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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Carragher who wrote (120260)	6/15/2005 12:58:01 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793964

Certainly, it would have been very difficult to get 500,000 men. But this universal assumption that it would have made the difference - that the guys running the Sunni insurgency would have just looked at the numbers and decided not even to try it - seems highly dubious to me. What these pundits seem to forget is that the final vote was in Baathist/Jihadi hands, not American hands. And they were and are well funded, well armed (Saddam had seen to that) and motivated. Even 500,000 troops would still be thin on the ground, and no amount of American troops could have provided the intelligence network needed for counter-insurgency; for that you need local troops. The insurgents could still have tried their current strategy, which seems to consist largely of blowing up soft targets. So how much difference would it have made?