Willravel

The OP wasn't thin air, and the left over Nazi soldiers could be considered coimparable to to insurgency, as there were attakcs after the surrender in Germany (thought they were MUCH less frequent due to the high number of Allied soldiers). Your comment about the roads and power being bad under Saddam's regime is an interesting point but it's somewhat misleadning. You suggest that the previous regime was responsible for the poor conditions in Iraq, when evidence is clear that the UN sanctions are responsible. The regime probably would have been okay if the UN simply maintained an arms sanction instead of economic sanctions. That has to be clear by now.
And it would be easy to dismiss me at that if it weren't for the fact that I am deeply emersed in military culture. My grandfather, unclue, cousins and other family members are all military officers, and love to talk about the many facets of the military, including experience on the ground (exclusing, of course, things that they're not allowed to tell me). Because I developed an interest in such things at a young age, whe I reached college level, I took every game theory class that was offered, while I was getting through my GE classes before reaching my AA. I excelled at game theory, including but not limited to the application of game theory to military operations that spanned the past 1000 years.

I'll try to break this down so as not to take up too much time. The most simple idea to war are to succede in defending points and taking points at the least cost. The succesful war is an efficient war (morality aside for the purpouses of this exercise). The idea is to use the least manpower, resources, time, and political sacrafics as possible. By all counts, the Second Gulf War is a failure of epic proportions. What should have been done was to determine the tactical options for all 'sides' in this, which should have included a possible insurgency after we were welcomed (and also should have considered action taken by other forces in the region). While it seems obvious that the administration came to the conclusion that there would be little to no resistence, that simply can't be true. There was a great deal of risk of an insurgency because 1) we've been building animosity for decades among the people, many of whom did actively hate us and 2) there were rebelions against Saddam, but those areas still showed a great deal of anti-US sentiment, such as Fallujah (they were the home of the resistence against Saddam before the invasion in 2003, but there are archived pictures from Fallujah dating back as far as 1991 and as recent as 2001 with burning US flags and protests in the streets). I suspect that, again, the intelligence community believed that a rebelion was not only possible but probable and warned Bushco. accordingly. They were simply ignored...to our substantial detriment.

Fast forward to today, we actually have an out that gives us back some of the political standing we lost with the international community, it allows the extreemist resistence to have less to hate (in game theory, we're taught that removing one miltary force from a multi-player game can serve to break the focus of one's adversary and weaken their resolve, so long as they don't view it as a victory). What should happen is consolidation of troops. We need to have our ground troops in easily defendable positions where fatalities are much less likely. No more of this 4 basic troops out in the open bullshit where they have the advantage. Large convoys with more of whatever they're moving, but a lot more troops, for example. This will reduce coalition fatalities (except for the accedental deaths thing which is symptomatic of extremely low morale).

The generals are not asking for 30,000 more troops (at least most of them). They are asking for a real change in direction, and they want a direction that either leads to a real victory or to a real withdrawl. Either way, 30,000 troops isn't going to appease them.


Ah, but the experts ae being ignored again and again and again. The experts were the ones that said there is no evidence of WMDs. The experts were the ones that warned that we would be in Iraq for years, not just months. It's the idiots that are in charge that continue to ignore the experts and do what they want in what they feel is a consequence free environment. The problem is that they are insulated from the consequences.