Iraq best case scenario: 80 - 100k US troops for 20-30 years

Re: Iraq best case scenario: 80 - 100k US troops for 20-30 y


I am not likely to be impressed by someone's credentials if i find their thesis or it's basis suspect. The sentence that i have quoted is significant to me, because the supporters of the current American regime who claim that the regimes opponents are painting a bleaker picture than the reality on the ground use exactly this tactic. Using specific incidents anecdotally, they focus on small, local successes, and by multiplying such otherwise isolated incidents, make a contention that genuine progress is being made. To use that tactic, however, it is necessary to ignore the time bomb which is ticking under the Iraqi nation. It is necessary to ignore the rise and expansion of Shi'ite militias and death squads, and the appearance of death squads among the police and army under a Shi'ite dominated government in Baghdad.

All in all, i am unconvinced that any significant progress is being made. But more significantly, the thesis in the quoted material assumes that the American nation can be lead to accept 20 to 30 years of occupation of Iraq. After all, after 20 years of English occupation of "Mesopotamia," the insurgency had not been conquered, the killing had not stopped, and all of that despite a growing troop commitment in the region by the English, and even despite the "terror bombing" of villages by Arthur Harris, who went on to head Bomber Command in the RAF in the Second World War. He freely acknowledged that his strategy of night-time area bombing of residential areas in Germany had its genesis in the experience of bombing "Arab" villages in Mesopotamia. It was no more effective against the Germans than it was against the inhabitants of what is now Iraq.

Perhaps the United States will be there 20 or 30 years from now. But it will depend upon the political realities in the United States, and not the military assessment of anyone's armchair strategist.

This may be a little off topic, but I heard somewhere (or imagined it) that the number of troops who have returned home and ultimately committed suicide is greater than the number that actually perished in Iraq.

Is that true? Is that even friggin possible?

biddle must be a liberal. according to the neocons, it was only going to take a couple of weeks and the mission is already accomplished.

Not sure gus. There's this http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2873622.ece

Here is a CBS report.

Almost 6300 veteren suicides in 2005 ALONE!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB2-xER8NS8