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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (27278)	3/15/2010 11:00:39 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 103300

Post-’Pottery Barn’ Intervention March 15, 2010, 5:45 am Idea of the Day - Must Reads From the Week in Review Staff ideas.blogs.nytimes.com Today’s idea: There is an alternative to Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn rule” — “you break it, you own it” — referring to America’s post-invasion obligations to Iraq. A security analyst proposes “repetitive raiding” as a model for future interventions. War \| On the Foreign Policy blog Small Wars, Robert Haddick calls attention to this essay in Armed Forces Journal, a monthly aimed at America’s military leadership. In it, Bernard I. Finel of the American Security Project offers an alternative to leaders seeking to avoid any repetition of costly nation-building efforts like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, requiring the suppression of stubborn insurgencies: [T]he vast majority of goals can be accomplished through quick, decisive military operations. Not all political goals are achievable this way, but most are and those that cannot be achieved through conventional operations likely cannot be achieved by the application of even the most sophisticated counterinsurgency doctrine either. As a consequence, I believe the U.S. should adopt a national military strategy that heavily leverages the core capability to break states and target and destroy fixed assets. … Such a strategy — which might loosely be termed “repetitive raiding” — could defeat and disrupt most potential threats the U.S. faces. While America’s adversaries may prefer to engage the U.S. using asymmetric strategies, there is no reason that the U.S. should agree to fight on these terms. Mr. Finel argues that in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States achieved most of its war objectives very early on, and that the costs of staying on far outweighed the benefits of achieving the few remaining goals. After all, he suggests, even when occupying forces eventually leave either place, there’s no guarantee all the broken dishes will have been repaired, so to speak. [Armed Forces Journal via Small Wars]