Feel free to try you little “extermination” plan and i’ll be glad to defend my right to place a bullet in your brainpan.

Tool.

In your earlier article you hinted that the second Iraq invasion could have been another culling of the armed forces followed by going home. Unfortunately you did not go into any detail about how this could have been rolled into better outcomes then what happened.

Hinting that the tactics of CI warfare should have been followed earlier was useful but you did not go into much detail. Nor clear up the logical inconsistency of advocating a notably un-comprehensive conventional (George Bush Senior style strategy) in one paragraph and in another advocate the ugliness of CI warfare. This inconsistency makes it sound like you wrote this article just be be a fat sour grapes nerd than to engage in the betterment of US combined arms policy.

Offering criticism without at least giving clear arguments to your favored alternatives just makes you look like a partisan democrat or garden variety complainer. Gary I expected more from you based upon past articles. Your loosing your touch… for god sakes get it back!!

Maliki and Sadr are both Shia. Under Saddam, who was Sunni, the Shia were divided and oppressed. Now they are out to get the Sunnis and take control of Iraq. Oh wait, they already have. Sadr controls the poor, and Maliki controls the middle class conservatives, and rich in Iraq. If you take a look at Sadr and Maliki, they don’t fight each other for constituency. They pledge to different people, like Republicans do in the US, giving one line to the racist whites – the Republican Poor, and another to the “Compassionate Conservatives” – the Republican Middle Class. Didn’t Maliki study how US Government works?

Same exact thing here. The Sadrists are the poor and the Dawa are middle class. Why do you think the Sadrists stopped their attack so soon, even before the US Troops went in? Did anyone even ask, how the Sadrists knew when the US Troops went in?

So now the Shia control Iraq. They want the US out. Once the US is out, there will be a major crackdown on the Sunnis, who are also getting together and organized, resulting in a mini-civil war.

The US just doesn’t learn. In Kosovo, there were Albanians who wanted to take land from Serbia. So they started an insurgency movenment, which the Serbs checked. Then the US went in to support the Albanians, under promises of “Democracy” from Thaci. I mean was Clinton playing stupid? Or plain stupid when it comes to foreign policy? Once the US help was no longer needed, up in flames went the century-old Serbian Churches, 200,000 Serbs were driven out, thousands killed, the women and children brutally raped and murdered. But that was in a minor region. Iraq is one whole big country.

So when the Sunnis are going to fight the Shia, they’ll start losing. The Shia have better numbers, organization and government support. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Shia did to the Sunnis, what Albanians did to the Serbs. This leads to more pissed off Sunnis and more recruits for Al Qeada. The War on Terror, remember?

And this is yet another present that Obama’s getting from Bush. And of course the Media will continue to somehow find a way to blame either Iran or Russia for this. Like it was Iran & Russia combined that sent in the Marines to transfer control of Iraq from Sunnis to Shia.

So why’s everything quite now? Because if the Sunnis attack too early, they’ll be utterly destroyed by US Troops. If the Shia act too early, they’ll be hurt by US Troops. Neither side wants to lose a company. And with the budget the US has, America cannot keep the troops in Iraq forever. Once they’re gone, the Civil War shall come. Of course CNN won’t really cover it…

Bush II, of course, did not intend to bring about any alleged positive outcomes of his imperial adventure. He suffers from borderline personality disorder.

Shia ethnic cleansing finds no moral offset in distant events supposedly linked causally to the initial lies of our post-modern Caligula.

“God wills it” in Bush’s mind and “oil justifies it” among neo-con’s are equally specious cover for a completely trumped up invasion and occupation.

History offers no absolution for the US even should Iraq flow with milk and honey in some distant, unforeseeable future.

Any link would be nothing but causality running down any of the new channels traced out by the blood of Iraqi civilians and US soldiers. This is the Law of Unintended Consequences in action, as it always is.

He certainly is. Though for who is the question. Russia? The Nazis (oh wait that ended in 1945 or thereabouts)? … or the OIL COMPANIES? “It’s the oil lobby, stupid” seems to be a good general answer to a lot of questions at the moment. Like, oh say, the last eight years.

Also, Cheney used to be human, apparently. But everyone with a bypass suffers brain damage and 42% lose 20% of their cognition. In one event. Mutliple events implies how much greater loss?
http://heartdisease.about.com/cs/bypasssurgery/a/pumphead.htm

Any day now the mayor of green zone Baghdad will be handed his head by ‘his people’ and we will see another Exit from Saigon. The two War Nerd columns below remain spot on.

… If you think that the policy insiders have screwed it up beyond salvation, listen to the little guy. Specifically Gary Brecher, War Nerd.

“Who won Iraq’s “Decisive” Battle? http://anti-state.com/forum/index.php?board=2;action=display;threadid=20671

“Bringing Ireland to Baghdad: How the Resistance Will Eventually Kick the Americans Out.” http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/90149/

“They have created a wilderness. And they call it peace. That is our legacy.”
- Malcom Rifkind, past British Minister of Defense

For a group that certainly DOESN’T get it, with the exception of Malcom Rifkind, see the Intelligence Squared debate on the motion: “America is finally winning the war in Iraq,” from October 13th, 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byEXGExDeos

Another school of thought says that George Bush is a genius. No really. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptzml1qQvZE

He has been correct on about every aspect of the war that he’s written about, and pissed off both sides on more than one occasion.

He’s recently declared that we have won in Iraq.
http://www.pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/archives2/027203.php

Have we? I don’t know, but Yon has credibility not so easily dismissed. Certainly a lot less easy to dismiss than some green-zone visiting MSM type. I’d noticed Brechter had fallen silent on the subject of Iraq entirely lately, and so I was expecting that sooner or later he’d have to eat his crow online. But it looks like he’s trying to defer the meal by attacking Bush. He should have posted some of those oh-so-amusing Bush=Monkey photos while he was at it. It would have helped distract the reader away from the uncomfortable truth that Brechter flubbed his call.

I also suspected at the time and still suspect that ‘the surge’ was more of a political device to buy time so that the other policies, whatever they may be, could have time to work. Whether ‘the surge’ worked militarily may or may not be true and is a reasonable argument to make. I’d just point out that most battles in the civil war were militarily unnecessary, but politically very necessary. Politics is what counts. A gun is just a tool to make the enemy change his mind – unless you’re like Brechter and think that genocide is the only way to do so.

What is not a reasonable argument to make at this point is that Bush was wrong and the War Nerd right in terms of their visions of, say, 4 years ago for how Iraq would be at this point in time. Brechter was accusing Clancy of being too involved in the hardware, but oddly enough it looks like Brechter fell into the same trap, focusing on go-go gadget missile trucks and the like and not understanding the underlying insurgent strategy and the counter-insurgency strategy put used by the US and the Iraqi government. This is forgivable. Counter-Insurgency is hard and unglamorous, and involves a lot of waiting to get blown up. What isn’t forgivable to my mind is how Brechter’s persona had to yield to the lefty journalist underneath and screed his hatred of Bush, regardless of the military facts of the situtation.

The counterinsurgency strategy of paying off some of the Sunni insurgents, allowing for Sadr’s self interested ceasefire to happen, pulling our troops into the bases, and it turns out assassinating top insurgent leaders right before the “surge” to make Al Qaeda in Iraq easier to knock down was a brilliant strategy, but was also a lie to the American people because the trickling of extra troops actually had zero to do with it, but was the only military strategy Americans could understand.

You accuse the war nerd of screwing the pooch and not admitting it, but I expect if you’re pooch is screwed (probably conveniently as soon as Obama takes office) I expect you to be in denial.

You were predicting six months ago that by this time Iraq would be a burning charnel house filled with blood, smoke, and IEDs. Sorta like the Republican Party looks today. Yet even so, the Sunni and Shia and Kurds appear to be getting along satisfactorily, the Iraqi army *and* police appear to have trained up to take over security in most parts of the country, and most amazing of all the Iraqi government is requesting that we leave, which is a victory condition in an insurgency if I’ve ever heard of one. Your assertion that Iran is more powerful than ever seems hollow, both because of falling oil prices and because on the diplomatic front Iran is increasingly isolated, and the contries that process Iranian oil into gasoline for re-export are seriously considering embargoing. There have also been a decided lack of signs that Iran is gaining any sort of influence over Iraqi politics, despite the river of treasure they’ve poured into special ops in Iraq. If things continue as they have been, Iran is going to end up with a much more powerful and politically stable regime counterbalancing them than there was under Saddam.

In any case, the endgame in Iraq is not at all turning out the way you were predicting since shortly after the war started. We see stability in the Iraqi state without the ethnic cleansing measures you were declaring necessary. We see the Iraqis themselves working out their tougher domestic political problems mostly politically and no so much with IEDs. (although admittedly they are still doing some of that).

I’m disappointed in you. I’m a fan of your writing, one aspect of which is that you usually admit when you’ve screwed the pooch. I was looking forward to you admitting you had been at least partially wrong, and giving Bush some credit for at sticking to his guns when everyone (including you) was screaming to run to the exits. It may have been the wrong decision to invade, but on the question of whether or not to stay or pull out, Bush doubled down on the chance he could make it work out somehow after all. It looks like he was right and you were wrong.

But I guess you don’t have the guts or the honesty to admit it.