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Yeah, the Russians did what YOU were recommending that WE should have done upthread!!!

Enough for me. You can have the thread to yourself to carp, recriminate and play arm-chair general to your heart's content.

So ; you're willing to conceed that I'm right are you ?

You seem to be desperate to believe that we're doing exactly the right things. In the real world we're doing some things right and some things wrong. It's important to understand what is wrong and fix it. We should have killed the enemy. It was a huge mistake not to. That would have been difficult and cost American military lives. The admin looks as far as the next election so we didn't.

Now we must destroy the warlords that supported ALQ and still support ALQ instead of paying them off and trying to pacify them.

We absolutely must occupy Iraq and not just for a few months. The admin ( looking as far as the next election as usual ) doesn't appear to be heading in the direction. We have to insist that it does.

The Russians didn't do what I recommended. They tried to do what you are recommending. It didn't work. Outlawing the warlords and build a national army capable of enforcing that is what the Russians tried to do. It's also what we are trying to do.

Then the Russians sent in the Russian army to back up the national army. Because the warlords had a safe haven
( the same one that ALQ has now ) the Russians would have never won. It was like us in Vietnam. When the enemy has a safe haven the war will go on forever.