Iraq Review From Salamander

*Some good stuff there, check it out*

And his is a Gibbonesque tale of horror. There is the endless Shiite-Sunni fighting. There is a massacre of the Assyrians, which is celebrated rapturously in downtown Baghdad. Children are gunned down from airplanes. Tribal wars flare and families are destroyed. A Sunni writer insults the Shiites and the subsequent rioters murder students and policemen. A former prime minister is found on the street by a mob, killed, and his body is reduced to pulp as cars run him over in joyous retribution.

I'm a big believer in martial law and kill on sight orders, as a way to maintain order and law. Maybe because I've been reading too many books that feature the environment as one of lawlessness where ain't nobody going to help you except yourself and your family. This added in with real events, sort of makes it obvious to me, what should be.

In lawlessness, it ain't time to play, people. It's time to put down the fist.

Kedourie described “a country riven by obscure and malevolent factions, unsettled by the war and its aftermath.” He observed, “The collapse of the old order had awakened vast cupidities and revived venomous hatreds.”

one of the reasons why I now support a longer war, 6 months minimum to 12 months, for OIF 1 and initial invasion period. Why didn't I support this back in 2002? Because I knew ZERO about military history, so all I could do was trust in the President and the generals. But, I'm a little bit more educated now.

If you go with the Afghanistan Spec Ops model, which I did not make up retro-actively via hindsight, then you could basically get the Shias to expend their rage against Saddam. And you can also get some Shia-Sunni-Kurdish alliances going on, by cementing loyalties through blood, which is all that will stick in the MidEast. This way, any Al Sadr guys could be found out, and "disappeared" pretty early on. Had an accident with a mortar piece, dontcha know.

Look at Karzai, is he insulting and being anti-American cause he fears being called a puppet? Oh they call him a puppet, but his power base is solid, and it is solid because SpecOps guys helped him fight and win battle glories. That's how you maintain power in the Middle East, demonstrate your ability to win and CRUSH your foes, as Karzai did when he took kabul with SpecOps help.

The Special Forces operators did brilliantly, not their fault somebody didn't want to give their CIA coordinator some Ranger units. It had better not have been because the Army was jealous that the Special Forces guys were going at it in Afghanistan...

But anyways, if you had a Real war in Iraq, lasting MINIMUM 6 months, then they could have gotten the killing out of their veins. Then they could just exile whoever was left over, like we did with the British loyalists after Revolutionary War. Everyone wins, except the losers of course.

Then, you could deal with WMDs WITHOUT having to deal with the chaos in Iraq, at the same time, boo hoo.

But nooooo, the Army guys wanted to do it the Army Way.... and I guess Bush knew only a little bit more than I, so was not confident enough to overrule the generals' plan. And so... here we are.

At one point, the British high commissioner, Sir Henry Dobbs, argued that if Britain threatened to withdraw its troops, Iraqis would behave more responsibly. It didn’t work. Iraqis figured the Brits were bugging out. They concluded it was profitless to cultivate British friendship. Everything the British said became irrelevant.

Haha, could have told you guys not to do that, even if I wasn't born until the 1980s. Man, the British were... totally wacked out. That is why America beat them, we are just better, at everything really.

There is, he wrote, no third option.

With enough power and will, you can create a third option.

The most perceptive reports describe not so much a civil war as a complete social disintegration.

Social disintegration cause the enemies are arrested and not made examples of, and the British or whomever is in control of Basrah, just lets the Shia militias do whatever they want. This ain't the fracking Japanese we are talking about, they didn't surrender, and they sure as heck didn't get annihilated fighting Americans.

Perhaps a competent occupation could have preserved it as a coherent entity, but now the Iraqi national identity is looking like a suicidal self-delusion.

Bush already told everyone he disliked nation building. The Democrats kept pushing him to give Iraq more sovereignty, nice loyal opposition we have there, eh?

I always favored a military dictatorship, with the dictator being a US Marine General, but that was just me. Even when I was ignorant, I still saw the US military as the best hope for controlling the situation.

Again, America isn't exactly an experienced Empire, we are going to make mistakes, just because.

Alter troop rotations so that 30,000 more troops are policing Baghdad.

Again, if the troops aren't given orders to execute and make examples out of the enemy, it don't matter how many boots you have. You can only wear TWO of them at any one time. So are you going to wear policeman shoes or army boots? Or are you going to try for the "new fashion". One army boot, with one policeman shoe, and start running after the enemy?

It will be time to effectively end Iraq, with a remaining fig-leaf central government or not. It will be time to radically diffuse authority down to the only communities that are viable — the clan, tribe or sect.

I favor a Kurdish Empire. Yes, I have no shame.

And the goals will remain the same: to nurture civilized democratic societies that reject extremism and terror.

Can't do that if you are a sissy, no matter how many of you are there. The Kurds are many things, sissies are not one of them.

U.S. Strategic Center of Gravity: Unified Support for the War. Oops.

I think people forgot that this is more like chess than some 2 minute fight on the streets. Look at the end game, and logistics, rather than the immediate tactical benefits. When I was ignorant of military stratagems, all that stuff they talked on tv about "tactical surprise if we go in at the South and keep the 4th Id on water" sounded pretty good to me.