If wishes were ponies

Hundreds, and probably over a thousand innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed by U.S. troops running checkpoints. And what is the attitude of the U.S. high command here?

"If these fucking Hajjis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen."

That wasn't a random cracker off the street. That was a full bird colonel, Col. William Rochelle, commander of an entire infantry brigade of 5,000 men.

So what why do we have these checkpoints, anyhow? It's not because they're somehow critical to defeating the Iraqi insurgency. We can't defeat an insurgency in a foreign and alien land using young soldiers who don't know the language and don't know the culture who are led by leaders who believe the answer to bad driving in the Middle East is to make them all into clones of Kansas City drivers. The answer that apologists for our occupation of Iraq make is this:

"If we didn't have checkpoints, thousands more Iraqis would die from suicide bombers."

And if wishes were ponies, we'd have a pony in every young girl's house!

Given that the checkpoints are a) demonstrably not stopping car bombers (and you better believe that if a checkpoint *ever* caught a carbomber, General Petroleum would call a press conference and announced that it was made with Iranian bombs and President Darth Cheney would immediately order airstrikes against Iran), and b) demonstrably have killed hundreds innocent Iraqis, I prefer to go with what can be seen and observed, rather than hypotheticals like "if wishes were ponies we'd have ponies in all young girls' bedrooms" or "if checkpoints didn't exist we'd have thousands more dead from car bombs." Sorry. It's that whole "reality" habit that I just can't kick no matter how much delusional thinking I'm exposed to -- I mean, who should I believe, your hypotheticals or my own two eyeballs?!

As for the notion that COIN ("counter-insurgency") makes any sense for the U.S. Army in the first place, the fact remains that we are an occupier in a foreign and alien land that we don't understand, and thus any sort of anti-insurgency operations conducted by our own military are, by definition, futile. Insurgencies are defeated via counterintelligence, not via military force. Even Joseph Stalin understood that one -- after the Red Army failed utterly to put down the Ukrainian insurgency after WWII, Stalin pulled them out and sent in the NKVD secret police and special forces, who then infiltrated the insurgency until if three insurgents met, two were probably NKVD moles. That strategy terminated the insurgency within four years. And note that the Red Army had the advantage that Ukrainians all knew and understood Russian due to hundreds of years of Russian rule, and due to the hundreds of years of Russian rule had basically the same culture as the Ukrainians -- neither of which applies to our Iraq adventure, where most Iraqis do not understand English and the average American has no more knowledge of Iraqi culture than he has of Martian culture.

Now, that said, there *is* a way to win against an insurgency using conventional military forces. It is the way that the British used against the Boer in the Boer War, or that the U.S. used against the Filipinos in the Filipino-American War. It is best described by Joseph Stalin, once again: "No people, no problem." I.e., genocide. Kill all military age young men, gather up all the women and children into concentration camps, and voila. Of course, then the women and children are dependent upon the logistical tail of your army for their food, water, housing, and clothing, which is most definitely not up to the task of providing these necessities for 20,000,000 people, so after a few months you end up with 15,000,000 corpses, but hey, what's a few million dead wogs, wot? We killed about a million Filipinos out of a population of five million on Luzon Island, mostly via starvation and disease in the concentration camps, but hey, we won, and that's all that matters, what's a little genocide amongst friends anyhow, right? Right?

So yeah, we could win in Iraq via military force -- if we wanted to surpass Nazi Germany as the biggest committer of genocide in world history. Is that what you want? If so... well, there's not much I need to say about that, hmm?

-- Badtux the War Penguin