Posted on 01/04/2005 12:54:36 PM PST by Rennes Templar
Oh brother. If it were that large, our forces would have been run out of the country by now.
Garbage.
doesn't have to be garbage. Let's learn a lesson from history, hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, Alexander the great and an army of 50k soldiers defeated a Persian army of 300k. The region's fighting qualities should not be overestimated though.
emphasize the sympathizers and de-empathsize the terrorists/fighters on that total....
I would guestimate that the total number of terrorists/fighters is under 15,000, most of which is not Iraqi....
Sounds like a bit of taqqiyah-speak to me.
Their spy chief is an idiot.
Just because we declared victory in May 2003 doesn't mean that the enemy declared defeat.
What is 200,000 based on? Really? It's based on nothing. I say there's 1,000,345. My number's just as valid as anyone's. The fact is we don't know how many there are, but it's a good guess there aren't 200,000. In fact, if there are 5,000 they're doing a piss poor job.
MI Ping
From the article, some of our people seem to agree with him.
So they join the movement that is causing all these problems in the first place rather than fight against it . . . What to do if there is no security, for example? Go pick up a machine gun and help destoy a police station, of course. Logic has never been the Arabs strong suit has it?
If they have 200,000, then only .01% of them have enough guts to even attempt fight.
#1- I don't know who "we" is, but the U.S. didn't declare victory in May 03.
#2- How does "not being a force of 200K" equal "enemy declared defeat?"
Yes, even if there's a thousand there still totally inept by any military standards.
Sure, a regime like Saddam's requires a lot of sympathizers to stay in business. The Ba'ath Party wasn't a team of fifty guys running Iraq from a hardened bunker. Those who lost their privileged positions when their boss was ousted would certainly be trying to help disrupt the new government - in the hope that they might one day return to power. But it's still a stupid (but typical MSM) way to look at it to say that there are "200,000 insurgents". More accurately, 23 million+ people are glad the Ba'athists are gone and glad the US is around to help.
Only 200,000 tangos?.....what the heck are all the other Marine platoons gonna do?
I'm afraid the Americans are too tender hearted to deal effectively with this kind of action. Besides, mere interdiction and hunting down of insurgent forces in Iraq is inadequate. Iraq must somehow be preserved from infiltration from Iran and Syria, and possibly Arabia.
Recently a special on TV featured the life of Hannibal. They mentioned that at the last of the three major battles with the Romans, the Romans lost more men than the Americans did in the entire Viet Nam War. Rome's response was to refuse to negotiate with Hannibal, refuse to ransom any hostages, banish any Roman troops who managed to flee away from the battle to Sicily, and raise and even bigger army. They refused to accept defeat, even when defeated.
Consequnetly, they won.
There are lessons for both sides in Iraq from this. I hope, as an American, we can learn to be more like Romans.
Are you sure these troop assesments weren't made by a General named George McClellen. ("I'm telling you that there are 200,000 rebels facing me right now on the other side of that river")
The key thing will be the election - if it does take place with little Sunni participation then we can probably expect continued irruptions from Syria and Saudi Arabia on behalf of the Sunni "insurgency." How they deal with those will be key to the survival of a Shi'a/Kurd government.
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