{"id":756,"date":"2004-06-04T17:40:00","date_gmt":"2004-06-04T17:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=756"},"modified":"2004-06-04T17:40:00","modified_gmt":"2004-06-04T17:40:00","slug":"756","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=756","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p><b>POLITICAL MICROMANAGEMENT OF MILITARY OPERATIONS IN IRAQ ?<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Shades of Lyndon Johnson but I have just received an email from Iraq indicating that civilian political control over military operations now extends to the company or even the squad level. Allegedly units must receive the &#8221; go-ahead &#8221; from civilians above the theater commander to initiate &#8221; counterbattery operations&#8221; with many restrictions now being placed on counterinsurgency tactics. In one instance a unit took a 150 mortar shells before receiving long-delayed permission from far-away civilian appointees to return fire.<\/p>\n<p>I have no confirmation of this beyond the past reliability of my correspondent but I&#8217;m wondering if anyone else has seen similar reports ? This would be to my mind, a terrible way to fight an insurgency and a disservice to American troops in Iraq.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>POLITICAL MICROMANAGEMENT OF MILITARY OPERATIONS IN IRAQ ? Shades of Lyndon Johnson but I have just received an email from Iraq indicating that civilian political control over military operations now extends to the company or even the squad level. Allegedly units must receive the &#8221; go-ahead &#8221; from civilians above the theater commander to initiate [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}