Let's Get Outside The Box In Iraq

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:

  1. 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.

  1. 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?

  2. 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.

  1. 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.”

I have to ask this…are you serious about this stuff or is this a joke thread?

-XT

I am serious, but these are “outside the box” solutions, designed to make people think about what we think might happen in Iraq and what we are doing there, by forcing us to confront the issues of what it might take to “win” in Iraq.

Ok…you are serious then.

Aside from how horrifying this idea is, its not practical either. The logistics of putting such collars on every soldier and civilian alone are impossible…not to mention how cost prohibative such a plan would be. I don’t even think such collars and the network to run them exists…so it would have to be custom built from scratch. And of course it wouldn’t work in any case.

Assuming this problem is at the epidemic proportions you are claiming, I don’t know how to fix this either…but collars certainly would not be the solution.

I assume when you say ‘judiciary’ you mean the entire law enforcement infrastructure…police, lawyers, judges, etc. I’m unsure how farming this out to another muslim country (Iceland?) would help things…or even how farming it out to another non-muslim nation either. How would bringing in cops, lawyers, judges, baliffs, etc from, say, Iceland, help the root problems? Aside from the problem of this being something you would be doing by fiat…in opposition to the elected Iraqi government who almost certainly would not agree. Said governement is close enough to the edge without further undercutting them. Such an undercutting could put the nation into complete free fall…and think of those poor Icelandic lawyers, police persons, judges, etc in such a frightening situation!

:rolleyes: Don’t get me wrong…I’m the first person to stand up for public nudity, or even women dressed solely in thongs and bra’s! But come on…this is a MUSLIM nation. They don’t even want to let the women out loose, even wearing veils and shapeless robes! You have to keep it real. Thinking outside the box is all well and good, but you might as well posit space alien mercenaries used to fight the insurgents…that would actually be more plausable. :stuck_out_tongue:

Again, I’m all for sex…lots of it, all the time, and prostitution legal! No problem here…but again, this is a muslim country. I’m also unsure how getting the Iraqi’s laid continually is going to help the over all situation or get to the root cause of things happening in Iraq.

I have my doubts about this. :slight_smile:
Anyway, as I said above, thinking outside the box is good…but you have to keep it within the realm of possibility. None of your suggestions (IMHO) is either practical or realistic…nor do I think that, even if you COULD do them, they would substantially help the situation there.

I don’t have a clear idea myself what COULD be done. Perhaps more troops…a heavy international presence (if they would even be willing :dubious: ). I don’t know. But…I don’t think your suggestions would do it. Though some of them would be fun if you could push em through (like the thong/bra thing!)…

-XT

It is a ridiculous proposition to have Iraqi women going almost naked in public. Do you not have any consideration for religious sensitivities?

I think rubber latex body suits would be more appropriate for women. They couldn’t conceal anything larger than a cashew under these. Of course the suit should also have a head covering with eye and mouth holes to protect them from the gaze of men. Perhaps also having a zipper over the mouth to assit during ramadan. There would be no problem with identity once the ID collars are worn. Since the latex is so hot there would be the added advantage of encouraging the wearer to remain indoors (more ‘inside the box’ than outside).

I stopped reading after “out-of-the-box” idea #1. :rolleyes:

I wish I had stopped after one. Nothing like teaching a fledgling democracy by instituting tracking devices, trials by non-peers, forced near-nudity, and vast changes to social mores.

How about partition? I mean, won’t full-blown civil war lead to that anyway? Maybe, just maybe, it can be accomplished with far less bloodshed.

Kurds, you go there, Sunni, go over there, Shia, get yourselves over there, and y’all stay there. Those who must move will be amply compensated. Those who refuse are on their own, simply because we’ve run out of other ways to protect you. Oh, and for the next fifty years, you’ve all got to share the oil wealth. Now you can stop killing each other. Sound good?

The best thing we can do to make Iraqi’s like democracy is to rebuff our current policies soundly in the 2006 and 2008 elections. They will see someone who has the power to wreck their country tossed out of office because our rules say his term is up. They will also see us peaceably change the direction of our nation with our votes.

I really don’t think there is anything the current administration can do to affect a positive outcome in Iraq.

It will be up to the next administration to prove we are capable of waging peace instead of war.

Problem is, the Turks would immediately invade the Kurdish partition. If we were willing to stop them, the partition & shared oil idea might work.

Yeah, the Turkish Kurds will be a major source of trouble, but if the place descends into civil war, won’t they be anyway? Won’t a Kurdistan emerge in any event? Somehow, some way, it has to be dealt with if full-blown civil war is truly on the horizon.

It’s not just the covering of flesh, but the hiding of body shape. I imagine skintight clothing would be a no-no no matter how much flesh it covered.

Instead, why don’t we just blindfold all the men? It’d have to be something like a motorcycle helmet fixed so it couldn’t be taken off, while the visor can be lifted when indoors. Not being able to see would discourage a lot of violence. Plus, the protection afforded would mean it’s much easier to identify bodies.

So, turn all of Iraq into a maximum security prison with a BDSM dress code? There’s out-o-the box, and then there’s batshit, gentlemen.

…Not a fully formed idea, here, but it does seem like we’re using the military to do police work, I wonder. Is there any way we could somehow withdraw our military (a little?) and install cops instead?

Our military is trying to hold things together while the Iraqi police and army get their acts together. I presume we also have law-enforcement experts working with their law-enforcement experts?

Another problem could be too many Iraqi young bucks with not enough to do. Is there any way to give them something to do, keep more of them out of trouble? Sports? Building major dams using wheelbarrows?

Well, that’s definitely outside the box. At least we’re trying to come up with something new. I can at least be happy with that.

Outside of that, this box exists because being outside of it means that the actions would be met with nasty, nasty resistance. I say this for the same reasons that the others have, as well.

Thinking outside the box myself, I think the only real solution is to nuke the sight from orbit…its the only way to be sure.

Even if the Turks don’t react adversely to a Kurdish homeland, you are falling into the same problem that Bush did. You are attempting to impose a solution on these people. At least, afaik no one IN Iraq actually wants the nation partitioned…with the possible acception of the Kurds of course, but they have other motives to be honest. Even if things were 100% peaceful they would STILL want a separate nation (and all those nice northern oil field of course).

Still, I have to admit that, out side of the box and implausable as partition is, its closer to reality than the OP. :stuck_out_tongue:

-XT

It would have been a good idea, but we didn’t do it. From the beginning we refused to hire many Iraqis, preferring to import foreigners. For that matter, we refused to do business with them, and preferred to import anything we needed. That’s a major reason why they have a screwed up economy and no hope for the future.

It’s probably too late to start now. By now, any we hire are likely to either sabotage anything we pay them to do, or they’'l likely be to afraid to work for us. Quite a few of the few Iraqis who do work for us don’t dare so much as tell their families that they do so, for fear of being killed by them for it.

Er…no idea what a possible ‘acception’ is. But with a possible EXCEPTION of the Kurds, it becomes a bit clearer.

:smack:

-XT

Yeah, maybe, but oddly while the Kurds are the only ones who fervently want to go their own way, the Shia and Sunni are at each other’s throats. If they don’t want a divided country, what are the trying to accomplish? If civil war erupts, what is the landscape supposed to look like when it’s all over?

Well, IMHO the Shia are trying to accomplish dominating the entire nation to their own ends, and the Sunni are trying to accomplish not getting wiped out in light of their less than steller past and how they ran the country when they had the whip hand. I don’t believe either group wants partition…they both want the whole pie. The Kurds of course didn’t want to be part of it from the beginning, but due to the separate facts that northern Iraq (where the Kurds are predominent) has lots of oil fields and that Turkey would not be thrilled by a Kurdish home land (that would also be economically viable), it was never in the cards.

The current fighting is all about the same cycle of violence that we saw decades ago in Ireland…revenge and reprisals in an endless cycle. We just happen to be in the middle of it right now…and we allowed a power vaccume to exist long enough initially to plant the seeds of what we are seeing today. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind and all that.

-XT