Part 1 of this week’s BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio: How the NFL’s Ray Rice knocked out his wife in a hotel elevator, lost his job and outraged America — and how U.S. District Court Judge Mark Fuller beat his wife bloody in a hotel room, will have his arrest record expunged, gets to keep his lifetime appointment to the federal bench and very few in America seem to give a damn.
Part 2: What would you do about ISIS if you were President? Callers, lots of ’em, share their thoughts. I share a few of mine in kind. Nobody gets a free pass.
Plus, Desi Doyen and the latest Green News Report, and a few more items here and there in what was a very lively show this week. You should listen to it.
Download MP3 or listen online below…
[audio:http://bradblog.com/audio/BradCast_BradFriedman_MarkFuller_ISIS_091014.mp3%5D
I wasn’t able to weigh in on this week’s show until now:
If caller Ken at minute 43:00 had just taken a different tack–I thought he was going to pursue the “overwhelming force” that you challenged him on, Brad, but he strayed.
I CLEARLY remember the fact that General Shinseki (in his earlier career) had advocated that since this stupid invasion (my words) is going to happen anyway, that we (the U.S.) should invade and occupy Iraq with overwhelming force. In other words, an invasion force in numbers closer to 500,000 soldiers rather than less than 100,000, the number actually used. It was talked often in the punditry about how after the initial “Mission Accomplished” American forces would overtake a strategic base or position, only to have to leave it open and defenseless a short time later when they were ordered to move on to the next position. The thing is, there were never enough soldiers to hold a position for very long, so it was only a matter of time until the occupation became an exercise of whack-a-mole with the American invaders just trying to make it through their tour without being killed just for being there.
Look at the postmortem from a year after the disastrous neocon invasion and occupation of Iraq:
The General Who Got It Right on Iraq
December 26, 2004
Asked by a Senate committee to estimate the number of troops needed for the operation, Shinseki said “several hundred thousand.” Rumsfeld’s office immediately denounced the number as “wildly off the mark.” But the disastrous experience in postwar Iraq has proved the general right: Security remains elusive because the numbers of U.S. and coalition forces on the ground are inadequate.
http://articles.latimes.com/200.../op-shinseki26
The following excerpt is from the book,The New American Way of War: Military Culture and the Political Utility of Force, By Ben Buley
Army Secretary Thomas White, who contradicted Wolfowitz by defending Shinseki’s estimate in front of the same committee a week later was soon also requested to retire by Rumsfeld. Interviewed after he Iraq War, he spoke of the powerful unease within the Army over the size of the attacking force and a sense that the lessons of Vietnam were being ignored:
http://tinyurl.com/qjvcy4t
I think that’s the point that Ken guy was trying to make–not that any scheme that doesn’t involve staying out of this “we broke it we own it” guilt-trip mess we created is such a good idea.