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Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: NA
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Jan 12th, 2007, 11:34 AM
Nutshell:
Up until now, apparently the strategy has been to kill terrorists wherever they are found and that's about it. This strategy has been limited by the Iraqis to only certain areas, however, like NOT Sadr City. We go in and shoot or capture some bad guys and then leave. The governing ideology behind the leaving part was that we did not want to be seen as "occupiers." The upshot of this strategy is that we were "liberating" the same areas and neighborhoods over and over, just to have terrorists move back in as soon as we left.
Kahljorn's Benny Hill analogy was pretty apt, I suppose.
Now we have extracted various commitments from the Iraqi government, such as the end of off-limits areas and the beginning of a more pro-active Iraqi presence in the hot-spots. Our "surge" will be met with an approximate ratio of about one of our guys to every five or six Iraqi soldiers in Baghdad. They have also pledged $10 billion of THEIR money to reconstruction.
I heard Rudy yesterday comparing the new plan to his method for reducing crime in Manhattan. Baghdad has 9 zones, each of which will be assigned a commander and each of which will be held to metrics measuring their success. As areas are cleaned, our forces will be sticking around to protect them from re-infestation.
In addition to what was said in the speech, I think it's important to note OPEC's sudden and timely drop in oil prices, which hits Iran right in the wallet, and Egypt's sudden and timely call for Iran to butt out in Iraq, which was totally unexpected, at least by me.
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mburbank~ Yes, okay, fine, I do know what you meant, but why is it not possible for you to get through a paragraph without making all the words cry?
How can someone who obviously thinks so much of their ideas have so little respect for expressing them? How can someone who so yearns to be taken seriously make so little effort?!
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