EXCLUSIVE: Iran tells Iraq factions ‘no attacks on US targets until Trump is gone’

[I don’t disagree, but I would like to think we are “better” than we used to be by trying to use precision munitions to minimize civilian casualties. In hindsight, most of the damage we did in Iraq was needless. They were surrendering immediately because the carnage done by air power in the first war in the gulf was fresh in their minds.]

Without large-scale slaughter driving the survivors into serious mental trauma or the continuing threat of large-scale death for a barely-scathed population, there is no submission. Without submission, you have the kind of guerrilla war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans.

Note that there are genuine surrenders, and then there are surrenders driven by a wish to continue fighting under rules favorable to the rebels. In antiquity, the remedy for guerrilla war was the extermination of the rebels along with their kin and friends. Lacking that remedy, GI’s bled for a decade. The Greeks applied it generously, and ruled Persia for as long as these United States have been around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seleucid_Empire

Our pulverization of Japan and Germany from the air may have performed the same function that Alexander and the Diadochi’s rigorous measures achieved in Persia.

[I am serious. To add insult to injury, the diplomats then came into Iraq and “we, the people” paid TRILLIONS of dollars (total) to “government contractors” like James Biden to rebuild the $10,000 stuff we destroyed. You cannot make this stuff up!]

Total spending in Iraq was perhaps $1T.

https://www.cbo.gov/system/files?file=2018-10/54219-oco_spending.pdf

Bad enough, but nothing like the Christmas tree ornament expenses that the Berkeley of the Ivies, Brown University, has hung on to the expedition. If we measured war expenses for WWII the way Brown measured costs for Iraq, WWII would have cost $200T, or more.

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