Alright... You've got a lot of stuff here, and I understand what it takes to put out a large and thoughtful post regarding a topic you have very strong feelings about, so I'm not going to pick it apart piece by piece, mostly because I'd like you to keep up the good work.
I think this needs a good, healthy debate. I sure as hell don't want to attack you and discourage that...
In that light, I'm not going to respond at all to your rebuttal of the article itself, and I'll only pick out certain bits of your own opinion to comment upon or question...
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Originally Posted by derrida
Saddam deployed the army to get these same factions under control, the Stalinist aspects of the state were almost all linked to the use of the army as a giant military intelligence unit on Iraqs own population.
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I will comment that this is not necessarily the style of a Communist regime as much as it is the style of any authoritarian or dictatorial regime. The origins of this argument, with regard to our situation in Iraq, finds it's roots in the (what I consider to be) somewhat racist theory that Arabs require rule by force to be kept in line. I reject that entirely, though I understand the underlying sentiment as it can be described to be something along the lines of: They have been oppressed for so long that they can't be expected to switch over to Western style Democracy overnight...
Previously, I have used the analogy of the battered spouse to describe Iraq, and I've come to like it. Think of the relationship between a citizenry and it's government as a marriage. It's certainly a relationship of a very intimate nature, right? The marriage between Iraq and Saddam Hussein has finally ended, and Iraq has found a new suitor... a proper gentleman, in fact... but one could hardly expect that Iraq is adequately prepared to transition right into this new relationship, one based on modern, liberal principles, without a few hiccups, right?
I am not trying to diminish the very real loss of life and human suffering involved here, though I think it's very important to understand the importance of this stage of the process. Were Iraq your new fiancée, you would gladly pay for the therapy... in this case intensive... required to prepare her for the wonderful life you plan to give her.
Given her history of abuse, she is totally not prepared.
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Originally Posted by derrida
An ordinary western style army, with a small cutting edge combat force and a giant support trail on it doesn't even remotely come close to intersecting with the police and human intelligence bits that seem to be needed of an army tasked to keeping a lid on Iraq.
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Actually, our typical military up until this point has been oriented toward confrontation with some sort of equivalent force, not what we face in the War on Terror. You are close to describing what we are headed toward, but imagine the Navy and Air Force constituting just a quarter of our total military power, still fulfilling the role of indisputably the world's most unstoppable force, and the Army and the Marines bulked up into what you could get away with calling a nation-building and police force the likes of which the world has never seen. The SysAdmin force that transitions a failed state into something more integrated into where the rest of the world is going.
That is where this is headed. There will be bleed-through and mission-creep, and the latter force will need the support of other modern nations, but this is the eventual goal of what they call "transformation."
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Originally Posted by derrida
It's not only that peacekeeping training is no longer the focus the way it was for dealing with other theatres, the army arrived, then deployed itself for force protection and concentration and left the rest to fuck off and die.
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That is a sentence fragment.
I will say, though, that "peacekeeping training" hasn't really
ever been the focus of the American military...
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Originally Posted by derrida
The US army has a different idea of what risk is and how best to avoid it than many others and particularly the British army. Walking around in the open and treating each attack as an individual case needing witness reports and an investigation (something they have recently started to do for US casualty cases) exposes the troops to danger in one way, but is generally more effective at eliminating single operators behind many attacks - that kind of attitude to things.
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That sounds like a kind of description of the second force of our soon-to-be military force. Yes, this is the kind of plan that will be most effective at maintaining order and security in a newly freed nation.
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Originally Posted by derrida
Setting off this death blossom of rifle fire, killing everything that runs and hoping they get lucky (and adding the dead up as likely insurgents) was always a completely fucking ridiculous way of dealing with this, it produces the same reaction as excessive police shootings as it does anywhere else.
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Enter the "Leviathan" force: Massive bombings and Special Operations. This is cutting the head off the snake. True, without a second, larger, kindler and gentler force, it seems a bit counter-productive and excessive...
Another goal of transformation is to draw the line decisively between these two missions and to learn to use them appropriately. You don't seem to be doing that very well... Try.
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Originally Posted by derrida
Riots first, and if the response is kept solely to broken bones and live fire a genuine insurgency will typically emerge out of that. Saddam turned his army into the russian model political/military intelligence machine to deal with it. The US has had, well, no approach, very little none at all til recently other than self defense and bullshit PR exercises. This approach may have simply been used too long for any new decisions to be made in the minds of Iraqis about the role of the US in their country.
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Again, try to view what's happening in the light of what might not be entirely insane and indefensible. Do you really think the men and women we have working as soldiers over there would be so committed to their missions were their jobs as ill-defined as you are presenting them?
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Originally Posted by derrida
Unfortunately, the last decision most of them made was that the US has little positive role to play and that it does little to intervene for their protection. The raw total percentage rate of support for US presense is misleading in one way, in that everywhere they are deployed in strength they are rated poorly - not at the nearly evenly split of the whole country, but by 60 plus and over percent negative.
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Ok... consider for a moment that the places our forces are deployed in force are the places that dislike what we are trying to accomplish the most. How is that misleading again? What we are trying to do is provide the security and stability required for Democracy, Liberalism and Pluralism to grow into a state that can attract enough Foreign Direct Investment that it can blossom into a place where unemployment and income numbers start to approach those of Brasil, Malaysia or China. Please, consider for a moment the intentions of those that would oppose that.
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Originally Posted by derrida
That is not good if you are going to try and sell these people an idea of a national direction and policy using the army as the salesman, noone is going to want to buy, and, well, they haven't been, they've instead reverted to people like themselves who they trust, all of whom have quite different ideas on what is to be done. Once you have ten thousand guys with hundreds of thousands to millions citizens behind them per side, with a couple of dozen splits between them, you are getting beyond the point at which this can be tracked without reverting to ye olde fasioned police state, or turning the american armed forces into the military intelligence beast that seems to inevitably come out of very dirty occupations. If you suddenly were able to magically transport every actual real live trained cop in the US to iraq and somehow brainwash them into wanting to stay it might not even be enough to deal with the kinds of numbers of trained operatives now running around and killing each other.
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Ok, Mr. Negative.
I hope I've already addressed all that.
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Originally Posted by derrida
Personally I think the war was lost by mid 2003, past that it was only going to go one way, a bunch of dummies had set the whole thing up so that as many different parts of the system would poke as many people in the eye as possible, as often as possible, and got rid of anyone with the temerity to suggest doing things differently. This was then all left to rust and the problems were denied and and passed on for a very long time. We are now at the point with this Rube Goldberg machine of stupid where everyone subjected to it has tetanus and severed limbs and is really pissed off at the designer. I don't think there's much useful to be done at this point, at least directly. Getting a couple of internal and external iraqi proxies up to act in the US's interests is about as much as can be usefully done now, and you don't need the whole fucking foot part of the military there for that. Leaving would be bad, though, huh?
Is victory going to look like half the country in refugee camps and the other half dead or deported?
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No, victory is when we can leave without Iraq, a country whose citizens have just begun to vote that they want something more like what we, Europe and Japan have, falling apart completely.
Care to suggest how else we might achieve that?