Selling the War; Selling the Enemy

This article gives a good explanation, of our primary failing in Iraq. Our army is designed to fight traditional command-and-control hierarchical armies. so it keeps interpreting the Iraq War in that light.

All this business that the real villains have to be states like Iran and Syria, or that Zarqawi is behind the resistance, and all of the assumptions that once we capture Zarqawi we will deal the insurgency a fatal blow (whenver they announce excitedly how close we are to capturing Zarqawi, the subtext is that doing so will somehow cripple the insurgents), comes from assuming that the enemy is the one we were trained to face.

One thing I disagree with Tom Engelhardt and Michael Schwartz on, though, is that we cannot defeat the insurgency with the army we currently have.

Even a decentralized guerilla resistance can be defeated by an army with the technology we have. The problem is, it would rob us of our humanity to end it. Because the only way to end it with the army we currently have is to simply start wiping out the ethnic groups most associated with the resistance, i.e. the Sunni Arabs.

If we are willing to go to some big Sunni Arab towns, round up the residents, and kill 100,000 of them, and then in order to control them in Northern ethnically-mixed towns, arm the Kurds and tell them it's open season on Sunni Arabs, I'm certain a lot of them would be willing to reduce the Sunni Arab population for us. I'm not certain about the Shiites, as they are Arabs and somewhat closer to the Sunni Arabs, but if they thought it would increase their power, and if we made some veiled threats about what we would do if they made common casue with the Sunnis, we could probably get them to help us on that, too.

Of course, none of this would mean that we wouldn't start getting trouble from the newly ascendant Kurds and Shiite Arabs, or from other countries.

However, it would stop the current insurgency, and I have a feeling that if casualties start going up again, eventually we will begin to move toward this option.

And that will NOT be good.

That is all.