And exactly how, BTW, are Iraqi officials able to interfere with that?
By not supporting our going into a neighborhood to root out the bad guys.
Did you miss the “more” in “20,000 more troops”? The US military is stretched thin as it is. To get more people on the ground in Iraq, we’d need to have more troops to send. The military doesn’t get more troops by just magically snapping its fingers; it gets them by recruiting folks from the general public. In other words, people like you and me.
It must be nice to live in a world where the military has unlimited numbers of personnel that it can deploy as many as it wants wherever it wants, but there’s a strictly limited number of terrorists and when you kill the last one you’re done.
The bad guys all have tatoos that say
“bad guy”. It’s even in English to make it easier for us.
:dubious: Would it?
[biting lip hard on temptation to Godwinize]
No… McCain seems to think we can do it. If you want to have a debate about the draft as Rangel called for today, that’s fine.
I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t even suggest that our military is being brutal.
Nah, the blame-America-first crowd is in charge on Capitol Hill, remember?
Don’t kid yourself. If you advocate military action in civilian neighborhoods, you are advocating brutality. We can be just as polite and circumspect in our descriptions as you may like and it will change nothing. There is no nuance in a corpse.
Even if no other form of military action could have even the slightest possibility of achieving the desired ends? This is, after all, a guerilla war, and unlike Vietnam the action is in cities, not jungles (nor deserts).
Totally non-responsive to my question. Just pointing that out. I will also point out (again) that I was asking what degree of brutality you think would be appropriate. I suggested perhaps you were thinking of the general destruction of a neighborhood deemed to be the refuge of ‘bad guys’. Is that your position, or not?
Nah. [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Fallujah]We already tried that.[/ur]
That would be more along the lines of asking if an action is justified, not whether or not it constitutes “brutality”. If the “guerillas” are founded in popular support, attacking that base of support is equivalent to making war on civilians, which is anathema. We’re the Americans, we don’t do things like that.
What, never? Well, hardly ever…
Not necessarily. Guerillas and terrorists can hide among civilians without enjoying wide popular support. Just ask Timothy McVeigh.
In some circumstances it might be warranted. I’m no military strategist but you have to fight them where they are .
Ok, let me get this straight. You believe the US armed forces aren’t being brutal, and the premise of this thread is that you’d *like them * to be?
This is the most intelligent and pithy comment made so far in this thread.
So far we’ve entered the conflict without a plan for termination, gone searching for “weapons of mass destruction” that nobody can find, declared “major combat operations” over and “Mission Accomplished!” without criteria, and have declared that we’re going to fight the “War On Terror” until we “win”. Given the lack of semantic rigor in the whole affair, I don’t think it would be out of the normal line of reasoning (such as it is) to arbitrarially declare “Victory Over Terror” and “strategically redeploy” our troops back home. (Eric Blair sits quietly in the corner weeping to himself, Ambrose Bierce dips his pen in the inkwell and starts another entry under the heading “Faith-Based Community”, and George Carlin just gets more bitter.)
Whether this would be a good thing for the people living in Iraq is a serious question, but not one that we’re really in the position to rectify. The other alternative seems to be creating ghettos or reservations and isolating the various warring ethnic and religious factions indefinitely. (Good luck on selling that one, even if it were physically feasible.)
Stranger
Why is it intelligent? The “enemy” are those who are taking up arms against the legitimate government of Iraq and those who are actively assisting them. Now, it might at times be difficult to determine who is taking up arm against the state and who is engaged in plain ol’ criminal activity, but both are legitimate targets of the ISF and the US military in Iraq. And I don’t mean targets in the sense that they should be shot-- targets for detention and trial, although shooting at them if they’re shooting at us first is fine by me.
IOW, the Shi’ites that are killing Sunnis, with the government’s tacit approval - we don’t regard them as enemies.
So we’ve taken sides: we’re for the Shi’a, against the Sunni.