Dafydd:

I agree, it is a lot like an alcoholic hitting rock bottom. They have to want to change, you can not make them do it.

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Dafydd, how in the world do you stay so positive? God bless you man; I appreciate your insight and communication skills. Now, do you think you can send some of the positive insight to the Red Sox; they sure could use it.

I think you're right, the counterinsurgency effort could not have gained any traction until the evil of the aQ/Taliban/whatever had been experienced first hand.

The Palestinians are a similar issue, until they get sick and tired of their own terrorists, there can be no peace. How did Golda Meir put it? "We won't have peace until the Palestinians love their children more than they hate Jews."

"You cannot impose a peace upon them until they fight themselves to collapse..."

This reminds me of the Hiroshima argument. That it took Hiroshima for the war to truly and finally end with Japan. The Japanese people had to come to the realization that the path they were on held absolutely no future before things could change.

I wonder a lot about "small" wars. Sometimes they work (Panama comes to mind). But only when a majority of the population really does despise the dictator. In the case of Germany, or Japan it takes something catastrophic to change the course.

Initially we thought Iraq would fall into the small wars category. It was a reasonable assumption. After all, the Kurds and Shia already hated Saddam. Maybe enough Sunnis secretly did too.

Unfortunately many Sunnis didn't hate Saddam, or rather, they feared the Shia more than they hated Saddam. And the Shia had their own dysfunctional pathologies to fall into. Only the Kurds behaved as expected. So the small footprint - quick war thing didn't pan out.

And, as most people may not realize, the Arabs are conspiracy nuts. They just thrive on the stuff. Arab leaders have exploited this for decades. It took time for things to change in that regard.

I think the longer we stay the better things are going to get. Hopefully we got a hard bounce from hitting bottom.

And what people miss - the upside for success in Iraq is HUGE. Imagine a stable, democratic, oil-rich, multiethnic, state in the heart of the middle east that owes us a few million favors.

Now the question is Iran - big or small war?

Sherman's march to the sea. Same difference.

Sachi, I totally agree and in fact submitted the following as a comment on another site back on August 13. What I wrote then was,

"My goodness, the left are all John Kerrys. They were for the surge (screaming for years that not enough troops were sent to Iraq) until Bush sent more troops (the surge at which time they were suddenly against more troops) until now when they are suddenly for the surge and the effect it is having. Yet I wonder how effective the surge would have been had it been carried out earlier and with as few troops as are now being used. Perhaps I’m very wrong, but I am left wondering if things didn’t have to get very bad in some areas of Iraq before the Iraqi people were willing to recognize that they needed to assess which direction they should go. The fact that more and more Iraqi people are now willing to inform on the terrorists might well be the result of all the violence which has taken place.
In the aftermath of the Second World War the United States attempted a couple of examples of nation building. What most people overlook, when assessing how successful those efforts were, is that both countries, Japan and Germany, were practically destroyed. Perhaps even exhausted might be applied to the citizens of those two countries. In the Iraq war it was over so quickly that the majority of the citizens of that country were little affected and so they had no idea of how much worse it could be. Now that they have seen some of how much worse things could get, they seem to be making some progress towards wanting a stable and functioning government. While it hasn’t yet reached as high as the Iraqi Parliament, progress is being made in smaller areas of government such as cities and their equivalent of counties. In many ways that mirrors how things work in the U.S. Ideas are tried in cities and counties and if they work they spread. Eventually, if appropriate, they even work their way clear up to Congress and are applied throughout the whole country.
As for our nationally elected idiots who are screaming that little or no progress is being made by the Iraqi Parliament, I would suggest they look in the mirror. How many years have they taken August off when the Social Security shortfall has not been fixed, or when a solution to the immigration issue has not been agreed upon? I could go on and write pages of things that have not been addressed in a meaningful way, but those two should stand out to everyone. To be blunt, I think the Iraqi Parliament is doing fully as well as our Congress. At least they aren’t passing all kinds of bills that will only screw things up. And I would remind them that they have said, many times, that they need to go home and see what their constituents want as an excuse for their August recess, so why will they not allow the Iraqi Parliament to do the same? Of course only time will tell, but perhaps the time off will allow cooler heads to prevail and the knowledge gained by the members of the Iraqi Parliament on their break might help them come to some agreements.
Now personally I don’t expect much from the Iraqi Parliament until security has stabilized more, and never did. Politicians are creatures of shifting winds and always want to keep their options open. Only when there is enough of a consensus within the country are they willing to take a stand. In that they differ from true leaders. So, my thoughts are that when things stabilize more with regards to security, and more people come together in the cities and other units of government, the Parliament of Iraq will come together. To me it seems ludicrous to expect them to make decisions when there is doubt about the outcome. Like their examples in Congress, they are unwilling to stick their necks out, but at least they have reasons for acting that way. If they guess wrong, they and their families could very well wind up dead where our elected leaders will only fail to be reelected. I wonder how many members of our Congress would do better under their circumstances. I fear very few."

I think you did a better job of explaining it. Well done.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. It's so good to read an analysis that isn't tainted by revisionist hindsight. Iraq has always been a read place with real people, not a wad of clay. Why did anyone expect the Iraqis to behave any differently than any other people, such as we Americans?

I've wondered about the type of person AQ is sending to Iraq. My guess is that instead of sending a rapist or punk to jail and humilating his family, the Arab locals in Eygpt, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria connect him to AQ and send him to jihad in Iraq. This gets rid of a lot of local problems as well as giving the satifaction of maybe killing a few Americans and having old Abudullah's son die a martyr instead of convict. Just maybe, the average AQ recruit is a glorified criminal without much of a future. Give these psychopaths a gun and a rationale for violence and it is inevitable that they commit horrific crimes on their hosts. AQ doesn't seem to realize what terrible public relations problems this type of recruit brings in the long run. The savagery of their tactics, in my opinion, is backfiring not only in Iraq and the West (albeit slowly), but also across the Muslim world. If this is what al-Qaeda offers, 95% of the world doesn't want it.

The role of al Qaeda in rise of the Anbar Awakening has been explained for months now by Roggio and Engram. The decimation of al Qaeda in Iraq needs to be trumpeted.

Your analysis is okay but doesn't explain why the Surge is working in Baghdad. It is working because that there are now enough IA and IP forces to hold and build what has been cleared, whereas in 05 and 06 there were not.

The influx of Iraq forces into Baghdad, working alongside the coalition, is a key factor in the success of the Surge.

You are not alone in your failure to take into account the marvellous job Iraqis are doing in fighting for their own freedom. Unfortunately you've pulled an O'Reilly by claiming it's been 6 years when in fact it's been 4 years. The progress has been phenomenal by historical standards and the criticism of the effort phenomenally ignorant.

Terry Gain: You're right. Their was no point in just clearing areas, until the Iraqis were able to hold them. Giving people a chance to develop a thorough hatred of Al Qaeda was presumably an accidental byproduct.

A number of people have argued that we didn't kill enough Iraqis in the original invasion, to put the survivors in a WWII German or Japanese frame of mind. It may have taken several years and some painful experience to get there by a different path. Someday the think tanks and academics will do the analysis, but I suspect it took fewer dead Iraqis this way. It took a lot of dead Germans and Japanese.

Thank you FNO. The consequence of killing more Iraqis to show them who was boss would have been to create more resistance, more insurgents and eventually more enemies.

The consequence of sending 500,000 troops (which we didn't have) would have been to convince Iraqis they were in a state of real occuaption, not the alleged occupation the opponents of the mission speak of.

And what would have been the result of the implementation of the vaunted Powell doctrine?

I say, without fear of contradiction, that the course of the war would have been as follows:
1. The insurgents would have seen it would be suicide to oppose such massive force;
2. Iraqis would have seen no need to sign up to defend their country;
3. Given the massive costs and the obvious lack of need for such forces the demands that U.S. forces be withdrawn would have been acceded to. Victory would have been declared and the withdrawal of the bulk of U.S. forces would have followed.
4. The insurgency would have then commenced. It might not have succeeded but the sacrifices to put it down would have been much greater than experienced to date.

Finally, isn't it interesting how people who have demonstrated no particular brilliance at their day jobs all understand so much better than the Generals conducting it, how the war should have been conducted.

Alas that includes me. But I'm beginning to think however that I'm one of the best of the least. This probably makes me delusional but at least I'm not a leftist- i.e. a person who insanely wants to see his country defeated by Islamists because it will improve the electoral fortunes of his party.

I've wondered about the type of person AQ is sending to Iraq.

Good point, elvin. And how about we ask: What kind of person did America send to Iraq? Think an army of conscripts would have been able to do what the well-educated and idealistic men and women we sent have done?

The last 4 years have been a struggle between the worst kind of monsters and the best kind of saviors. Are our folks perfect? Of course not, they are just much better people on average than any army we have ever fielded. And these saviors are not bleeding-hearts - these know how to kick ass.

Now we need to watch our soldiers' backs to prevent them from being ambushed here at home. Believe me, the Petreaus ad was just an opening gambit from the Democrats and the media, because American victory in Iraq is totally unacceptable to them.

I thought that once the "AWAKENING" started, but who knew that al Qaeda would be so darn dumb and it would work before the media convinced the American people all was lost. But a hint of what should happen in Iraq could have been provided by the media had they actually looked in detail at the end of our deployment in Vietnam or more recently in Afghanistan by the Northern Alliance. The brutal tactics of the VC were legend (and most times ignored by the media even when they were on our side) and we certainly had a heavy handed method of defending the people from the VC. However, unfortunately any shift in South Vietnamese public opinion was clouded by Tet where the Viet Cong were basically destroyed and the war shifted to a North Vietnam Army practicing more conventional military tactics with the media missing both. Somehow, I don’t see the American civilian authorities knowingly practicing tough love in Iraq until the Iraqis realized their problem.

Heck, the NYT would have by now released the finding about how callous the President and his war council was allowing the 650,000, or is it 1,000,000 now, Iraqis to die before changing tactics. The Left could then revise the Vietnam War story to make us more brutal than were the VC. Well ya, I almost forgot, Lt. Kerry did testify to that some time ago. The Left certainly would have a ball with this thought about the situation in Iraq though.

Terry Gain:

Unfortunately you've pulled an O'Reilly by claiming it's been 6 years when in fact it's been 4 years.

Oops, that may have been my mistake. Sachi posts are usually collaborations between us: She writes the initial post, I edit it into the Big Lizards style. I'm not sure which of us added that line; it could easily have been I.

Thanks for catching it!

Dafydd

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