I'm not a "lefty" but I do love this country and the people who defend it, and I am G-D tired of the way they have been led.
I share your frustration on the way the war is being conducted, but then again, I don't know all of the facts and circumstances involved. I prefer to use nukes and be done with it, but then again, I'm just an engineer with no facts or other strategies in front of me.
Well, you and I agree on this...I wouldn't use nukes, but I would have instituted a draft, taxed consumption to pay for the war, and invaded using the rule of thumb of two attackers for every one defender (in this case Muslim inhabitant) to overwhelm the enemy.
I'm sure that 'your' method of fighting the war on terror would be working right now correct?
It certainly would have gotten the job done, and it would have sent a strong message to those embracing terror in anachronistic countries such as Saudi (it stll has a king for God's sake) Arabia, and Islamofacist regimes such as Iran, Syria, Sudan, Somolia, Yemen, and Jordan...then perhaps more moderate Islamic countries such as Lebanon, UAE, etc. would not seek to join the growing evil empire.
So you would have deployed approximately 54 million troops? Impressive. I'd hate to work up the TPFDL for that one.
With regard to what our options were when we were making the decision to invade Iraq, to institute the draft and build up a substantially larger military would have taken ... let's see, how long is it taking to accomplish this within Iraq ... 3 to 4 years.
However, it wasn't anticipated back then that we would need a large ground force in order to reconstruct Iraq while suppressing various insurgent forces. Back then, the argument concerned how large of a force we needed for the invasion. The "old school" said 500,000, and the "new school" said 150,000.
It is only after the fact, when we wound up having to deal with the insurgency that some people are saying, you know, if we had gone the "old school" way, we would have had a large ground force in country, which could have dealt more effectively with the insurgency.
(BTW the "old school" plan anticipated 5,000 fatalities during the invasion.)
If we had a time machine and could go back and re-do what we did, here are just a few of things we would have done differently:
1. Not call off the Persian Gulf War after 100 hours.
2. Not abandon the Marsh Arabs when they rose up against Saddam Huissen, but helped them to establish a semi-autonomous region within Iraq as we did with the Kurds.
3. Not reduce our military from being able to fight and win two wars simultaneously to being able only to fight and win one war at a time.
4. Not go to the U.N. to ask for permission to invade Iraq, allowing Saddam time to prepare for our invasion by having his key people in the military and police infiltrate into the population and continue to resist us by unconventional means.
5. Not invade Iraq at all (since they no longer had WMD).
As it is, none of these options are available to us at this time. Instead, it appears that the only options are (A) win the damn thing, or (B) leave and tell them good luck and, oh, by the way, why don't you partition your country. With an increasingly capable Iraqi army, I'm thinking option (A) sounds pretty good, and thank God for those who are making this option possible.