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Dayuhan,
just as the strike on Iraq in December 1998 was calculated to distract Americans from the Impeachment proceedings,
Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched to bolster partisan reelection prospects the next year. This sort of thing happens so often that it has its own special name: "rally around the flag."
The main lesson Bush II learned from Bush I was to not let a war end too quickly.
Bush 41 suckered Saddam into invading Kuwait (through his emissary April Glaspie) just so he could launch a war to kick him out again. The War wrapped up in early 1991. By November 1992, American voters had forgotten who had led them to victory only 18 months earlier, because the "no new taxes" pledge had been broken.
Except for the Civil War and the two "World Wars," every American war appears to have been started as a way to help a President get elected to a second term. I could be wrong, though.
When the USA is at war, voters like to keep the sitting President in office until the war is over. This too has a name: "don't change horses in mid-stream."
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What folks think an invasion of Somalia would be a cakewalk ? Mostly folks who never served in the military, but are now deciding the foreign policy of the USA. The Obama team in the Pentagon is no better grounded in military reality than the previous Administration. A big reason for that is because President Obama retained so many of the poor performers from the Bush Team.
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President Farole spelled out a lot in his Congressional testimony in January 2009. In April 2009 he issued a "100 Days' Report" explaining where he wanted to take to country
http://somalitalkradio.com/2009/apri...e_100_days.pdf.
He was also involved in some confidential negotiations with the CIA, DOD, State and USAID, to which I'm certainly not privy. An associate of mine is a former Minister in the government of President Muse, and he confirmed to me reports in the news site GaroweOnline.com that President Farole laid out a very specific plan for how to spend that money, promising specific results.
A dollar goes a lot further in Puntland than in Luzon.
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I'm new here. I don't know what you know about the US police action in sunny Southeast Asia 40-some years ago. But that started as a training mission, advisors only, and American soldiers were training indigenous forces that the Americans mostly held in contempt. American officers mostly had no respect for Vietnamese officers or civilian leaders. I never went. I sat that one out on the Green Ramp at Pope AFB. But most of my NCO's and officers served over there.
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This thread is not going at all like I wanted. I am 100% certain that our Sneaky Petes on the ground in Somalia are gonna get a lot of backup from conventional ground forces, and I'm pretty sure that will happen by this Summer. I was hoping this community could help them from screwing that up. I've hung out with some of the geniuses who designed our two current wars, and the crowd on this website is smarter than those OSD policy wonks. Not as pretentious, either. But y'all seem to think that good ideas can only be found in a white paper or an article in a professional journal. You don't give yourselves enough credit.
I think that our entree to Iraq and our escalation in Afghanistan were a huge error of judgement.
The signal image of the Iraq invasion was a US platoon putting a US flag on the statue of Saddam, capping the "Thunder Run" into Baghdad. After weeks of declaring that we were coming to liberate and help the Iraqi people, we claimed with that photo op to have conquered and defeated them. So much for "hearts and minds."
Likewise, in Operation Enduring Freedom II, we lost track of who attacked us in 2001, and for reasons I cannot understand, turned our guns on the civilian population. The Taliban is a lot like the French Resistance in WW II, fighting against foreign occupation by the Nazis.
The smartest US military leader in Afghanistan today is the USMC Brigadier who led the fight for Marjah. BG Nicholson says that Taliban is not our enemy, and we shouldn't be fighting them, because they ARE the local population.
In my opinion, we fought and won OEF I in 2002/03; abandoned that fight from 2003 to about 2007; and ramped up OEF II in 2007/08. I say that they are two separate campaigns: the first was to get revenge against al-Qaeda, and the second to punish the Afghani people because we didn't satisfy our bloodlust in the first campaign.
If our coming misadventure into Somalia is as badly led as the two current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this blog community doesn't lift a finger to prevent that, well, why even blog here ? Certainly not simply to recount how well you performed when you were knee deep in hand grenade pins.
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