Hi tekboy; Re: "... I'm starting to get a bit worried [about Iraq]."
"Starting"??? A "bit"???
That "pretty good update" is so full of false hopes that it's stunning:
Re: "Security: Deploy sufficient forces to subdue Iraqi resistance ..."
Problem is that would require a tripling of soldiers there (per the figures for Britain in Northern Ireland etc.) and no soldiers even approaching these numbers are available to go, not from the US or anywhere else.
Re: "... and continue the hunt for former leaders of the regime, especially Saddam Hussein."
A sign that the writers are still deluded into believing that Saddam's life matters in terms of the guerilla war. We've been capturing one card after another, but the guerilla war not only continues, it grows. This proves that capturing all of them ain't gonna stop the war.
Re: "Law and Order: Must be established in Baghdad and throughout Iraq. The U.S. should intensify its efforts to recruit and retrain Iraqi police officers, and immediately seek international assistance for this process."
Again, we need about 500,000 troops in Iraq and huge numbers of police as well. They can't come from the US because we can't speak Arabic and consequently don't have the slightest idea whose ox was gored. They won't come from the Arab world unless we let them run the place which would imply an admission on Bush's part that the war was a disaster. They can't come from Iraq because it will take many months to even hire ones (that have been security checked), and then train them, etc., and then we'd have the same problem every similar situation has generated in the past, the guerillas would infect the Iraqi police force.
Re: "Re-establish Services: In Baghdad and throughout Iraq as soon as possible. Especially electricity and telecommunications."
These are all great ideas, but there is no way that we can do any of this in the face of a guerilla war. Pipelines and electric lines are linear things that stretch for hundreds of miles. They cannot possibly be defended in guerilla war and never have been, ever. In Vietnam, even with 500,000 troops we were unable to even defend the major highways. In Iraq, our troops again cannot defend even the major highways but instead are ambushed anywhere they go. Under these circumstances, to talk about restoring power is ridiculous.
Militarily, they should be talking about supplying generators for small neighborhoods that do not require power lines, and moving oil around in convoys of (easily ambushed but less easily sabotaged) oil tanker trucks. Ah, but such would require an admission that the Bush administration cannot keep the lights on, and in addition it would be massively expensive.
Note that since the report was written, the Iraqi water supply has been sabotaged.
Re: "Get the Message Out: Through the establishment of world class radio and TV broadcasting ..."
This is true, but not solvable. The problem is that human nature being what it is, the American government can't even convince its own population that smoking is a bad idea. How the hell is it going to convince the Iraqi population not to hate us? While our soldiers run around shooting civilians daily? It won't work any better than the Soviet attempt to convince their citizens to love their state.
Re: "... support for independent media ..."
The problem is that truly independent media in Iraq is complaining constantly about the Americans. This is not a solvable problem.
Re: "... and possibly the opening of local public information centers where Iraqis can more readily access CPA officials."
This is a joke. We should instead be giving power over to whatever Iraqi groups are willing to take it, and let them deal with the minor problems of their citizens.
As it is, we have a situation where a country is 65% unemployed, angry, and is accustomed to everyone owning a machine gun or even grenades, in their home. We cannot possibly control the place, Saddam Hussein, in all his viciousness, was barely able to keep the civilians in check.
Re: "Generate Employment: For the estimated 60% of the working age population that is unemployed."
This is a good idea. But it also has problems. Right now there are a certain number of Iraqis who are spending their time trying to make sure that they get enough to eat. They hate us. Giving them money for food is not going to stop them from hating us any more than giving money to poor people in the US stops them from envying their richer neighbors. So now we'll have a situation where instead of having starving guerillas shooting at us, we'll instead have well fed and healthy guerillas shooting at us.
Re: "Share the Burden: By seeking a broader role for the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, ... to allow other countries to contribute troops and funds for stabilizing and rebuilding Iraq."
This is a great sentiment, but it ignores the political realities. Since the authors wrote this, we've had the UN targeted, the first non Anglo/American KIA, a steadily lengthening death count for the US, and still no significant troop donations from other countries.
The basic problem is that to get to the troop level that Britain used to quiet Northern Ireland (over a 10 year period) we need to get another 300,000 troops. We could recruit Martians and Dolphins and still never get near that total. That's cause the other countries on the planet don't want to send their troops over to get slowly picked off in the desert.
Re: "... and our Arab allies ..."
This is a joke. We have no Arab allies. The Kuwaitis used us to get rid of Saddam, whom they had a grudge against. But are they volunteering to police the mess they helped create? Not only hell no, but they wouldn't even send any troops to begin with.
The other Arab states all have minor or major problems with Al Qaeda. These problems began in earnest when Russia pulled out of Afghanistan and all those returning veterans started wanting changes in their home countries. Having a chaotic Iraq as a place for Islamic nut cases to be attracted to is very convenient for the moderate Arab countries, who are the only ones that would consider sending troops or police to help us. No country that has a fly problem is going to send troops that would stop Iraq from being fly paper.
-- Carl
P.S. This should give you cause for worry:
An independent public opinion survey of 1,090 Baghdad residents by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies (ICRSS) conducted on June 19, 2003, reinforced many of our own observations.
It's a notorious fact of human nature that the citizens of the big cities are, on average, far more liberal than rural or small town folk. So when you look at the opinion polls cited in the report, you should understand that in Iraq as a whole, the numbers are far worse. And it is in the countryside where the pipelines and powerlines have to be defended.
By the way, this difference between the country and city dates at least as far back as the American revolution, and appears to be a universal trait of the human species. |
