Charlie could have been interviewing Condi just prior to invading Iraq.
Everything National Security Advisor Susan Rice said about Iraq and Syria appeared to be either a political sham or a product of manufactured intelligence estimates. As we saw with the Bush crew, this is no way to run the biggest war machine on the planet.
-- Rice describes retaking Mosul in Iraq as though US air strikes are the critical factor. This enormous operation is described as depending on "American leadership."
-- No mention of Quds Force, General Suleimani, the Iranian drones, the Iraqi and Iranian air forces, the alliance with the Kurds.
-- Rice states that Iran has trained 80,000 militiamen. She also states that Iraqi Security Force number 50,000. (Both numbers are off by far.)
-- Talk of supporting "moderate Syrian rebels." No identification of who this is, of course. She focuses on a commitment to force regime change -- taking out the secular Ba'athists and Assad -- which Rice says will be timed to take place prior to taking out ISIS.
-- Talk of Iran needing as long as ten years to build an atomic bomb.
The online page for the Rose show is HERE. Rice was up as the # 1 segment. That changes.
Charlie Rose asked Rice to tell us how long it will take to defeat ISIS. The reply is that this will take "longer than one year. Long than two years. Not as long as twenty years."
OMG.... At that point I figured out that I was looking at another Perpetual War freak.
Another Richard Perle. A Douglas Fieth. Surely not a Dick Cheney, but maybe a "Susan Cheney" recast as a Democrat.
What she has to say is as different from what we know as fact as what we heard from the Bush Administration. Item by item details below the orange muffin........
War is Big Business.
Iraq
The total for all the anti-ISIS forces either surrounding Mosul or preparing now for the assault is estimated at 80,000 men.
That figure should include units from a very wide range of government supported and irregular organizations:
-- Kurds in Kurdistan's Peshmerga and from towns in Syria
-- Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq (AAH) which is also an Iraqi political party
-- Other Shi'ia militia groups from all over eastern Iraq
-- Iraqi Security Force (their army)
-- Hizb Allah/Hezbollah urban combat trainers
-- Sunni militiamen (mostly former army men from the Saddam era)
-- Iranian Quds Force and air force
And the command-and-control top level featuring Iranian specialists whose experience fighting ISIS in Syria has transferred to Iraq quite nicely. The victories at Tikrit, Amerli and Jurf al-Sakhar ended with annihilation of ISIS attack groups.
The total for all military units fighting ISIS in Iraq runs high side of 600,000 officers and men inside Iraq and Kurdistan. That's from local estimates by reliable professionals.
The military situation at Mosul is relatively straightforward: some 2,000 to 3,000 ISIS invaders are surrounded inside Mosul. The northern section still needs to be strengthened to call it a siege. Meanwhile the ISIS units have busied themselves rolling off to the east and killing Kurds by the tens and twenties.
ISIS has learned one thing: stay dispersed prior to attacks. Minimizes the air attacks.
Syria
For gawd sake, when do our Political Class mavens get it that the war in Syria has two sides and only one of the two is going to win ???
The secular Ba'athist Assad dictatorship vs. ISIS/al-Nusrah/Muslim Brotherhood/minor Saudi proxies.
Them's the choices. The only choices.
(Iran's Quds Force is helping the Kurds. that includes money. Three Kurdish enclaves on the Turkish border have stabilized militarily. Damage to buildings, power plants, sewage, etc. at Kobane is extensive.)
Where Saudi/GCC intervention is present through Muslim Brotherhood and other proxies, the best you're going to get for modernization and standard secular education runs to Ba'athist dictatorships. Even the bad dictatorships are better than seeing Selafi-based extremists take power. Consider the dictatorships:
Saddam Hussein
Muammar Gaddafi
Hosni Mubarak
Bashar al-Assad
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
If Saddam Hussein was the worst, how did his rule compare to seeing 1,455,000 Iraqis die from the total extra death impacts of the 2003 invasion ??? And utter destruction of the national socialized enterprises that formed the backbone of the Iraqi economy.
Anybody wanna do a weekend in Libya? Bring a beach towel?
It's MENA. Middle East and North Africa.
Egypt ran into a 1,500 man crew of Muslim Brotherhood fanatics formed up as a Death Squad. Compared with taking out that group, is it worth a whole lot of effort spent worrying over the Mubarak-to-Sisi transition?
With dictators you can apply pressure through sanctions, personalized bans on travel and international bank accounts, even assassination if that's what it takes. It's one guy at a time. One tiny ruling clique.
Human rights abuses get translated to economic retaliation. More or less, it works. When it doesn't work well, anybody think that doing another Iraq invasion is the way to go?
When these guys and their secular governments get into it with Saudi/GCC proxies, the like of Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS and al-Nusrah, expect blood in the sand. Why on this Earth would an American government think that we want to back the Saudi/GCC proxies in these struggles ???
Iran
Atomic bomb.
For the Love. Of. Mike. pay attention to how Trinity did it. Rice spoke as though Trinity didn't happen.
The first relevant weapon was called "Big Man." And at Trinity they built their explosive lenses by hand. No lasers. No CAD/CAM.
What? Iran is a pack of dummies? Racially inferior, maybe? Saying that Iran couldn't have built an atomic bomb same as Trinity doesn't make sense. I don't understand the "kabuki." The huge piles of propaganda BS.
Iran has not tested a bomb. That's unless China ran the test for them. They're close enough with China to have gotten that done decades ago. The notion that a simple, relatively small Pu 3% bomb would take Iran years to build sounds absurd.
Whatever.
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The strangest part of listening to the Susan Rice talk with Charlie Rose, for me, was the sense of deja vu.
Richard Allen. The other Rice. Walt Rostow. Colin Powell. Dean Rusk. William Rodgers. George Schultz.
Poor effers. They knew they didn't know WTF was going on, as much as not. Couldn't admit it. Mouthed shxt and again and again. No way to fight the unending/tsunami-like tide of crap that engulfs NSAs/SoSs.
Sorry, Susan. And you wuz a smert gal.