I think an internal redeployment in Iraq is a good but inadequate step

Submitted by Charles Martel (United States), Aug 27, 2007 at 18:06

Just getting out of the cities would reduce our day-to-day IED/sniping casualties (which is worth something) but our fingerprints are still on the internecine warfare as long as we're there.

Therefore, I think we should hope the surge gives a plausible patina of "success" in time for us to get out, although getting out of the cities is a fine secondary and interim.

We have gotten too soft to really hammer and thus reform our enemies as we did in WWII.

That's too bad, because Germany and Japan are a lot better off having gotten those well-deserved beatings.

I expect Iraq to erupt in civil war when we leave, and I think that will be a good thing because it will disproportionately kill the very crazies we want killed, and the hatreds generated will be intra-Muslim.

It was a huge mistake letting the Iraqi Army collapse -- it was an undeniably legitimate and secular Iraqi institution.

If we had demanded the Iraqi army return to its barracks as units and continued paying them a fraction of their nominal salaries in hard currency, 90% would have gladly complied.

We would have gotten rid of most generals and many field-grade officers over the next months, but the insurgents would have been a smaller and more-easily-dentified minority than they are now.

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