If equality refers to a comparably equipped force, with numeric superiority, we actually have a rather good idea. Insurgency is the mystery, not matched forces.

Major exercise centers such as the National Training Center (for heavy armored forces) at Ft. Irwin were originally set up to train against Soviet forces. Quite accurately, that meant that US forces would be outnumbered three to one. Less accurately, but as more of a challenge, the Opposing Force at NTC has US, not Soviet, level maintenance and equipment effectiveness. The OPFOR is permanently assigned, so it fights over the same ground every couple of weeks, and has intimate terrain sense that a once-a-year unit can't.

NTC, and the light forces equivalent, JRTC at Ft. Polk, are extensively instrumented; every move is recorded and reviewed. The ground centers derive from the original Navy Top Gun concept: that pilots who survive their first five air combats tend to be the most effective. Top Gun also used numerically superior OPFOR, and it was no sin to lose simulated combat there, or at NTC or JRTC. The idea is that by the time units are out of training, they are more experienced than any units in history.

There are other training centers, which don't have tactical units that generals don't see anyway, for higher command levels, the former BCTP now called Warfighter. We don't know definitively, but, historically through Korea and probably Viet Nam, we'd have generals that utterly failed in combat. There is now a much clearer idea how candidates would do.

I am quite aware of the wise military maxim that no plan survives contact with the enemy. Nevertheless, there's a much better idea how conventional combat will go (see Battle of 73 Easting). We still are lacking in both training and doctrine for peace enforcement, although JRTC is working in this area. Unfortunately, Rumsfeld didn't want to apply JRTC lessons in Iraq.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

This worked for Rome. Destroyed Judea and had about 200 hundred years of internal peace. Exception:That bitch in Britannia. Everything else was Rim-world.

Of course, haven't read the book. But without the counter-hegemon, I see it as pretty tough to maintain the "first-among-equals" status of the US in the post-WWII order. (If you believe the West was an actual int'l democracy, quit smoking that stuff.)

MY might like the idea of the US having only as much power as Ghana or Haiti, but Cheney and a few others didn't think it would work.

I remember reading about the desert warfare training center (forget where that is). The OPFOR there used to kick the crap out of the rest of the US units because of that "home ground" advantage and a lot of experience. Some of it was fairly funny, as I recall - wouldn't have been funny for real, of course, which was the point of the training.

Has the military made any attempts to set up a realistic urban insurgency training center that you know of? You'd think that with Iraq going into its fourth year that there would be a couple billion allocated in the budget for this.

The desert National Training Center is at Fort Irwin in California, near the equivalent Marine center at Twentynine Palms. At all of these centers, it's not a black mark to get beaten, if you learn from it, and the review is extensive. Of course, if the visiting unit does win most or all of the engagements, it's what they call career-enhancing, but for good reason.

NTC is for heavy (mechanized/armored) forces. The Joint Readiness Training Center, for light forces, is at Fort Polk in Louisiana. It includes forested and other rough terrain, but also an MOUT (Military Operations in Urban Terrain) "box" containing several "towns", the largest of which is named Shughart-Gordon after the two Delta Force operators who received posthumous Medals of Honor for the "Blackhawk Down" engagement in Mogadishu. JRTC has both a permanent guerilla force, as well as civilans that include an underground.

The Army is also working on a traveling MOUT system. There are now, incidentally, several billion allocated to IED detection and neutralization.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*