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Tell me, what is the difference between terrorists & insurgents.
Terrorists attack civilian targets - usually indiscriminately, though not neccessarily so - with the purpose of fomenting social disorder through the chaos they cause.
Insurgents are the equivalent of 'freedom fighters'; those who oppose armed occupation of their country by a foreign force. Their attacks usually focus on military targets though they can include infrastructure.
The important distinction is that there is no moral issue with being an insurgent. The Iraqi insurgents have the right to decide that they don't want us in their country and can fight to remove us; their behavior is no different than we would expect ourselves to act in if China marched in and conquered half of the US. Morally they have to be dealt with in a different fashion than Insurgents.
When you lump all of our enemies in to the same category, you make a serious error, because the fact is we don't face a monolithic beast with singular motivations and desires. We face many small groups who have in common a dislike/hatred for the US, but their goals are quite different in nature and therefore the approach to the problem is quite different in nature. This is why every now and then you see talk about rolling the Sunnis more into the gov't, in hopes that they can be calmed down from the fighting; we still think they have a chance of becoming regular, productive members of society. Not so for the terrorists.
Quote:Why wouldn't bombing work? It's working in SOmalia & tell me that's different than what's going on in Iraq.
You say "it's working in Somalia," but based upon what? The one report that we shot some people up with gunships there? Has this solved the violence? How exactly is it 'working?'
You see, our mission in Iraq - hope you're sitting down - isn't to conquer an army or kill as many people as we can who oppose us! Not at all! Our mission is to set up a peaceful society. It is difficult to believe that we are going to bomb and kill our way to a peaceful society.
Quote:You're very good at saying what won't work, got any ideas of what would work?
I no longer believe anything we do will work. We've screwed things up so bad, created a severe power vacuum, to the point where the Sunnis and Shiites are just going to keep right on fighting for a long, long time.
I think if we had done a much better job in the immediate post-war period - not getting rid of the Iraqi Army, actually spending money rebuilding instead of wasting it, protecting power and water better, employing more Iraqis, working to develop a better oil-sharing structure (instead of giving our oil companies 30-year non-competitive leases to their oil) - maybe we could have done the critical thing: turning the regular, everyday citizens of Iraq against the extremists in their society who are willing to perpetrate this violence for as long as it takes.
I have said many times, that if only 5% of Iraqis support the insurgency, it will
never be defeated without resorting to genocide. Never. There are around 30 million Iraqis; 5% of that is 1.5 million people working against our 150k or so. It doesn't take a genius to realize that the numbers aren't on our side. We would literally have to resort to killing hundreds of thousands of people to wipe the insurgency out.
We face a huge host of problems in trying to do something so basic as sorting the good guys, from the bad guys. We can't just look and see who is who; we don't speak the language; we don't understand the traditions of the area very well. We have to rely on Sunnis to tell us who is a 'bad guy' amongst the Shiite, and the other way around for the Sunnis. These two groups hate each other to the point where the intelligence becomes unreliable.
In short, we have done such a poor job of presenting the US as a 'better alternative' to the internal power struggles, that we have completely lost any ability to gain the trust back. We only have three options now: start killing large swathes of the Iraqi population, withdrawl, or hunkering down and hoping that the Iraqis can get their sh*t together and stop fighting. The administration will choose option #3 as it is the only one that is politically survivable, but it won't win the war for us.
It is important at all times to remember that this war, all the problems caused by it, everything - was
optional. We brought this upon ourselves through the Bush team's lack of foresight and incredible hubris.
Cycloptichorn
