The plot thickens:
( A ) Not effective at all, and ( B ) because it’s stupid. If the guns make no difference it’s a waste of money and resources; if they do make a difference it’s self destructive to give weapons to people who have every reason to use them on you
And it’s counterproductive to hand out weapons to a faction in a country that’s already disintegrating into mutually murderous factions. How is the government we supposedly support going to ever impose order if we arm this or that faction’s private army ?
Well, there you have it!, what needs to be done to beat the insurgency is to get more sand in Iraq.
Paging Halliburton, paging Halliburton.
Plus of course - there is the rather obvious down-side to handing out body armour to people the coalition soldiers might want to shoot at.
Well, that depends on what exactly you are trying to achieve. From a propaganda perspective, or perhaps from a good will perspective, it might be marginally effective to arm some of these folks.
No, I don’t think so. Oh, it probably IS a waste of ‘money and resources’…but its a drop in the bucket compared to all the OTHER money and resources we’ve wasted in Iraq. As for turning them on us…well, thats just silly. As I said, they can turn the SOVIET stuff on us already (in fact, you have perhaps noticed that they have done this already :)).
As I said earlier though, it might bring about some good will toward the US with some of these groups…and might get them hunting AQ FOR us too. Both of those outcomes are worth the marginal risk of giving these folks weapons and body armor (in a country awash in weapons…and I’m sure if the insurgents REALLY wanted body armor they could get that as well from the Iraqi security forces ‘misplacing’ some sets).
It does our troops more good than it does their’s tagos. Its mostly effective against shrapnel (like from an IED, say) or indirect small arms. AFAIK it won’t stop a rifle (or larger cal weapon) fired directly unless you are lucky enough to have it hit in a certain spot. Would that this body armor really WAS that effective…
-XT
Although I expect they aren’t giving away the good stuff.
So, now we’ve taken sides. i guess we had better brace ourselves-the Shia are now the ones who will be blowing up bridges, suicide bombings, etc.
Nobody can predict what will happen now-but I’m sure the results WON’T be pleasant! 
Is there really such a thing as “al Queda” anymore? We tend to forget the original set of bloodthirsty morons was primarily composed of religious fanatics, of a very particular stripe, that is, inspired by the insanely fundamentalist Wahhabi sect. They are strictly a Sunni subset and are virulently anti-Shia (kinda like Klansmen hating Catholics, though nominally Christian).
Point being, if the AlQ in Iraq is cut from the original cloth, there might well be a plausible motive for Sunnis to oppose them, as the Sunni tend to be more secular than the Shia, and, save for the Wahhabists and the Taliban, much less prone to fundamentalist extremism. One can hope that they might wish to stamp out provocative attacks from within their ranks, either in hope of sustaining peace, or for more practical reaons of gathering strength. One can hope that.
Trouble is, if you want the AlQ wiped out, you don’t need a weapon or a soldier, such as these are already thick upon the ground. You want a nest of 10 AlQ members whacked? Drop a drachma on them to the closest Shia militia. Or to the nearest US Army representative, if you want to curry favor with the Americans. It can be done in complete anonymity, without so much as exposing a pinky finger to gun grease.
Even if these guys are sincere in their enmity to alQ, they don’t need them to fight alQ. Therefore, they most likely want them for some other purpose. The number of benign purposes is small.
We took sides at the outset, we backed the Shia. Now we are backing the Sunni in response. It’s standard divide and conquer tactics that we used to great effect throughout the cold war keeping people weak and unstable so that should they ever switch to communism, it would be easy to take them out if we had to. The point here is to keep the Muslims weak.
I do this in Civilization all the time. My friends and I call it “Playing America” you sell resources to anyone and everyone, keep them dependent upon your resources while you are bleeding their economy dry, thus heavy capitalization comes in, so you can run at a constant domestic deficit. It’s even more beautiful if they have a trade agreement selling their own resource of a specific type to another civ, so that if you ever need to go to war with them, you yank your supply of Iron/Oil etc… so they can no longer build the needed equipment, and they can’t yank their trade from the other country without pissing them off, so they are broke, don’t have a necessary commodity and once you’ve trashed their modern military they start loading up on partisans in the hills who harry your armor divisions as you sweep in and pick apart their cities. It also helps if you make an alliance with their neighbor and rite of passage agreements with the intervening nations between you and your target. You use your bombers to break the roads to their resources one square around each of the resources.
The result.
- They are broke
- They don’t have necessary resources
- When their army runs out of steam they can’t build new units of sufficient type.
- They are being attacked on two possibly even three or four fronts losing cities at a fantastic rate.
- You can ‘liberate’ your allies cities that have fallen to the enemy and never give them back. Or give them back and make your allies love you until you name them the new ‘Axis of Evil’.
- You trash their culture
- You are awash in their money and can use it to buy their core cities back up to the standards of your civ.
- Your allies are hopefully more depleted than you.
- They have no retaliatory capacity against your core.
Iran can go broke very easily, and their access to weapons is inferior to ours. I don’t particularly think ethnic cleansing is a major risk on either side. It’s possible, but I think improbable. Ethnic cleansing would cause repercussions in other nations. Iran is surrounded by Sunni nations.
It’s about the ammunition, not the launcher. Increasing their access to RPGs is significant. Yes, Saddam hid caches of weapons all around the country and the Baathists are the ones who knew where they were, so these insurgents are well armed, but there is always such a thing as ‘better armed’. The US could be armed ‘better’. I recognize that the Shia outnumber the Sunnis by 3-2, but I also recognize that the Sunnis are better trained and were keeping the Shia down for a number of decades.
BTW, I never said that all Sunni were Al Qaeda, only that arming Sunnis to take out Sunnis seems like some pretty stupid logic. Al Qaeda is based firmly in Wahabism and the Islamic Brotherhood that while not operationally cohesive are fairly philosophically cohesive in their desire to make Islam particularly Sunni Islam dominant in the Middle-East.
Voyager It’s possible, if you think about it this war actually spans from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan. There is not a country in that is not directly involved. They are either hosting US bases, or training troops for the other side, or both, with active fighting going on in most of them. The Kurds are of course harrying Turkey, and Muslim immigrants are rattling cages in Europe. With the ethnic Cleansing, think of the Palestinian problem on a much wider scale. When you push Sunnis out of Iraq, where will they go? I don’t think the war will so much spread as become more intense. From Chechnya to Darfur, and Karachi to Riyadh the war fluctuates in levels of intensity, but is always at least warm. Ethiopia just went in and cleared out the Islamic courts that had stabilized Somalia using North Korean weapons and US funding.
elucidator Al Qaeda is more of a propaganda tool than anything, used by all sides to inspire either courage or fear depending on the context. There are actual networks that are being used that work basically on the same kinds of principles as criminal black markets. Al Qaeda is real, despite it’s nebulous nature.
It’s been happening for a while now
Sort of explains the massive refugee problem
Was surrounded by Sunni nations…
I don’t think the insurgents are going to run out of RPG rounds (or rounds for their AK’s either) anytime soon to be honest. Even if they were in danger of this unlikely event happening (Saddam didn’t just squirrel away weapons but massive amounts of small arms ammo…and even bigger stuff), the Soviets didn’t just give out weapons and no ammo when they gave these things away. The entire region is basically awash in the stuff. Almost all of the nations in the region (including Iran and Syria) have access to vast quantities of Soviet arms and ammo…while the supply of top shelf US gear is pretty limited (Saudi and Kuwait maybe?).
I serious don’t see the problem with this proposal to be honest. Sounds like a win /win for the US.
-XT
Without being a win/win (there are no win/wins in Iraq), it’s at least a strategy that makes a certain amount of sense in the short term. But it’s unlikely to make any real difference in the long term. And there’s the danger: we begin to think, “Ah, we’ve finally the turned the corner!” when all we’ve done is win a temporary and highly local victory.
Well my point was more about a successful ethnic cleansing of Shia over Sunni, not an attempted ethnic cleansing by both sides in the pockets where they can. That’s just about dominating territory in a civil war. When I think of ethnic cleansing I think of a route by one side over the other. Though, I do concede your point. Do you understand what I am getting at though?
With this one also, except in the cases of extreme minorities like Christian populations they aren’t really ‘cleansing’ so much as getting people from all sides to flee the violence.
I see no evidence of a Shia rout basically.
Fair enough, Iraq and Afghanistan are no longer nations, but Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Azerbaijan, Pakistan and Turkmenistan still are. I am not sure what Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan are predominantly though.
xtisme I don’t know that sounds a little too pat to me. While I agree that they will never run out of bullets, some people will and others won’t. Rockets and RPGs are another story. That’s why IEDs are so popular in that part of the world. Being better armed does make a difference. The entire history of the 20th century US foreign policy has been about arming both sides and then having a crisis develop out of the winner, so I remain dubious. All this does is help facilitate the ethnic cleansing that the good Captain illustrated above.
I think every victory in this case is a matter of moving the goalposts to suit where the ball was kicked, rather than trying to kick the ball through the established goal posts.
I remain convinced that naming Iran the “Axis of Evil” after they cooperated with us after 9/11 was probably the biggest foreign policy blunder in all of history. If not the biggest, it definitely ranks in the hall of fame. I’d take Khatami over Ahmadinejad any day of the week.
Not really, no - or maybe partly. It’s true that most of the sectarian shit is going down in previously mixed areas, and that people are fleeing to culturally homogeneous areas that can be defended by local militias - nasty but local scale.
But there’s more than just that going on, the extremists on both sides are hitting Mosques and religious ceremonies - those are not local opportunist acts, they’re designed to provoke all-out national conflict.
Can either side really totally prevail over the other? I doubt it; all sides seem pretty well dug-in in their heartlands.
However the connections between Iraqi and Iranian Shia are so strong that IMHO Iran would intervene in cases a long way from total rout (a large scale massacre of Shia or the over-running and destruction of a sacred site, say)
It may not be in Iran’s interest to get directly involved in Iraq (rather than by proxy as at the moment) - but from the viewpoint of the extremist factions in Iran they’re on a roll, removing the arch enemy next door and humiliating the Great (and Little) Satan - I doubt wise council could prevail against the zealots and nutters if Iranian TV screens were filled with pictures of Shia being slaughtered just over the border
Sure, there will be a lot of bloodshed, but to me ‘cleansing’ implies a sense of accomplishment, like in Darfur or Rwanda. Right now it’s tit for tat reprisals and violence, no one is doing an effective job of dominating territory so that it is ‘cleansed’ of the other ethnicity. It’s kind of like trying to ‘cleanse’ the New York Subway with your sponge and some antibacterial solution.
I think in the end a three part partition is the way it will go naturally, kind of like Pakistan and India. Which is ethnic cleansing of a sort.
I think you’re overestimating Iran’s capacity to wage war. Iran would cease to exist the moment the step across their borders. Something major would have to change in American and Israeli foreign policy for them to have a chance at an open action. Their greatest strength lies in the fact that they are not an aggressor nation. The moment they become an aggressor nation, it will become quite clear just what their demographic problems and lack of natural resources mean for the country. This is one of the main reasons they want nuclear capacity, because the only thing’s they have is a bit of oil, which costs them more per barrel to extract than competitor nations, and a good location for building pipelines between the major powers that surround them.
If America were to launch strikes against Iran, their military capacity would be completely annihilated within a week, and I doubt that we’d ever put troops on the ground. I think they know this.
The fact of the matter is that Iran is weak.
We’re not talking about Iran declaring war on America, then cruising over the border flying flags and tooting trumpets
The idea up-thread was that the US could stand off and do it’s fighting indirectly by arming/supporting Sunni factions :-
We’re talking about Iran taking action to protect their brethren (as they see it) against Sunni militia or death-squads - not US troops.
OK, the US inevitably gets involved – OK, Iran doesn’t stand much chance in a conventional war with the US and may sneak back quickly (with just a few tens of thousand zealous volunteers staying behind) - or things escalate as they tend to.
Either way the original plan of getting someone else to pick up the load is screwed since the US has had to do all the lifting
(Not that I think the “rolling over” thing is actually the plan anyway - tho’ I’m buggered if I can see what the long term aim actually is, maybe there isn’t one and this is just a one-off chance to kill a few AQ in one area)
Perhaps an attempt at “redefining” the mission? Declare ourselves exclusively concerned with AlQ, neutral as regards the Sunni-Shia struggle?