Ol' Vic is at it Again

There is much to disagree with in Victor Davis Hanson's latest screed, but this statement has struch me as the most interesting:

The shortcoming was never the number of U.S troops per se, but our self-imposed straightjacket on rules of engagement that apparently discouraged the vital sorts of offensive operations that we have at last seen the last two months.

Last wo months? We have been hearing about such offensive operations since at least April 2004 with the Fallujah struggle.

But more importantly, what he is actually saying seems to be that we don't need more troops, we need to be more brutal and merciless. Which is exactly what I predicted:

I think that there is only one way that we can win in Iraq. That is to resort to massive anti-Sunni Arab brutality. Even if we caused Syria to close its borders, the insurgency would be going on strong. It might lose its supply of suicide bombers, but it would still have the ability to place IEDs and would still have most of its warriors who fight with guns and mortars.
The only way to stop the insurgency is to convince the Iraqis that any ethnic group that attacks us will be decimated. Currently, that means massive retaliatory attacks against the families and towns of insurgents.

In fact, this statement by Hanson:

The lesson of Vietnam is that the south was more secure in 1973 without almost any American ground troops than with over 500,000 present in 1968. Promises of air power to support ARVN forces between 1971-3 proved about as viable as thousands of prior search-and-destroy patrols by American soldiers.

if taken literally, would seem to suggest that the US ought to use airpower to support offensive operations (and in fact, we did use airpower in Tal Afar. And against guerilla fighters, how would that work, unless we actually level villages? There are claims that we did level entire neighborhoods in Tal Afar, and then imposed a media blackout, but I am not certain how much weight I would give a report from Islam-Online.Net. (Although, considering how little news I hear from Tal Afar, it is reasonable to assume that there was a blackout, and I find it hard to believe that if the situation in Tal Afar was peachy keen that we wouldn't have had some live reports about it from Fox News (even if you accept that most of the mainstream media is antiwar and tries to cover up good news from Iraq as much as possible, only a fool would think that true of Fox).

Back to initial point, though, I think that Mr. Hanson is preaching the exact response that I was afraid we would take, and seems to feel that we are taking it, so it seems that I was prescient in my worries.

That is all.