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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ish who wrote (111694)	8/15/2003 9:37:35 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

<So we should do what? Bring our guys home and nuke the country? Start from scratch?> Any successful policy has to be 90% political, and only 10% military. More force, more dead Iraqis, is not going to succeed, no matter how many we kill. The present policy (area searches, regularly shooting into crowds of Iraqis, using artillery and helicopters in urban areas) uses massive amounts of poorly targetted firepower, and turns the civilian population against us. We have to avoid what happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan, where the Islamists and nationalists allied against the foreign army of occupation. The only way to keep the Islamists out of power in Iraq, is to ally with the nationalists, against the Islamists. And that means giving the Iraqi nationalists real power. They can't be our puppets. We have to create an Iraqi army that answers to Iraqis, not Americans. We have to turn over the oil industry to Iraqis rather than Halliburton. If we are unable or unwilling to do that, then, yes, we should just cut our losses and get out ASAP.

To: Ish who wrote (111694)	8/16/2003 12:44:34 AM
From: smolejv@gmx.net	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

>>So we should do what? << Military (US, UK, German, French, generic) have been trained to defend & attack, to win battles and wars. It's not their vocation, whatever flexibility there is in their professional approach, to combat lawlessness and statelessness. To play the cops and service guys - they sure can do it, but... -. What's needed now in Iraq (my opinion, Im not cutting and pasting somebody else's) is a professional, multinational, not-exclusively-American task force, partly police, partly paralegal, partly infrastructure&hardware, on top of the military already there. Re reaping the profits etc - it will cost us all dearly first. But without that, it will be even costlier. Re comparing this situation to Germany in 1945 and later: to quote Maurice, now is 60 years later. Let's push & shift a paradigm or two - out of the way...

To: Ish who wrote (111694)	8/16/2003 3:46:53 PM
From: GST	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

<Bring our guys home and nuke the country?> What a novel approach to "liberation". It is a farce to claim as so many do that Iraq is being "liberted". Only the oil is being liberated -- it used to be Iraqi oil, now it is American oil. The first step in Iraq is to liberate Iraq from the US -- and the only way we can do that is to turn Iraq over to the UN so the real work can begin. The alternative is a grinding guerilla war in which young Americans are used as target practice, day after day.