Wed 10 Jan 2007
What makes anyone think that more troops would make much of an improvement in Iraq? In my opinion, no amount of soldiers can stop suicide bombers looking to massacre pretty much anyone outside their religion.You guard the pipelines, they bomb the police station. You guard the police station they bomb the hospital. You guard the hospital they bomb the market. You guard the market they bomb the mosques. You guard the mosques they bomb the bus stations. You guard the bus stations they bomb cafés.
It seems to me that unless you’re talking about instituting a police state, no amount of troops will be effective against the sort of violence inherent to this new worldwide trend of Islamic murder and thuggery.
January 10th, 2007 at 4:48pm
more troops three years ago would have helped.
more troops today? i’m not so sure. but if you’ve ruled out withdrawal as an option (which the administration has), what other choices are there?
January 10th, 2007 at 4:58pm
aphrael: I’m certainly not saying that I know of a good choice for today. If one exists I am unaware of it.
January 11th, 2007 at 10:58am
I read an interesting article the other day describing how the current administration screwed up. Their theory is that the current occupying force needs to actually *secure* a given area and properly rebuild it with Democratic Freedom Power - so yes, taking a limited subset of the country (for example Baghdad) and turning ito a police state until everything is fixed, rebuilt, and the urban population there is pleased with the result. The downside is that this would require about $LargeNumber troops to secure Baghdad alone… so if they took the new forces, and pulled everyone else out of the other areas of Iraq, maybe they could do it. But they won’t, and they’ll keep bumbling around for another few years.
It was linked from someone’s HuSi diary, let’s see if I can find it… Oh yes, here we go. You’ve probably already read it, but: http://www.brookings.edu/views/articles/pollack/20061214.htm