Victory in Iraq
Iraq is not a war. Iraq is an occupation. A war can be won, an occupation cannot. When the 28 percenters talk about "victory", you'll notice they are never specific about who exactly we're going to defeat in order to win this great victory. Iraq is in chaos, and the American troops are just another armed faction.
Defeat the insurgency? They are primarily Sunni Iraqis who do not want their country occupied by a foreign army. You'd have to kill off over 20% of the Iraqi population to "defeat" them, and then you will have radicalized so many more it would be an endless task.
Defeat "al Quaeda"? These are the non-Iraqi jihadis who come to fight the American Imperialist occupiers. There aren't that many of them, but there is an endless pool to draw from. They will never be "defeated" either. But if Iraq wasn't occupied, they'd have significantly less reason to go there to fight.
Now, all of that said, I could end the insurgency in 90 days. You don't think so? Of course I could. Occupations of conquered lands have been successful for millennia. They used to know how to do it. The solution? It's called "Collective Punishment". If a roadside bomb kills a couple of your soldiers in a given town, you immediately go into that town, round up a hundred men, women and children completely at random, take them to the center of town, and shoot them. You do this a couple times, word gets around. Sure, the populace still hates you, but your well being is intimately tied to theirs. It comes to be in their best interest that you are not injured. They don't even want to see you with the sniffles. You have effectively co-opted the insurgency. If they can't convince some young hothead to put down his weapons, they will turn him in. The alternative is too costly.
What's that you say? Well yes, actually, this is specifically a war crime. It is a horrible, barbaric behavior, and if anybody can't recognize my satirical voice, I'm certainly not recommending it. But it is the ONLY proven method for controlling an insurgency in an occupied country. If you aren't willing to do it (if so, good for you), you can't end the insurgency so you might as well start planning your withdrawal.
posted by mikey @ 6:09 PM
1 Comments:
But even the Collective Punishment route isn't supportable in a long run. Britain tried that route a couple of times, right?
Insurgent natives will always have a strategic (or is it tactical) advanatage in that they are not readily sortable into Friend and Foe; you would have to constantly increase your military numbers and savagery, until you hit a point where it isn't supportable, in a combination of economic, military, and political terms.
What the warnoids seem to misunderstand or willingly gloss over is the fact that at some point, we have to leave Iraq
The question is, do we have the ability to define what's left when we leave? Maybe once we did, a couple of years ago.
But I think we don't have that ability, not for some time. At this point, we can define the terms of our departure.
By 2008, I don't think we'll even be able to do that.
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