I saw this really cool article on Yahoo! and thought I’d bring it here to debate how effective folks think it will be. It SOUNDS like what we should have been doing all along. However, perhaps there is a window of opportunity to try it now?
-XT
I read about this in the Times today. It was an article by an Air Force colonel criticizing the Counter-Insurgency Manual saying that people are taking it dogmatically at the expense of our high-tech military supremacy. His argument was that while things like this are a good idea that America’s dominance technologically keeps the bigger threats like China and Russia at bay. He agreed wholeheartedly with the use of cultural anthropologists on the ground, but said that winning the hearts and minds is useless if you can’t also blow the crap out of them.
Do you have a link?
-XT
Coulson’s Law: When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will surely follow.
We Still Need the Big Guns - Charles J. Dunlap Jr.
Sorry he’s a Major-General not a Colonel.
That Bush or whoever was in supreme charge in Iraq wasn’t out touring the countryside giving speaches to the general populace from week one to start communications going and getting them to stand up for their own country, already fairly well doomed the whole move. Trying to accomplish the same thing now, working with little dudes with no actual power, is silly.
Yeah, because our undereducated President getting shot at in the middle of a war zone is a great way for him to spend his time.
It sounds better in the original dog latin:
It is. It’s his war, he should put his candy ass on the line.
The New Yorker profiled the Australian anthropologist David Kilcullen and his work for the Pentagon on counterinsurgency in this article just over a year ago.
Here comes the science.
First, this is rather like going to medical school after you’ve killed the patient. It’s too late for much of anything useful to be done by anyone.
Second, Bush and his buddies are still in charge, so there’s no reason to believe that any well meaning and/or competent people will be allowed to make a difference, if that’s even possible.
And third, our position in Iraq is fundamentally weak because we are grossly in the wrong.
Nonsense. I suggest you read the news about what is happening in Iraq now. You might be surprised to learn that there is still a country and there are still people there, so there is some value in learning who is who within that complex tribal nation.
For a year more. Besides they aren’t handling small everyday decisions. If you truly believe what you said you clearly know nothing about the way General Petraeus has organized things in Iraq. He has people in stations strategically placed within the community, at every station tehre are both Americans and Iraqis working together. Learning who the people are and the way they actually interact is useful intelligence for the forces there on the ground.
Your opinion is well known, but you overestimate the value of it. Our possible actions might be limited by the egregious error that was made by going in, but that does not mean there is not left a plethora of possibility left to be managed.
It’s funny, they are finally sending people in to actually Gasp learn about who the Iraqis are, and the people who hated the war because we didn’t respect them to begin with are too cynical to accept it as a step in the right direction.
Why, you’re right! There is no possible way to even improve our status there one smidgin! No matter what we do, it’ll have no positive effect; even leaving will do no good! So we should stay there, any maybe dump napalm on the populace periodically, and it won’t matter since the patient’s already dead anyway!
Funny, I thought that he was already there, making his little difference. I must have misread the OP. Of course, this is not to say that in the future Bush won’t go in there personally with an AK-47 and undo any small good he does. But with your certainty, I assume you have a cite for this future event?
Because, of course, bad guys always lose, and good guys always win. That has to be the reason why things are going badly over there; being in the wrong caused Bush to be an idiot, not the other way 'round.
a) The goal is to get things turned away from becoming a war zone before it becomes so.
b) If you’re not willing to do what it takes to rebuild an occupied nation, you shouldn’t move to occupy it.
That’s all well and good, but putting a President on the Battlefield is stupid no matter how stupid the other factors are.
You’re saying then that it’s impossible to create a decently safe venue for an important figure to talk in? If nothing else there’s radio, dropping pamphlets from airplanes, loudspeakers from safe areas, etc.
Treating Iraq as a war zone where everyone is an enemy, rather than as a ally who we seek to work with and aid, filled with some sort of silent majority who just wants to live their lives in safety and raise their children well, is where we failed with Iraq. Not with having too few troops or not getting sufficient aid from the UN (in my belief.)
Definitely true, if Cheney doesn’t go with.
Not impossible, merely irresponsible. Starting an irrational war does not justify further irrational acts. A President on the ground is an attractive terrorist target, certainly you can secure the area, but if there is ever a justification for dusting off the single Katyusha you have, that’s a good one.
xtisme Would you care to offer an opinion about the impact of this, perhaps you can help drive some discussion? I am very interested in the notion, it could have very profound effects on the middle-east and might actually propel Iraq further due to having more advanced demographic data than most middle-eastern nations. That demographic data can do a lot for marketing, governmental projects, any number of things.
I’d like to see this problem approached from two directions:
- How can this data help the Iraqi people in a civilian capacity?
- What benefit does this have for the US military?