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

To: Sig who wrote (129288)	4/15/2004 12:14:47 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi Sig; Re: "It could have been predicted with near certainty, and was by yourself, that resistance would occur but how to plan for it?." To pacify a resistance, you need to either send adequate troops, which gets back to that 20 per 1000 figure, or alternatively, you must exit the country before the resistance begins picking your soldiers off. In Iraq, that would have meant either sending in those 250,000 troops that Shinseki got fired for asking for (because the Bushies believed that he was gold bricking), or handing off control of Iraq to unreformed Baathists and Islamic militants. There never was any other option, and frankly, if we'd sent in the 250,000 size force, they'd have been unable to pacify the population either. The general rule is that you do not start an "optional" war unless you have the means to end it in a favorable manner. Re: "Rather like 911- which town, and who and when?" Let me guess... I know, it would be the Sunni triangle, the Baathists, and right away, LOL. And as for the rest of Iraq, it was predicted before the war that if we weren't out in a year we'd be in deep doo doo. In fact, the original Bush plan was to have us mostly out by the end of last summer. We were supposed to be down to 30,000 troops. Instead, we're ramping up a year into the conflict. This failure of planning is an exact mirror of Vietnam except that they had a draft back then so they had more warm bodies available to send. -- Carl