Posted on 08/21/2006 8:13:51 PM PDT by neverdem
THREE years into the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, everyone from slicksleeved privates fighting for survival in Ramadi to the echelons above reality at the Pentagon still believes that eliminating insurgents will eliminate the insurgency. They are wrong.
There is a difference between killing insurgents and fighting an insurgency. In three years, the Sunni insurgency has grown from nothing into a force that threatens our national objective of establishing and maintaining a free, independent and united Iraq. During that time, we have fought insurgents with airstrikes, artillery, the courage and tactical excellence of our forces, and new technology worth billions of dollars. We are further from our goal than we were when we started.
Counterinsurgency is about gaining control of the population, not killing or detaining enemy fighters. A properly planned counterinsurgency campaign moves the population, by stages, from reluctant acceptance of the counterinsurgent force to, ideally, full support.
American soldiers deride “winning hearts and minds” as the equivalent of sitting around a campfire singing “Kumbaya.” But in fact it is a sophisticated, multifaceted, even ruthless struggle to wrest control of a population from cunning and often brutal foes. The counterinsurgent must be ready and able to kill insurgents — lots of them — but as a means, not an end.
Counterinsurgency is work better suited to a police force than a military one. Military forces — by tradition, organization, equipment and training — are best at killing people and breaking things. Police organizations, on the other hand, operate with minimum force. They know their job can’t be done from miles away by technology. They are accustomed to face-to-face contact with their adversaries, and they know how to draw street-level information and support from the populace. The police don’t threaten the governments they work under, because they don’t have the firepower...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Yes, NY Times, go have some face-to-face time with those terrorists planting that bomb over there. Oh, take your time, no rush, make sure you stay there awhile.
Daly gets tough...LOL.
lol
Oh that's right, they want the Islamokazis to win.
You know, whenever I think the left just can't get any dumber, they never cease to surprise me.
"Yes, NY Times, go have some face-to-face time with those terrorists planting that bomb over there."
Yea, the Slimes should head on over to Tehran. Ahkmenajob loves the media/sarc. Well, he and Khomeni don't like criticism in the media, so the NYT will naturally fit right in.
You've got to start somewhere.
A modern military perhaps, but the Iraqi police are corrupt and failing. We are addressing this now, but have not had the time to get results yet.
The sectarian nonsense is not helpful to a police department either.
The sectarian stuff has got to wind down and end soon.
This author is ignorant as dirt.
The Brits didn't defeat the IRA by killing every last one. They negotiated a deal.
Killing the enemy until he can't fight anymore has worked every time it's been tried.
What part of "sufficient number" did you confuse with "every last one"? The IRA didn't have an ethos of, "There is nothing but victory or death."
Not killing will sho' 'nuff lose it though.
But honestly that may not be the plan, the real plan is to kill terrorists in Iraq, and not in downtown Anywhere USA.
Just don't tell the Slimes, let them figure it out on their own.
The IRA wasn't made up of seventh century death cult members.
God are YOU ignorant Neville Chamberlinbuff. The IRA lost it paymasters when the Sovs collapsed. They simply surrendered. The only difference was the Brits allowed them a political fig leaf to cover what was their total surrender. There goal was "Liberating" Northern Ireland. Who does Northern Ireland belong to right Neville?
Then their is this HUGE difference. The IRA has POLITICAL goals, they did NOT want to see every single one of their enemies covert to Marxism or die. The IRA did NOT have a globalist world vision of forcing EVERYONE to accommodate their religion dogma. Only a total ignorant partisan hack would compare the IRA to the the Islamic Fascists. There is utterly NO intellectual veracity to the comparison at ALL.
Actually, it has a 50% success rate if you take into account the side that is killed into submission.
Yeah right...mash here for the latest and greatest of what the IRA does best ..08/12/06 ...http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1682628/posts
Get back to me about "negotiation" with terrorists.
I vote we take the 50% that wins.
Amen.
If this guy is writing for the NYT, he has gone over to the other side. I think he was a civilian advisor in Vietnam, I read some of his stuff before. Too bad.
He sounds like one of those Kerryites who thinks we can fight the terrorists by using police departments. Things changed when we entered the 21st Century, and there are people out there who think we can reason and talk to them. As if they would obey any laws they did not agree with.
Slightly over 50%, you have to allow for cases such as the Chatham Islands Moriori people who decided not to resist the Maori invaders.
For at least two years the media never even bothered to tell the American people that a Saddam minority group was creating all the fuss trying to turn the clock back. Now they can't wait to proclaim a civil war.
There isn't going to be a civil war. The Sunnis have been fleeing the country and attempting to negotiate a truce and amnesty for their war crimes now and before 2003. It's not working their way and they will continue to pay a heavy price until it's nothing more than a rabble of mafioso left.
In order to have a civil war you need armed sides near equal strength. That isn't the case in Iraq. The Sunnis are now less than 20% of the population and continue to decline.
Soon they will be a much smaller minority. Revenge is a tradition there and unfortunately it's been built up by decades of Saddam's Sunni fascists thuggery.
These people are not going to forget just because of an election.
So don't believe the media. They have their agenda and it has nothing to do with the truth.
As you recall, did they ever say Americans were defending the oppressed Iraqi majority? Nope.
All true enough.
No doubt...if my family member was fed into a chipper shredder by a Baathist, a democratic election is not going to stop me from wanting to exact revenge on anyone who sided with them.
Such is human nature, such is life.
The insurgency is a military operation, war by irregulars. Only a paramiliatry police force can handle things like this, and that is different only in degree from special forces operations. Let him look at the Iraqi police and ask: can they do the job?
No more killing. Does he understand how many of these guys have been killed.? Probabaly a hundred for every American killed in combat. he says that the insurgency is getting stronger. What ground do they hold, what areas do they govern?
In that type of case, the "sufficient number" is zero.
I'd like to know just what everyone thinks he's describing.
"The United States needs a professional police organization specifically for creating and keeping public order in cooperation with American or foreign troops during international peacekeeping operations. It must be able to help the military control indigenous populations in failing states like Haiti or during insurgencies like the one in Falluja.
"The force should include light armored cavalry and air cavalry paramilitary patrol units to deal with armed guerillas, as well as linguistically trained and culturally attuned experts for developing and running informants. It should be skilled and professional at screening and debriefing detainees, and at conducting public information and psychological operations. It must be completely transportable by air and accustomed to working effectively with American and local military forces."
"Didn't anyone watch the program on Germany after the end of the war. From 1945 to 1952 there were skirmishes with remnants of the Nazi Party. They attempted to keep their ideals alive against an overwhelming Democratic society that was sick and tired of Fascism and what it brought Germany and the rest of Europe.
Isn't this the same thing we face in Iraq?"
Up until recently, I would have agreed emphatically with what you are saying.
But now, I think it is more the case that the veneer of civilization is a bit thinner in Arab lands, and the insurgents and terrorists have more allies in this than hte Nazis had. We face a much bigger challenge, and the whole Islamic religion is built for prejudice and anti-western hatred. It's easy to stir the pot each Friday at 'prayers'.
The solution, ie counterinsurgency, is well known.
The execution in this case is not easy, but this is emphatically a winnable war.
"The difference here is that Iran continues to forment the deaths of their own Muslim people.
Look to al-Sadr for the unrest in Iraq. Get rid of him and things will settle down. He should have been done away with the first time he killed an Imam and set his Mahadi Army on the American forces.
Like they say I may be cabbage looking but I'm not green. Iran is paying al-Sadr to continue the unrest in Iraq, just like the paying hezbollah."
Yes. More extremists in Iraq need to be terrorized and the ordinary people and pro-western Iraqis (there are many) need to stop being terrorized.
"Killing Won’t Win This War" is the title the NY Times OpEd page editor gave to the article. The guy is a guest, "OpEd Contributor." I'd like to know what the author's title was. When Jonah Goldberg's columns go out in syndication, the same column gets all sorts of titles.
The first paragraph describes the German police, who are trained to become military police in time of war. The rest sounds like the old Marine Corps in the days when they did small country stuff down in the Caribbean. The mission sounds a bit like the British army under Kitchener. Politically the constitution of such a force would be impossible.
We are facing 1.5 billion Muslims who believe that the crusades never ended. Islamofascism is their new wave hope. First instilled into them by Hitler.
If you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.
I don't believe that the soldiers who are helping re-build the infrastructure of Iraq, or re-building schools, believe they are sitting around singing "Kumbaya". They know from the faces of the kids they see everyday that they are doing something important; transferring the idea that if given the chance, people will usually choose freedom over tyranny.
Yeah, the IRA seem like boy scouts compared to these guys.
Ironically, tho, it was 9/11 that was the final nail in the coffin for the IRA. Without money from supporters in the US there was no way they could ever contemplate going back to war.
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