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Iraq "too successful"

Dorian Gray said:
Hey, why not nuke Mecca and Medina just like Michael Savage says? Then we could move troops into Saudi Arabia. Strategically, we would then control the entire Islam religion, and therefore we would control the Islamofascists too.
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No good. They would all vote for Kuchinic and we'd all be back where we started.
 
Seismosaurus said:
Does anybody seriously think that any enemy with two brain cells left to rub together is still going to be Falluja? I mean, they've had weeks of warning about what's coming.

So I'm a terrorist. What am I going to do? Wait here for the US army to come bomb the hell out of me? Of course not! I'll bury my RPG and my AK-47 and simply leave. If I'm stopped then I'm just another civilian getting out of harm's way. I go spend six months blowing up cars in Baghdad instead, then when all the fuss dies down it's back to Falluja to dig up the weapons and start again.
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Guerilla warfare 101 would indicate that you get out of there and go stir up trouble somewhere else. Then again, there may be some cleric urging them to martyr themselves for the cause.
 
Guerilla warfare 101 would indicate that you get out of there and go stir up trouble somewhere else. Then again, there may be some cleric urging them to martyr themselves for the cause.
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You're using the old manual.

The current revision of the manual says leave some heavily armed 'martyrs' behind, camped out in schools, mosques, hospitals, etc. so U.S. forces will bomb, shell and shoot them all up. Fire a rocket, or a few mortar rounds from a window, then drop the weapon and run like heck and to another building with another rocket launcher or mortar as many times as you can before an AC-130 catches up to you, times a couple thousand 'martyrs' will be an awful mess. All you see in the street is fleeing civilians, and if you catch on, how do you PROVE the unarmed people that U.S. troops are gunning down were 'bad guys', and not hospital staff? Heck, how do the guys on the ground even know? They can't.

A ruined Iraq in total chaos is a desirable and profitable thing for pretty much everyone in the region, except for Iraq and America.

Any neighbor with a border could slant drill for oil, or even use Iraq's instability as a reason to annex terrirory for a 'security buffer'. Heck, Turkey's been sending troops into Iraq to kill Kurds for many years. Kuwait's been tapping into Iraq's reserves since before the first gulf war. You think Iran, Syria or Jordan wouldn't want some nice bonus oil income?
 
evildave said:
And if they stash their weapons and 'blend'? What shall we do? Round up the whole city and torture people at random some more?

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=234070

I will disagree with Seismosaurus on one point.

There are probably 3,000 (or more) people who are going to go down fighting, forcing the U.S. to pretty much raze the city in order to 'martyr' them, and getting plenty of noncombatants into the line of fire.

There are certainly many others just laying low, waiting to repeat the cycle in the next city. Once another 300,000 Iraqis are impoverished and homeless refugees, and many freshly aggrieved for losing homes and family members, even a 1% yield of new insurgents from that population alone will replace their losses.

They'll get plenty of excellent propaganda out of it because there's just no way mosques, hospitals, schools and public utilities will be out of the line of fire. That will contribute to recruitment elsewhere.
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Yes, I think you are absolutely right. Certainly some will stay and fight - the government will probably get a decent bodycount and then claim it a victory on that basis (just like vietnam).

But this nattle is being fought entirely by choice of the enemy, and entirely on their terms.

What is it they say about armies who lose the initiative?
 
I remember my intelligence being insulted by this bit of chop-logic during the debates.

Here's the quote:
BUSH: ...But because Tommy Franks did such a great job in planning the operation, we moved rapidly, and a lot of the Baathists and Saddam loyalists laid down their arms and disappeared. I thought they would stay and fight, but they didn't.

And now we're fighting them now...
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Two points being made here:

1) Our victory was so overwhelming that we neglected to actually destroy the enemy.
2) Our enemy are miserable cowards for choosing to fight under conditions more advantageous to themselves.
 
phildonnia said:
Two points being made here:

1) Our victory was so overwhelming that we neglected to actually destroy the enemy.
2) Our enemy are miserable cowards for choosing to fight under conditions more advantageous to themselves.
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It's especially hilarious when you consider that the American Revolution owed a measure of its success to guerilla warfare tactics. Who says we learn from history?
 
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