Which means that, to win, we need to find other manpower.
And that means Iraqis, of our choosing.
Kurds are easy, and Kurdistan is not a problem. It's stable and able to defend itself.
The South is a mess, but we can have a great big, bad, violent and abusive Iraqi army there if we want one. We just need to get out of the way and let it go after the Sunnis, who are still the ones planting the IEDs blowing up OUR guys.
It means ethnic cleansing and a lot of dead people.
But at the end of it, it means that bad guys beholden to US will rule the roost in the South, as opposed to bad guys in the Sunni jihad, or bad guys aligned with Teheran.
Of course doing it this way means signing the death warrant for tens, or hundreds, of thousands of innocents. But that's what going to war in Iraq ALWAYS meant. We were only fooling ourselves that it didn't.
In the aftermath, a sprawling, corrupt, Arabist Shi'ite state with a war recivil war record as bloody as Saddam's, will be in power in the South, and at war with Syria and Iran, and a Kurdish entity will be in power in the North. Both will be beholden to us.
That is a victory.
It requires us to fully embrace the evil of a regime that, to win, will commit ethnic cleansing of Sunnis in the South. These Sunnis are our enemies, and the enemies of everything we stand for in the Middle East. We keep foolishly pretending that they don't have to be.
They are, and they DO have to be, and we're going to retreat in defeat and hand the place over to the pro-Iranian Shi'a (who will ALSO carry out the ethnic cleansing, but without our arms and money). Which will be a disaster.
We can win.
Our grandchildren will wring their hands about how evil we were, about how we "became as bad as our enemies", etc. And they will be right.
But we will have WON, and that's what I care about HERE and NOW. The echoes of that evil are for future generations to sob over. Right now, I want victory.
We were once willing to inflict this sort of desolation on other AMERICANS (voir: Sherman's March), but our leadership are now such a bunch of pansies that they will not do what has to be done to WIN.
Or we can do anything else, anything at all, and lose.
Bush won't embrace the evil option. He has been recommended it more than once, and he has publicly said "No". So instead the MORE evil option will be the outcome: which is that really bad guys still win, still butcher their foes AND they're our enemies too.
We can't do it with our army. We can still do it using Iraqis. Bush says no. Unless he changes his mind, we're dead.
Very, very good.
The key difference between what Sherman did and what you propose is that Sherman and his North did their own dirty work. What you propose "outsources" the dirty work to what you perceive to be a lesser-of-many-evils, who in turn become a powerbase in-and-of their own right, and whom the West will ultimately have to sort out. Another Saddam, in concept, without the Saddam branding.
Unless I've misunderstood your hypothesis.
On the surface, is what you propose safe? Somehow I have significant reservations. I'm not sure it would work too good.
Do I have any better ideas than yours? No -- that's what makes the WOT and the Middle East such a complex problem. It has consumed and is consuming the full-time attention of some very clever people, who themselves haven't got a pat answer. But I will suggest this:
If the Middle East were a Microsoft Windows PC, by this stage the Blue Screen of Death is a constant feature, making stable operation impossible. Despite best attempts to repair, it is in such a mess that it would be better to ctl-alt-del and do a low-level-format and reinstall the operating system from scratch: the backup copies are corrupted and unusable. But first maybe place c:\Israel and other valuable and useful data to secure offsite storage to see if it can be restored once the environment has been stabilized...
...then put in place a firewall, pop-up stopper and virus checker to make sure this situation never happened again. And always have a backup copy "just in case" for next time.
As with Windows, so with the Middle East.
I was thinking of Sherman's march, too. And Lincoln's search for a general. Times change, but war still means breaking things and killing people.