The distinction is important - there have been signs that Iraqis are sick of the acts of foreign terrorists and I would expect support for domestic terrorism to be much lower than for insurgents in general.
Different groups with different aims and methods raise different problems but open different opportunities - the foreign terrorists are only realistically going to be countered by force and they are a difficult but finite problem.
The domestic insurgents are easier to kill individually (they don’t have the training, they stand in the open with RPGs etc) but they are potentially infinite. Pure force used against them breeds replacements faster than you can cut them down - the good news is that most of the aims of the potential insurgents can be addressed without force, the danger is if people feel the only way to protect their community or selves is to take up arms.
Offer potential insurgents genuine security and a stake in the future of the country and they stay as shopkeepers or cab-drivers – bomb their house and kill their kids and you end up with an insurgent or even domestic terrorist
Of course, it’s not really as simple as that (Tamerlane mentioned warlords –and no doubt there are all kinds of other complications) but the people fighting the occupation are not a single group with the same commitments – actions that might be successfully employed against one group could be counterproductive against another
Well, that’s the problem in a nutshell, isn’t it? There are several different factions with very different ideas about what Iraq’s future should be. The only thing uniting them all is their common hatred of the occupation. As soon as we pull out, they’ll start fighting each other. Iraq will stop being Vietnam and start being Yugoslavia. And then everybody will, of course, be much too preoccupied with other things to bother with running the oil industry. We should’ve left bad enough alone. At least Hussein’s Iraq was a society that worked, in the sense that there was a basic level of law and order, and most people had clean water to drink and enough food to eat.
See, there’s an upside to this whole thing: By all accounts, the ‘insurgents’ brutalized the population. Purging ‘collaborators’, shooting anyone who resisted their demands, forcing women to wear veils, forcing shops to close at gunpoint (and stealing what they needed from them), etc. That would be why, in a city of 500,000 people, almost EVERYONE left. The citizenry did not stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the insurgents - they abandoned them.
This may be one of the biggest weapons the U.S. has - the fact that these insurgents are generally bloodthirsty animals - ex-regime dead-enders, Islamist radicals, etc. They are not being kind to their own people. As word of the treatment of Fallujans spreads, you may see popular support for the insurgency, such that it is, crumble.
I understand the reasons that lead the US Army to take Fallujah… but its a lose lose proposition. Basically not going in means insurgency has a safe base. Going in means killing way to many people to help win hearts and minds.
Reading this thread I remember a quote attributed to Vercingetorix a Gaulish chief talking about Romans: (more or less like this)
“They kill and raze everything and create a desert… then they call it Pax Romana.”
Sam: how unfortunate, then, that Bush overruled the wishes of his commanders on the ground and, apparently, the civilians of Fallujah in the interests of electoral calculus. [/cheap shot at Bush]
As for everyone leaving, I thought that 30-50% stayed behind in the city. Getting out could just be a reasonable aversion to urban war zones. Good sense, rather than necessarily a political statement.
I do hope that the loathing that Iraqis (civilian and insurgent) have for the imported fighters continues to grow though. Issues are tricky enough without having a few extra sides who have no interest in victory for either side, but only in continued misery for all Iraq that plays well for the cameras.
Good thing you took it, because Lord knows, there haven’t been enough of them around here.
As for why the Marines waited 8 months… Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that there would have been 500,000 civilians in the way last time, and this time there were almost none? The reason the Marines pulled out the last time was because the civilian casualties were too high. But they can’t win with you, right? If the Marines had stormed Fallujah last time, you would have been screaming about the civilian deaths. So now they wait until the civilians are out of harm’s way, and now you’re whining that they waited too long.
“Hearts and minds” can’t get in the way of clear military goals, though. (They can get in the way of willy-nilly military goals, but that’s a topic for another day). Otherwise, just about any action is impossible.
“Hearts and minds” will probably just have to be won at some later date (probably through cultural dispersion, not diplomacy). If that date is 50 years down the road, so be it. I wouldn’t consider Germany or Vietnam staunch enemies of the United States right now.
Germans weren’t doing guerrila war for 50 years while the Marshall plan chugged along well… Vietnam is not an enemy of the US for different reasons. Not very good examples.
Do you think years of occupation will help the US… no way. Either you get them on your side… or not. You can’t bribe them into liking you later. Not if you want a stable Iraq… instead of a strong armed (but “friendly” dictatorship.)
My comment of “50 years” didn’t mean “50 years of occupation” – I meant “50 years into the future”.
My point of bringing up Germany and Vietnam is that “tides change”. The current state of Iraqi hearts and minds should be (and are) considered by military planners, but short-term “hearts and minds” thinking shouldn’t drive the war planning because time will eventually heal the “hearts and minds” wounds.
Well the way you phrase it… it seems like “hearts and minds” is about being nice… and has no relevance to the military aspect. I don’t think that is true… insurgent have plenty of recruits due to this disconnect.
No, no, no … “hearts and minds” have plenty of relevance – but only so much. There are situations where it’s possible to overemphasize “hearts and minds” to the detriment of clear military goals that would help shorten a war.
“Hearts and minds” definitely is and should be a part of the equation in wartime strategy. But it should not be the lone factor, or the overriding factor.
Now do we define the current situation in Iraq as post-war peacekeeping and counter insurgency... or "wartime" ? I don't think its "wartime"... even if it looks like it. I think "hearts and mind" during counter insurgency is more important than I think your judging it... though I'm not sure I would call it the overriding factor.
The reports about that video clearly state that the wounded people inside that mosque were disarmed. They were then left without further treatment, without food, water, medication a day (or two?) before an other soldier came to kill one of them or maybe even all of them (yes, there are also reports of more then one wounded man killed).
The video shows soldiers talking casualy outside a building (if that is the same building = if the video was not some cut and paste work, on which I have doubts at this point). They do not look particularly worried for entering that building.
Then a soldier says with a rather exited tone in his voice that the man on the floor is alive. He kills him as if he is finishing off a wounded animal.
You hear an other voice saying “he is dead now”. I don’t know how that sounds to you, but I hear satisfaction in is tone.
Not one single protest or amazement about what the other soldier did, yet also no fear or worries considering the “danger” that the other wounded men could form for the soliders safety.
Surely if the wounded men were seen as such an immediate deadly threat, there should have been fear and caution in voices and attitudes to begin with and also after the killing. Since clearly after that wounded man was dead, there are still other wounded men in that place who are also still alive. (I hear stories that they were also killed or at least two of them.)
It is lovely to see the arguments that a videa “is not proof”.
No it is not since you can do whatever you want with such material. There is however in this case a “western” and “embedded” reporter who made it, so that should lend automatically credibility to his material it in your prejudiced eyes, no? It was not Al Jazeera who filmed it. You can not dismiss it as “Arab/Muslim” propaganda.
Whatever… I have a question about this “video is no proof” issue thazt here so suddenly arose: Care to explain why whenever you see a video about a murder on a non-Iraqi by what you perceive as Muslims, is for you “clear proof” that this or this person or group or whatever “did it”? You even take “anouncements” on websites claiming that it has be done "int the name of… (fill in at will) as “proof”. How come you don’t see your own prejudices and double standards and falling into the Meida trap in such cases? How come that whenever someone (me for example) tells you that a video or a website gives no “proof” of anything, the attacks are legio (even to the point of claiming that I “defend terrorists”) ?
In cases like this one, it is not clear at all what really happened, yet when looking at the circumstances as they are know no, it is clear that at least that soldier overreacted. Why he did is is something that should be clear without much thinking.
a) Before the attack on Fallujah, you could hear their commanders pepping them up as if they were going on a fox hunt. As we all know, at a fox hunt the dogs hunt the fox because they have learned that they can tear it to pieces once they got it. The soldiers went at Fallujah with exactly that same mentality. I have no doubts about that at all.
b) It is claimed that the soldier was wounded the day before and saw an other soldier get killied (what he was sent back there is an other question. Are they that short in soldiers that they send them right back after being shot?) . Clearly that soldierwas not only scared by that former expierience, since he is human, he must have been mad as hell too and out on revenge. I don’t know if that works in his defence, though.
c) It is not such a big secret that among the US soldiers in Iraq are a bunch of trigger happy cowboys. It is not a secret at all that they are in general perceived - and with reason - as a bunch of trigger happy rude and arrogant cowboys whenever they encouter Iraqis who do not act as they would wish they act… And immediately and at their orders (in English). This is a mentality and attitude we have seen since the very start of this criminal invasion of a sovereign nation. (This in visible contrast to the attitude as displayed by the UK military in general).
d) It is also not a secret that the US military all too quickly bombs and kills at will whenever they “think” (a few hours to seconds on forehand) that someone or something is linked with the Iraqi resistence. US soldiers inevitably are influenced by that attitue of “attack first, ask questions later”.
I have no doubt that this particular story was only filmed by accident and that there are a lot of similar situations that are not documented but by those who saw them happening = those Iraqis that survived such situation and automatically are not believed by the US and its defenders when they talk about it, and those in the US military who witnessed it and do not talk about it for different reasons.
(Most probably there are a few who do talk or write about it, but as always in ongoing wars these reports will only surface when time is ready for it).
I have contacts in Iraq. I know these things happen. Yet even without having stories coming from Iraq itself, if you reason a bit normal you know these things happen. They happen in every war on every side and no matter who fights whom.
I have an other question: When it comes to the Iraqis resisting being invaded and occupied, why do you find it needed to use every kind of denigrating wordings you can think about?
No, the resistence in Iraq is not all “AQ adherents” imported from “the outside”. Even those few who come “from the outside” are not “all” members of some sort of terrorist group. (Of course the invasion of Iraq provided for the ideal recrutement ground and of course such groups try to get a finger in the soup.)
No, the resistence in Iraq are not “all” abducting and killing people on videos.
Since the Brilliant US Hero Criminal Bremer in one stroke of a pen dismissed army and police and teachers and whatever civil servant you can name, abducting people is a very flourishing business. You have all sorts of criminals doing this and most of them do not abduct “Westerners” or other outsiders, but Iraqis.
It is a PR stunt of the US and its applauders to make you believe that everyone who ever gets engaged in the resistance against the US invasion is part of the abducting and murdering circle (I am over and over again amazed how easy public opinion can be played at. History over and over again repeating itself.)
No, the resistance in Iraq can not be simplified by saying “Sunni” who “are afraid because now the Shia might take power”.
Yes, fighting an invading army is the right of every citizen of Iraq.
Yes, fighting that army with whatever means possible is the right of every citizen in Iraq.
No, the US military has no claims to make about how the Iraqis “should” fight them. They are the criminals, they are the invaders, they are in breach with International Law. You can not expect a resistance with no air craft, no tanks, no bombs, no missiles, nothing whatsoever but few amunition and weapons they can lay their hands on to fight the invading US army “the conventional way”.
By the way: If you keep reasoning in the simplistic terms you are fed by the US PR machine, I’m afraid you are lost for logical thinking and any form of history class one can imagine.
Salaam. A