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

To: Sam who wrote (238016)	7/26/2007 10:34:06 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

But Sam, those 1500 AQ in Iraq are SUPER BOOGEY MEN! They are orders of magnitude better trained and armed than the 300,000 Iraqis WE'VE been training and arming for six years, not to mention the entire AK-47 armed Iraqi population that's on OUR side, somehow. Osama's 1500 guys are just BETTER than us and the Iraqis put together, I guess. You've just gotta BELIEVE! America MUST stay in Iraq, for ISRAEL. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Now, the civil war idea makes much more sense. You've got 50 million Iraqis with AK's that could be mixed up in THAT. But that would mean they're on THEIR side, not ours, whichever side that IS..

To: Sam who wrote (238016)	7/27/2007 12:00:06 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

First of all, I've never read an article yet which claims that AQ in Iraq was more than 1500-2000 people. And usually less than that. Sure, 1500-2000 people can create havoc, but they can do so long term only if they have the tacit support of many 000s more who will feed, shelter and hide them. But if they lose that support, they will fairly quickly be rounded up and/or killed True. But as OBL has observed, when people see a choice between a weak horse and a strong horse, they will chose the strong horse. If they see AQ as the strong horse, then the support falls into place. Second, I recall reading articles last fall about how Sunni tribes in Anbar were getting sick of these lunatics and beginning to turn against them and cooperate with the US against them. All I've read over the past 6-9 months has pretty much confirmed that. Yes, no question. But what if the US hadn't been there, with its overwhelming and focussed military capacity that can take out any enemy if it knows where he is? What if the US hadn't been campaigning to enlist the help of Sheikhs, to enroll their men in local militias as well as the Iraqi army - a big change in US policy? What if it was just the Sheikhs on their own, disunited, with Al Qaeda playing off one tribe against the other, and assassinating opposition at will? Would they have turned then? Stuff like this doesn't just happen on its own unless the balance of forces lets it happen. Yes, there are certainly many other forces in Iraq, both Sunni and Shia with big guns. BUT al Qaeda likes to congregate somewhere where it knows it can be the biggest gun; last year that was al Anbar; more recently it was Baqubah. They need a safe base of operations. The US has been trying to clear & hold them out of their strongholds.