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"In a word, yes."

You are kidding right? Non-stop imagery on Al Jazeera of unarmed people getting sprayed across the town square would be a positive thing for our troops there? Do you think the average Iraqi is going to say to himself, "well, those people were giving aid and cover to the snipers, so they were legitimate targets". The people rioting today are a very small percentage of Shiite in Iraq, without a lot of popular support. But they're still Arab Muslims, and if you want to increase their numbers 10,000 fold, just pump a few 105mm shells into their happy faces. None of them are worth a single American life, but if we took your suggested course of action our guys on the ground would be fighting a couple million screaming looneys instead of a few thousand.

I have to disagree with you. Near the beginning of this insurgency some Freepers made a ridiculous attempt to compare Iraq to Germany after WWII. There is a huge difference, and that is that we never really defeated Iraq completely. The Germans didn't do the crap the Iraqi's are doing now because they remembered a place called Dresden. Now, I am not saying we need to kill 100,000 Iraqis in one night, what I am saying is that we need to institute martial law and give up this liberation crap for now. That means no armed protests of any kind. If somebody in your protest throws a brick, you better get the hell out of there because you know that the Apaches are coming. They would learn soon enough. Then, once all protests are peaceful, we can get back to rebuilding Iraq. If we do not comprehensively defeat our enemies there first, as soon as we leave Iraq it will descend into a hellhole worse than before we started.