US determined to cut out 'cancer of Fallujah'

[leftchick]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=563620

<snip>

American military commanders in Iraq are planning a series of major assaults before the end of the year to retake control of Fallujah and other cities held by insurgents.

<snip>
"We need to make a decision on when the cancer of Fallujah is going to be cut out," an unidentified senior US commander told The New York Times. "We would like to end December at local control across the country."

<snip>
US commanders recognise that retaking Fallujah - which they are now bombing on a daily basis - will not be an easy task. What they have not commented on is the likely number of Iraqi civilian casualties in such an operation.

US warplanes and artillery units fired on Fallujah in two operations over the weekend, killing four and wounding six, hospital officials said.

[Born Free]

1. they will plan this for after the election

the bush coward team will not want to risk any negative news from Iraq, so look for a quieting effect for the next few weeks - then if they steal the election and get away with it look out!

[leftchick]

2. "December D-Day for Fallujah"

:scared:... these poor people.....

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/Iraq/0,6119,2-10-1460_1591656,00.html

[atreides1]

14. Not D-Day, Warsaw Ghetto

These are the same tactics used by the Nazis, to empty out the Warsaw Ghetto. They used air attacks and artillery, and finally when the defenders had nothing more to fight with they sent in SS troops.

D-Day was the title given to the invasion by allied forces to free Europe, what is being done to Fallujah is more reminiscent of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

US ground troops and airmen now play the part of the SS and the Luftwaffe.

We have finally become that which we fought against, how much longer can it be, before the government starts to fill up internment camps?

[Minstrel Boy]

17. Exactly. It reminds me of the title of SS General Juergen Stroop's

report: "The Warsaw Ghetto No Longer Exists."

When people become a "cancer" that needs eradicating, that's a Nazi sleight of hand.

[Comadreja]

25. How do you know they haven't started already?

Haven't they created a few defacto camps by encircling some villages in razor wire?

[atreides1]

28. I Don't

And it's a slam dunk that the "media" wouldn't be reporting it anyway.

Besides, most Americans want to feel safe, and if that means the razing of an entire Iraqi city, so much the better.

Perhaps Fallujah will become the 'Lidice' of this war.

[alittlelark]

40. Do you really believe that * will win????

If so........flee........If NoT, stand and fight.

[Carla in Ca]

39. Here is Rumsfeld's comment, courtesy of Dailykos

Rumfeld's plan to win the war.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld cast it a little differently this week, at a news conference in Missouri. Iraq is making progress, he said. "At some point the Iraqis will get tired of getting killed and we'll have enough of the Iraqi security forces that they can take over responsibility for governing that country," he said.


This statement is so idiotic, on so many levels, that I'll let it speak for itself.

[0007]

3. Taking care of cancer the good old fashion way through death

and force! Ah isn't Democracy wonderful?


Ah, isn't Democracy wonderful?

[Hekate]

4. Quicksand; not a quagmire, because it's a desert (n/t)

[xchrom]

5. so what? they're going to kill everyone in fallujah?

who's the enemy?
at this point so many iraqis violently oppose the u.s. staying in iraq -- i don't know HOW they can figure this will work.
kill one innocent bystander and create 5 new insurgents -- the military has lost it's mind.
they're spending to much time listening to john mccain.

[lostnfound]

6. Not cancer IN Fallujah, but "cancer OF Fallujah" -- the whole city??

Like excising a tumor.
The pro-life party.

:puke:

[Zhade]

7. Phase One in any good genocide: dehumanize the enemy.

We're the new fucking NAZIS.

These treasonous bastards just don't understand the hellstorm they're going to unleash. We're going to start getting hit by every country - probably economically, first - and as long as we keep it up, we're going to bleed.

The Empire will die by a Thousand Cuts. And they'll ALL hurt.

[Disturbed]

8. Turks and Shi'ites.

I wonder why they are not speaking out against this atrocity?

The new Iraq policy is bomb them into oblivion or submission which ever comes first. 3 million Vietnamese deaths, many more millions maimed. I wonder how many Iraqi deaths and maimings it will take?

The majority of American don't give a rat's ass about Iraqis. Even American troop deaths are starting to be ignored or said to be the price that must be paid for this War On Terror, as Iraq is now framed as.

Amerka= WAR CRIMES

[jmcgowanjm]

9. They are Disturbed

The Turks are apoplectic about what's going on in Tal 'Afar.

The Shi'ites are kicking Brit butt in Amariya and
(& Brits IMHO,know what's coming and why their
floating rumours of w/drawal now) in Basra
and captured at least 15 Iraqi Guards
to swap w/ US for captured Sadr aide.

[coalition_unwilling]

19. Maybe Allawi will start a 'strategic hamlet' program

Which will allow him to declare Falluja and Ramadi "free fire zones'.

[donsu]

10. I'm concerned with the mental condition of our officers

calling Fallujah a cancer. and other cities who won't buckle down, cancers.

where do they come up with such names? the pentagon? Rummy?

with all the depleted uranium we are spreading around, Fallujahans will surely have a lot of cancers in the near future, if we don't murder them first.

[Jacobin]

11. During Ramadan?

How clever. Now, what else can we do to further enrage Iraqis?

[starroute]

16. Ramadan ends November 14

So I guess we can expect to see the assaults start on the 15th.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

12. I guess they saw all those Marine general's complaints

appearing in the media the past month, and had to squelch it.

[DulceDecorum]

21. Thomas Barnett's fantasy vs the reality of Lt Gen Paul Van Riper

This blueprint for America's defense force comes wrapped in a presentation devised by Mr. Barnett that samples the "ching ching" sound effect from the television series "Law & Order," borrows lines from the Sopranos and features the voice of movie character Austin Powers calling out "Oh yeah, baby!" to punctuate a key idea. At one point, upsetting some, Mr. Barnett refers to 9/11 as the "first live-broadcast, mass snuff film in human history."
<snip>
Mr. Barnett conjured up his vision at the urging of Retired Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski. After 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tapped the admiral to run a new office in the Pentagon, dubbed the Office of Force Transformation, focusing on changing the military, one of Mr. Rumsfeld's pet projects. Adm. Cebrowski turned to Mr. Barnett because he first wanted a better idea of what a post-9/11 military was supposed to do. During the Cold War it was designed primarily to contain Communism. "The Soviet Union was the principal designer of our force," the admiral says.

Adm. Cebrowski, a 61-year-old former naval aviator, flew 158 combat missions in Vietnam and commanded an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf War. He's a devout Catholic who attends Mass every day and raves about Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ."
<snip>
Mr. Barnett bets that advanced technologies will allow the U.S. to fight wars with smaller, high-tech formations. Some military analysts, such as retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, think that's naive. Gen. Van Riper, who plays the enemy in Pentagon war games, says enemies could too easily hide from the Leviathan force's sophisticated surveillance. HE ALSO THINKS THAT THE SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR FORCE WOULDN'T BE STRONG ENOUGH TO DEFEND ITSELF IN PLACES SUCH AS FALLUJAH.

"I admire Adm. Cebrowski," he says. "But this is absolute nonsense from folks who are thinking about war as they want it to be, not as it actually is. War is a terribly nasty, brutish business."
http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/published/wsj.htm

"What we're seeing is a repeat of the McNamara era," warned Paul Van Riper, a retired three-star Marine general who was in the corps long enough to remember that time. "We're seeing a leadership that is arrogant, is unwilling to listen to military advice. They thought they had the answer, they fundamentally didn't understand war. It was war as they wanted it to be, not as it exists in the hard realm of reality."

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was determined that Iraq would not be your father's (that is, Bush's father's) Gulf War. The U.S. and British march to Baghdad seemed the model of the kind of "transformation" that Rumsfeld had been advocating as the force of the future, with air dominance, ground speed and information superiority producing battlefield supremacy. And for a few weeks during the invasion last year, the Iraq war was as the Bush team wished it to be.

But if the plan of battle was long on style, the follow-on was short on substance. "The difficulties we face in Iraq now began more than a year ago, and they began because we have an arrogant, unprofessional, unschooled senior leadership in the Pentagon," Van Riper says. "They believed that modern technology and some of their very weak operating concepts and unrealistic expectations of what the Iraqi people would do let them go in on the cheap with ground forces." He adds: "If you think I'm emotional about it, and I am, it's because soldiers and Marines are dying today because of their incompetence."
-- Salon
SUBSCRIPTION
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/04/29/military/index_np.html

[Waverley_Hills_Hiker]

31. Goddamn OUTSTANDING article!!

THIS IS A MUST READ!!!!

Boy oh boy is history repeating itself or what. We are seeing the same damn hubris all over again....

[Junkdrawer]

13. All those damn Arabs sitting on OUR oil...

Do they think they OWN the oil or something?

[Cocoa]

15. we shouldn't take this at face value

this probably has very little to do with their actual plans, if they have any.

[Larkspur]

18. The cancer is really in the US Presidency

[quaoar]

20. Fallujah is indeed a cancer

It is run by radical clerics and militias. Collaborators are beheaded and videos of the executions are sold on the street.

It needs to be cut out before it metastasizes any more than it already has.

But a frontal assault is only going to result in Stalingrad, The Sequel.

[0007]

22. junior is a radical cleric in the Christian sense and assholes

like General Boykin is just as bad as those your pointing your finger at.

[DrWeird]

23. Sounds like something Saddam would say.

nt

[Aidoneus]

24. People who think like this are a cancer

On the side, assaulting it would be a Stalingrad-2, but you're in favour of that anyway in order to "cut out the cancer", or..?

[Comadreja]

26. Sounds like Saudi Arabia

When do we excise the Saudis?

[demoman123]

27. Hitler used to use these disease metaphors.

As a justification for exterminating people.

[Bridget Burke]

29. How can it be "cut out" without a frontal assault?

And it's alreadly metastasized.

Cance is a disease. Fallujah is a city full of people.

[Minstrel Boy]

30. Meanwhile, the REAL cancer in Fallujah

and elsewhere in Iraq continues unabated, and for generations, thanks to the uranium contamination of American weapons of war:

"They're using it now, they're using it in Falluja, Baghdad is chock-a-block with DU - it's all over the place," says Major Doug Rokke, director of the US army's DU project in 1994-95.

Scientists say even a tiny particle can have disastrous results once ingested, including various cancers and degenerative diseases, paralysis, birth deformities and death.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/09/15/1095221665719.html?oneclick=true

[leftchick]

32. I think of DU everytime I see photos like this......

As well as when I hear of the bombing raining down daily on those poor people. Yes, saddam was a bad man but not nearly as bad as shithead*.

[arwalden]

33. Cancer Cured With Radiation, Eh? (Read: Nukes?)

or tactical nukes?

[stlchic]

34. Ah..."Let Freedom Reign"

Nothing says it quite like referring to a part of the population as a disease....

[maxsolomon]

35. the plan? make an example of fallujah

show the iraqis we can be just as brutal & merciless as saddam was. perhaps levelling fallujah is really the only way to demonstrate that dissent will not be tolerated & freedom will be embraced.

do we have the stomach for it? the arabs, from OBL to moqtada al sadr, most definitely think we do not.

neither did col. kurtz.

[PurityOfEssence]

36. I hear Guernica's lovely this time of year

There are plenty of charming metaphors. Perhaps Nanking's on their mind.

I don't know about these tough guys trying to out-macho Arab Nationalists and Muslim Fundamentalists; doesn't sound like too much of a plan to me...

[leftchick]

37. "Guernica".....

Do you have a timely photo or post so we do not forget?.....

[Deja Q]

38. Hmmm. Cancer can be culled with radiation. Are they hinting at nukes?

:shrug: