All but the most hardened Bushiviks have pretty much admitted that Bush has screwed the pooch in Iraq. The standard way of conducing a military occupation has been a colossal failure, with the country fast headed for civil war and no bright prospects of anything but more dead soldiers at hand, it’s time to toss out the regulation playbook and start thinking outside the box.
To that end, I am presenting several proposals that are well outside the standardized methods of conducting a military occupation and try something new that might, actually, like … work.
By their very nature, these ideas are risky and untried, so that can’t really be a criticism of them. If you want to argue with them, you have to argue with them on some logical ground of their specific effects on the country or the strategic situation.
Also, the argument that ‘it will make the Iraqis/the Arabs hate us’ does not wash. They ALREADY hate us. You would have to argue that it would make them hate us SIGNIFICANTLY more than they already do, with specific reasons once again, to run that one.
Also, the argument that a solution will be difficult does not wash by itself. We are in a difficult situation in Iraq. All solutions are likely to be very, very difficult.
And feel free to offer out of the box solutions of your own.
That said, here are my proposals:
- Electronic collars (or ankle cuffs) for all Iraqi soldiers and civilians who are required by their profession to bear arms, collar which log the locations of their wearers. It’s no secret that a lot of the murders which plague Iraq are being done by soldiers and police. So I say log them all in via tracking equipment monitored by American troops. That way when 20 guys’ bodies with their heads blown off show up in Baghdad, all of them from Sumer Street, and the tracking equipment for half a dozen militia members show they were in Sumer Street for an hour when the murders were committed, you could haul them in and ask them questions.
Right now, the police and the militia are literally getting away with mass murder. Nobody is getting prosecuted for this shit. A few high-profile or better yet, many timely prosecutions might just slow things down a lot in that respect.
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Along the same lines, turn the judiciary over to some other Muslim country, preferably a distant one, where the divisions between Sunni and Shia are much less important, so they can concentrate on who did what to who on March 14, 2006, rather than what happened at the Shrine of the Imam Mustafa in 431 AD. It would be best to hold the trials on some remote island not notable for its Arab population, to avoid importing trouble. Maybe Iceland?
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Make all the Iraqis go naked in public. Well, not completely naked. Suspender thongs and bras for the women, just thongs for the guys. Everyone, even the very old and the very young. It’s not what you think. I suspect that one of the big reasons that terrorism works so well in the middle east is that everybody runs around in sheets. Or burkhas if you prefer. It’s pretty durned easy to conceal an AK-47 or a lot of C4 under those things. Sneak attacks would be a LOT harder if you didn’t have those handy-dandy concealing robes to hide your weapons/bombs/what-have-you. Of course, people would have to carry their wallets, etc. I’d suggest small transparent purses (for both men and women) like dept. stores in the US use to humiliate their retail employees.
Car and truck bombs would still be a problem under this plan, as would attacks from the windows of buildings. Maybe we could develop clear acrylic shell bodies for cars and trucks, as well as clear plastic interior parts. And attacks from buildings would be a lot more traceable if you could easily see that the people in the street were unarmed.
- Long term, make marrying more than one partner at a time illegal and make prostitution legal, or at least punishable by something minor, like a $10 fine, rather than public stoning or any of that other shit some Muslim societies practice. It’s my theory that much of the violence that bedevils the Mideast is a direct product of sexual frustration among the young men of the region, brought on by their bizarre sexual mores. In many societies (probably not so much in secular Iraq, but I don’t know for sure) young Arab men don’t marry until they reach their early 30s, meanwhile by Muslim custom a man can have up to 4 wives if he can support them, more than that in many cases (check out the Saudi princes and their wives and children).
Well, if you’ve got ZERO wives and prostitutes are rare because of all the stoning and shit so you have no sexual outlets except your hand, and your boss has two wives and his boss has four wives and the CEO has 40 wives, I imagine ENVY isn’t quite the word. Something like ENVYLUSTHATE would be more apropos. The more lustful and violent young men become easy fodder for terrorist action under those circumstances … working hard all your life is a chump’s game, the obvious thing is to become a big man and have a lot of wives, and if some innocent blood gets spilled along the way, well, YOU didn’t make the rules. (Though by damn you’ll enforce them once you’re a big man because it’s fun to make the chumps suffer when you have the upper hand.)
Getting your average young Arab guy laid regularly would make Al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group’s recruiting a LOT harder.
Those are my suggestions, O solons of the Dope. I especially remonstrate with those who are conservatives to come up with reasons, not just why my plans wouldn’t succeed, but why they wouldn’t be a more abysmal failure than the current more mundane approach taken by the Bush “leadership.”