As soon as we get 50% more troops in Iraq, our death rate will increase by 50%. As those troops are ordered to present a more forward attitude, those troops will take correspondingly larger casualties. As the Iraqis learn to fight us, they will kill more of us.
Hopefully that's a worse-case (not yet worst!). It is still possible that if we - well, especially the US, but UK as well - start actually delivering on our earlier promises the mood might change in our favour. We could begin by at least getting basic services working so that normal life might resume, halting the looting, and getting a police, justice and legal system in place so that normal people would feel we had their interests at heart.
Most of all, this would mean handing over powers to locally-chosen administrations, and publishing and sticking to a plan for transition to democracy even if we don't like the probable new leaders. It's all too evident that there was no plan in place before or during the conquest...
Odd, isn't it. I don't know why, we had the example of Afghanistan, but there really seems to have been no one in power (i.e., not just Bush/Blair, but even PNAC) with plans for what to do when (as was obvious and inevitable) we won. The only planned action seems to have been the contracts for Bechtel and Halliburton, these have gone ahead quite nicely. But that's obviously coincidence. |
