[dark_lord]

I say hit the hometowns of the Baath party leaders. Carpet bomb them. See how willing they are to fight after we annihilate their families.

This only works if you kill everyone, without exception. Which doesn't happen. Even carpet bombing only kills a relatively small percentage of the population. Human beings are really pretty tough -- kind of like cockroaches, pigeons, and sea gulls. And what happens if you don't get them all? This is what happens: you kill some guys wife and kids but miss him. He goes and becomes a dedicated anti-American fighter. He kills some of our guys by sniping, eventually he gets killed. We go bomb some more villages, make more guys just like him.

So why don't we just kill everyone, without exception? Because, surprise, we really do want a functioning country with an oil infrastructure that we can use to:

(a) Strategically offset the Saudis when we get around to them.
(b) Act as a territorial base for our military to do ME power projection. This means having a functioning economy where we don't have to ship everything from the good old USA.

Ergo, we can't just kill everyone. And if we don't just kill everyone, then your strategy would cause more problems than it would solve.

[milan]

You do have a point. Destroy the tribe...no one to cause any problems. However, we could be more heavy handed than we are. I don't think it would have the opposite effect and create more terrorists. If you are heavy handed enough, they get to the point where they just want you to stop. This worked in Germany and Japan, and to a lesser extent Vietnam.