Free Republic

QUESTIONS FOR THE COMPLACENT AND COMPLICIT IN THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE. HOW WE THINK MATTERS! It is my opinion that American society is both willing and able to deliver Iraqis from the inherent danger of the world they live in today. It is in American's interests to do so and that is precisely why we shouldn't be distracted by the violence we are witnessing right now. Globalization has made their problem our problem. We can't afford to live with the dysfunction of a Saddam or Al-Sadr. Westerners - and increasingly Easterners - have been putting billions of dollars into the...

AN ANALYTICAL JOURNEY FROM Saigon to Mogadishu to Baghdad HUMINT: Let's start making some comparisons. Given the situation on the ground in Sadr city, Iraq, it looks and sounds worse than Mogadishu of October 2003 and in some ways worse than Saigon of 1968. What if we hadn't left Somali as we did? What if we hadn't left Vietnam as we did? What if an ounce of resolve in Somalia is worth a pound of resolve in Iraq today? What if a grain of resolve in Vietnam would be worth a ton of resolve in Iraq today? Although these rhetorical...

HUMINT: Interpreters in Iraq have reason to be terrified. They’re the messengers of all news, good or bad. But should they be more worried for their lives than an average Coalition foot soldier? I tend to think so. My thinking on this developed because I’ve repeatedly been asked why I think terrorists in Iraq, AKA insurgents, are targeting Iraqis more so than American and other Coalition forces. I think they are murdering Iraqi civilians in cold blood for two primary reasons. HUMINT: FIRST – the terrorists are trying to sever the bonds that form naturally between Iraqis and Americas through...

HUMINT: Democratization is about bending Identity. This work refers specifically to US and Coalition democratization efforts in Iraq and the Middle East in general. As liberators, Americans can only provide the conditions by which liberty can grow and eventually thrive. One articulation of what is occurring across the region may be that Americans have demonstrated they can "bend" the political environment of the Middle East but cannot directly bend the identity of Middle Easterners. If social change is introduced externally it is reasonable to assume that any changes of the individual identities of Middle Easterners will lag behind that...