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Arabian Nightmare: Red Meat for Rantburgers
cum granis salis - it is Ralph Peters after all, who seems to swing rather wildly at times on Iraq.
With Iraqi society decomposing - or, at best, reverting to a medieval state with cell phones - the debate in Washington over whether to try to save the day by deploying more troops or withdrawing some is of secondary relevance. What really matters is what our forces are ordered - and permitted - to do. With political correctness permeating our government and even the upper echelons of the military, we never tried the one technique that has a solid track record of defeating insurgents if applied consistently: the rigorous imposition of public order. That means killing the bad guys. Not winning their hearts and minds, placating them or bringing them into the government. Killing them. If you're not willing to lay down a rule that any Iraqi or foreign terrorist masquerading as a security official or military member will be shot, you can't win.
Now where have I heard that before?
I've mentioned the principle of "pay me now, pay me later" a time or two in these pages. Here it is writ large.
We have the number of casualties we do now because when we went in we said we were going to do "shock and awe" and instead went out of our way not to kill the entire Iraqi army. That may have been Tommy Franks' mistake, but I suspect it was Colin Powell's — or at least the Powell party within the administration.
Subsequent to disposing as gently as possible of the Iraqi army, we set about bringing democracy to Iraq, an experiment that has demonstrably not worked. We all had high hopes, but I've also mentioned on a few occasions that democracy is not the same thing as invidual liberty. Without the latter, the former is just another form of government, no more or less desirable than an oligarchy, a monarchy, or a dictatorship. All have approximately the same chance of producing a society that's worth living in. Democracy as an expression of individual liberty is a different story. Pakistan's democracy rules the country, while in the U.S. our republican democracy governs. There's a big difference there.
With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, it would have been better to install a McArthur and make sure the troops in the country were occupation troops and the legal system U.S. martial law. Rather than allowing the Iraqis to draft their own shariah-based constitution it would have been better to impose our own, or a close variant thereof, upon them. Had we done that, Moqtada al-Sadr would have been shot a couple years ago, before building a Mahdi army under our noses. The Association of Muslim Scholars would have been arrested and shot at approximately the same time. Sadr City would have been suppressed with tanks and infantry the first time it erupted, and Iranian and Arab infiltrators would have been shot, preferably on the spot.
We'd have taken enormous political hits in the UN and the press. Lotsa people wouldn't have liked us. But Iran wouldn't be tugging Uncle Sam's beard now, nor would North Korea. Syria would probably have joined Qaddafi in making a separate peace, and Yemen and Sudan wouldn't have gone back to the dark side. That kind of policy may even have kept the Paks a bit more honest. |
Posted by: OldSpook 2006-11-15 |
