British Expatriate Network

How can this guy compare WW2 with the war in Iraq.
Both Germany and Japan were major powers with strong armies and Germany was on the brink of developing the A bomb.
http//www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N19220972.htm

This is so much like the mess that the US made of Vietnam.

I'm no Rumsfeld fan but what he actually said was that pulling out of Iraq now would have been like withdrawing from Germany as soon as the war in Europe was won and allowing the Nazis to take power again. Unfortunately he's right and if all foreign troop were withdrawn it would be a blood bath over there. It's our (the Yanks and the Brits) fault and we should be made to clean it up before we leave or just go when asked to do so by whatever form of government they elect.

There are differences with Germany on VE Day of course - if the western allies hadn't stayed the Iron Curtain would have been along the Rhine.

The story of Vietnam, like this one, starts back in colonial days and the way things were divvied-up. The French screwed up Indo-China and we screwed up Iraq.

True, but still any comparison is a sign of frustration. I suspect the guy will be glad to see the end of this administration as the rest of us. He's stuck between a rock and a hard place. ( Bush and Cheney)

This quote from CNN
Former top officials in two presidential administrations -- one Democratic, one Republican-- disagreed Sunday with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's characterization of what would happen if the United States were to pull out of the war in Iraq.

Henry Kissinger, who served with U.S. forces in Germany at the end of World War II and who served as secretary of state under Republican Presidents Nixon and Ford, said the situations are not analogous.

"In Germany, the opposition was completely crushed; there was no significant resistance movement," the German-born diplomat told CNN's "Late Edition."

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as national security adviser under President Carter, a Democrat, was less charitable.

"That is really absolutely crazy to anyone who knows history," he said. "There was no alternative to our presence. The Germans were totally crushed. For Secretary Rumsfeld to be talking this way suggests either he doesn't know history or he's simply demagoguing."

Absolutely. Not only were the Germans crushed but they had hundreds of thousands of soldiers in captivity, mostly in the former Soviet Union and many of whom were not repatriated for years, if at all. Additionally, many had been killed in action.

At one point, it must have seemed that the country was populated by and large with women and children and barely capable of surviving, let alone organised resistance. In any case, it would have been completely pointless, as four well armed and well organised armies were setting up permanent bases and installing their own mayors or burghers to run the cities and towns. Former Nazi party members were banned from public offices and of course investigated where possible for war crimes.

I suppose eventually, power was more or less handed back to the Germans but it took about 10 years and even after that, the military presence remained.

Perhaps if the Iraqis had been crushed, this uprising would not have been possible but modern day tactics shy away from wiping out the enemy or carpet bombing their towns. Additionally, such tactics would provoke widespread condemnation and the risk would then be extending a small invasion into a large-scale, multi-nation war.

At the end of the day, if you play with fire, you invariably get burned. USA has yet to learn that it does not understand Middle Eastern politics and has a lot of catching up to do. Certainly, there is a percentage of Arabs that admire and appreciate the United States but there is a much larger percentage that distrust and are aggravated by any suggestion of western influence in their country. They will resist that at all costs and this is a large part of what is being experienced today.

Because he's a knob head.

And its not now?

And like Vietnam and !raq the US thought it could do what the Frogs and Brits failed to do.

It took them 14 years of shock and awe before they got their butts kicked in Vietnam. If they have any sense they will get out of Iraq before it gets worse.

Vietnam was all about saving a corrupt South Vietnam from being taken over by the communist North.

Iraq is all about oil.

I think that the biggest difference is that we, the allies, had enough people to control and administer the country and we didn't cede control back to them until there were enough administrators, trained by the allies, to take administrative control. Even then, we kept large forces there to protect them (and us), which allowed their economic recovery to advance more quickly than the Brits.

Germany got more Marshall Plan recovery money than Britain as well - a bitter irony really, especially as Britain's empire was in the course of being dismembered at that time.

I'm still puzzled as to why Britain got involved in the Iraq invasion. Either the leadership of the UK was naive enough to believe that Iraq needed liberating from Al Qaeda or was naive enough to think it was going to get a slice of the pie when the conquered lands were divvied up.

I am one of the few (it seems) who supported the war but has come to realise what a mistake that was. No this isn't a "shit we're losing...better slip into the crowd" thing. There have simply been too many revelations and fuck-ups to leave me supporting it. I can still understand why there are those like Christopher Hitchens will argue till blue in the face why it was right, but I just don't. The scandals - Abu Ghraib cheif amongst them - are reason enough for Rummy to go. For me there are just too many revelations of how the whole thing was based on bullshit - to name a handful, the Downing Street Memo's, General Shinseki's astounding picture of what happened with planning, Hans Blix detailed account of how the UN process works and how it was trampled (something I was enormously wrong about at the time), Colin Powell revealing after the fact that Rummy, Cheney and Armitage admitted (and gloated!!) to him that they used him to lie to the world, and simple hindsight at the case for war, etc. That doesn't include the incompetence, and not just of screwing almost everything up, but stupidity as well - such as the capturing of the weapons stockpile by the insurgency on the eve of the 2004 US election.

Which leads me too to ask what the purpose is for the UK to have go into this. Blair is an extremely smart guy, and unlike Bush he actually seems to have unbounding convixtion in this whole thing. I don't believe he has the same feelings as Hitchens. I don't see it as hanging on to the coattails of the US either - the whole poodle thing is nonsense as far as I'm concerned. But in a purely real politik sense, I just don't get it.

And yeah - Rummy has to go.

I'll let you in on a secret Gavin. Blair really isn't that smart, charasmatic certainly, but not that smart. I've never really met him (I've been in the same room and exchanged a 'hello' once or twice but nothing more) - however I know (or knew back in London) several people who had worked with him as a barrister, in a local Labour party member (he and Charles Clarke were neighbours in Hackney, I lived around the corner) and later in opposition and government. As you'll see, I knew these people over some years and saw Blair develop, although I never recognised where he was going, I might have said more than hello if I did :wink:

As to why he went into Iraq, only he really knows, but he has a freaky evangelical streak - he thought he was going to make it a better place. Read some of what he said in the lead up to the Kosovo intervention and also some of what Clinton says about Blair and Kosovo - then read some of Hitchen's justifications for the war in Iraq.

The Bushies shared none of this IMHO, theirs was a cynical decision to go in, remodel Iraq, destroy or at least neuter OPEC, alleviate some of the pressures on Israel by weakening the big oil states (and their hold over the West) and reward the big businesses that bankrolled Bush and the Republicans. They genuinely believed that Iraq had WMDs (as did I) but they never really feared them, that was simply the fig leaf policy.

It was a grand plan and the ends would have justified the means if it had been pulled of successfully. Unfortunately,like so many of my criminal clients, their was one big flaw.
The planners were imbiciles.

It is amusing (in a horrid morbid way admittedly) to see how the neo-con plan was embraced by those who like the idea, but not the plan. Kristol must get up every morning and see how Rumsfeld and Cheney are butchering everything he's ever worked for and wonder whether he is actually in hell.

The British reason for deposing Saddam cannot be for the same reasons that progressives like Christopher Hitchen's and Paul Berman have advocated. I've heard Jack Straw lay out his position and whilst it's eloquent it doesn't equate for me. I really don't like the "well why not invade [insert-name-here] instead then" argument, but the British position really does beg the question - why not somewhere else? If Iraq is a worthy cause, what on earth is Sudan? They don't have the percieved military pervue to invade neighbors, but those in chareg have gladly supported Al Queda since the late 90s.

Rumsfeld is an unsual character. Out of all those in charge he seems to have been the only one who didn't want to go into Iraq at all - the other being Colin Powell. He's tried to do a job within the Pentagon which is in some ways noble - a drastic draw down of American presence both home and abroad through troop/base numbers. But it draws a parallel with huge tax cuts/massive appropriations. You can't have both.

As an aside - does anyone actually think he'll leave early? He's "resigned" twice already and been denied.

With the news that North Korea has the ability to carry out a pre-emptive strike against the US.
What are the boys at the White House going to do about it?
http//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060321/ap_on_re_as/nkorea_us

"It's our (the Yanks and the Brits) fault and we should be made to clean it up before we leave or just go when asked to do so by whatever form of government they elect"

Its tough on the military, I don't envy them their impossible task. I think that both Bush and Blair should be forced to stay in government until they finish what they started. They should stay and work out how to solve this mess - see it through to the end, guys, don't leave the mess for someone else to clean up, while you swan off in comfortable retirement as soon as the next election comes around.

The problems in Iraq can only be settled by Iraqis. It was a huge mistake starting the war, but by continuing to stay will only make things worse.
This is not like Germany or Japan. Those countries inhabitants were not divided by religious/ethnic differences.

It's a huge pill for the US to swallow by getting out.
They did it in Vietnam and they got over that. I say OK you have made a mess of things, but get the troops out in an orderly fashion and leave the Iraqis to clear up the mess.

This is a quote from http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/kimnix.html

Maybe Bush will have to settle for a similar deal through the UN.