I think you are being optimistic here.
You will have to find the terrorists, and their safe houses. To do so, you will have to interrogate the Lori Berensons of Iraq, and do so successfully. You will make mistakes. To be successful, you will have to eliminate the foreign fighters, and all those who support and hide them, and maybe start making examples of those who merely see and say nothing.
With the family/tribal structure, you may have to kill whole families, to cut short any vendettas caused by killing only one of a family.
You will need to handle the problem when the other side starts killing whole families, with the only purpose to blame it on the government.
It's a sad fact that Iraq already has Death Squads, as seen in the recent assassination of the election officials. The Media only recognizes Death Squads if they are NOT leftist or islamic.
If the Iraqi government creates and uses hunter-killer squads, the MSM will scream DEATH-SQUAD in 3 inch bold type. It won't matter how effective or how efficient they are in finding and killing only bad guys. It will matter even less that fighting fire with fire is sometimes necessary.
Given the history of the middle east, I doubt that you'd find enough angelic types to staff such units to provide anything that doesn't make the Latin American units look like choir boys.
I think you are being optimistic here.
To be successful, you will have to eliminate the foreign fighters, and all those who support and hide them, and maybe start making examples of those who merely see and say nothing.
With the family/tribal structure, you may have to kill whole families, to cut short any vendettas caused by killing only one of a family.
It's a sad fact that Iraq already has Death Squads, as seen in the recent assassination of the election officials. The Media only recognizes Death Squads if they are NOT leftist or islamic.
If the Iraqi government creates and uses hunter-killer squads, the MSM will scream DEATH-SQUAD in 3 inch bold type. It won't matter how effective or how efficient they are in finding and killing only bad guys. It will matter even less that fighting fire with fire is sometimes necessary.
The article i read about this explicitly states that these "death squads" will be trying to make it painful for civilians who may be inclined to favor the insurgency. Not people who are themselves insurgents...just people who look the other way. People who let the insurgents into their home, maybe. People whose 16 year old child was seen talking to an insurgent. You know, anyone who is at all suspected of contact.
How do they make it painful? Well, they kidnap you, they 'disappear' you, they torture you, and they kill you. This is not "US Soldiers" killing people who call themselves "soldiers" (interesting that you are willing to define them as soliders here, by the way....i thought Geneva was 'quaint' because these people aren't soldiers.).
This is Iraqi para-military groups literally terrorising a civilian population as a way to discourage not just participation in, but also support for, insurgency. As noted upthread, previous uses of this means of furthering democracy have resulted in literally 100,000's of dead, tortured, and disappeared civilians. Women and children, raped and mutilated. Men beheaded in front of their families. Political dissent is very offectively oppressed by these means.
Now the insurgency is certainly not a legitimate form of political dissent, and it is a problem for the US, and a serious one at that. The question is, though, is there *nothing* that is not justified by a war-zone? Have you people ultimately no common humanity in you? We are talking about MY FRIGGIN GOVERNMENT COMMITING THE MOST HORRIBLE IMAGINABLE ACTS, in my name and yours, on people who, let's be honest here, are horrible people, but we're in their country, and we picked this fight, and we told them to 'bring it on', and now we want to cut lose the dogs of Hell on them, and fuck 'em anyway?
We went there to bring democracy, and that, my friends, is NOT democracy. I understand that we are in a shitty situation over there, i really do. But we need to retain our humanity, our decency, our respect for the Laws of God and Man, or else we will regret it. And frankly, the Left is in the right here, when they look at us and say "i told you so."