IMHO, that’s about the only area where it can’t be considered at least comparable to Vietnam. Krugman’s got a column on this, which I’ll come back to in another post.
No prob. Figured the word was still getting out.
Well, it’s a ‘middle’, but the OP wasn’t excluding it so much as saying the terrain hadn’t been mapped, and he was asking whether there were some passable routes through it.
I appreciate that.
I think there’s one important point to make about the directed-violence point: that which constitutes directed violence, from our military’s POV, can constitute indiscriminate violence to the Iraqis. We’re all much more upset when bad things happen to people we can identify with than when they happen to people we can’t. I’m not claiming to be a sainted exception here, not hardly. But we need to be aware that our ‘collateral damage’ is heartrending to them.
I sort of agree and sort of disagree. I think that until we’ve trained Iraqis to handle their own internal policing, the job of preventing or responding to the violence of one sect or faction against another is in our hands.
But this isn’t what I see here. It’s violence by some significant factions against us. And ISTM that what we do about it depends on whether this is indeed a few thugs, or the armed portion of a much more widespread popular movement. If it’s the latter, then our ‘enemy’ is too large for us to defeat by military means, and to attempt to do so will only result in the convergence of ‘our enemy’ with ‘the people we came to liberate’.
I’ve held the position for the past 15 days that we were effectively making war on the people of Iraq. We weren’t making war on the people who killed the four mercenaries in Fallujah; they’d probably blown town before we had the chance to cordon it off. Rather, we were making war on people who took heart from those killings. Reprehensible though it may be, such attitudes are legal, which is why we should have just cordoned off the city. By attacking it, we were effectively saying, “Hating the US is outlawed,” not to mention killing people who, up to that point, didn’t need to be killed. Ditto when we shut down al-Sadr’s newspaper. And when he had his uprising on April 4, the right call was to get out of the way, since we, and not some other faction, were the object of his militia’s fury. Getting out of the way would have minimized loss of life on both sides, and avoided creating the seeming moral necessity of retaliation.
Since even Rumsfeld’s saying how surprised he was by the widespread support for the insurgents, I think that’s unfortunately been vindicated. And we’ve meanwhile created a whole lot of new facts in the ground that won’t quickly be forgotten.
If you think I’ve wholly in support of W’s every move, you are again not reading carefully. I’ve already said I agreed with most of what RTFirefly suggested. Where I didn’t, I said what I suggested. If I were to come up with some more of my own, they’d include