"Winning" in the sense that the US "won" in Falluja would be easy enough, I guess. Though to carry out that policy nation-wide in Iraq would require a lot more resources. Plus a pretty huge gulag to hold all the rounded-up usual suspects, plus really huge refugee camps for all the non-suspect displaced population. Or maybe vice-versa on the pretty huge / really huge front, the net seems to get cast broadly at times. After all that, I guess nobody would need to ask why they hate us anymore.
A couple clips from the economist article:
Whether or not the insurgency is fuelled by American clumsiness, it has deepened and spread almost every month since the occupation began. In mid-2003, Donald Rumsfeld, America's defence secretary, felt able to dismiss the insurgents as “a few dead-enders”. Shortly after, official estimates put their number at 5,000 men, including many foreign Islamic extremists. That figure has been revised to 20,000, including perhaps 2,000 foreigners, not counting the thousands of hostile fighters American and British troops have killed; these are the crudest of estimates.
There's some indication of how crude a little later:
In bold contrast to his masters in Washington, General George W. Casey Jr, the commander-in-chief of coalition forces in Iraq, credits foreigners with a minimal role in the insurgency. Of over 2,000 men detained during the fighting in Fallujah, fewer than 30 turned out to be non-Iraqi. In Ramadi, the marines have detained a smaller number of foreigners, including a 25-year-old Briton two weeks ago, who claimed to be pursuing “peace work” but whose hands were coated with explosives. Pleased to find an enemy who understood English, marines say they queued up to taunt him; one told him he would be gang-raped in Abu Ghraib.
Ok, 30 out of 2000 doesn't correlate very well with the alleged 2000 out of 20000. But then, a lot of stuff doesn't correlate with official happy talk on Iraq, you just gotta believe. |
