Eight U.S. soldiers killed by roadside bomb, suicide bomber. At least 39 killed in attacks around Iraq. The only surging appears to be in violence.
As I've pointed out before, the only way to pacify a conquered country is the way we pacified Japan and Germany in 1945, and the way we pacified the Philippines in the 1899-1912 timeframe: genocide. Kill all the military-age men (or at least a significant percentage of them), destroy all their homes, raze their infrastructure, put the remainder of people into concentration camps, control the borders with massive military forces (or have the luck to conquer an island nation like Japan or the Philippines where ships can do the job), destroy the crops, make the population entirely dependent upon rations distributed by your occupation forces that barely supply enough calories to sustain life and which certainly won't provide sufficient calories for young men to conduct military operations. *Or*, have the luck to invade a country that is ethnically and linguistically identical to yours, and then use massive police presence to infiltrate all resistance organizations and either subvert them or arrest them.
That's it. Genocide, or secret police. That's the only two ways to pacify a conquered country. We don't have the ability to set up a police state in Iraq -- we don't have enough Arabic speakers to infiltrate the resistance -- leaving genocide. And if you don't have the stomach to do that, you might as well get out, because all you're going to do is bleed, bleed, bleed. I suppose that the American public could be brought around to the notion of exterminating 25% of Iraqis, but thus far (thankfully) the Bush Administration has been reluctant to test that theory. Which is a good thing, because as morally repugnant as invading a foreign nation that has never attacked yours, deposing its government, and killing hundreds of thousands of its citizens is, genocide is far, far worse. But sans genocide, there's just no way to "win" in Iraq for any reasonable definition of "win" (defined as, "a free, calm, and democratic Iraq that supports the U.S. and Israel"). So all this manly surging is doomed to failure, in the end, because it simply ignores basic facts about how to pacify a conquered country. You might as well try to calculate the area of a circle ignoring the basic fact of the constant pi, or try to fly by flapping your arms. Either has about the same chance of success -- i.e., none. You simply cannot violate the laws of nature, which, unlike the laws of men, come with their own enforcement mechanism (as in, step off the top of a building and flap your arms to fly, and you *die*).
-- Badtux the Military Penguin
The only way to destroy a country is to destroy their belief system.
ReplyDeleteThat is why we won in Japan and Germany and one of the reasons they are very secular.
We destroyed the Eastern block by breaking their belief system.
We seem to maintaining Iraq and Afganistans belief system