You know, if only Republicans used listened to what the Left had to say before the war...

Boston's NPR has a show called OnPoint which is hit or miss, quality wise. Yesterday, they hit a home run by reserving an hour to discuss T.E. Lawrence and his lessons about the Middle East and guerilla warfare. (You can listen to a podcast here.) Lawrence of Arabia should know something about the topic since he led an Arab force in guerilla warfare tactics against the Ottoman Empire during WWI. Lawrence also lived during a time when the British had troops in Iraq and tried to quell an insurgency there, so, if he were alive today, he would have a little something to say about the United States' current occupation of Iraq ... More to the point, Lawrence might point out the poor planning of it.

One of the guests on OnPoint pointed out that Lawrence said, to fight an insurgency, the military fighting it needs to setup a system of checkpoints -- one checkpoint every 4 square miles in the country. And the checkpoints need to be manned by 20 armed troops. This guest decided to do the calculations for Iraq and found out that for a checkpoint system like this to exist, the US would need over 800,000 troops there.

If there's any testament to how much Bush's invasion of Iraq lacked planning, it should start with the number of troops that they've committed to the area. You can't secure a country the size of California with a force whose size could only secure an area the size of Massachusetts.

And even if we had a coalition of 800-900,000 troops in Iraq, would it help? How long would we have to keep them there before the Kurds decide, "Oh, we don't want our own nation anymore," or before the Shia and Sunnis suddenly decide that they don't hate each other anymore?

But, to play Devil's Advocate, if we leave Iraq then the terrorists will consider it a victory over a superpower. Just like they felt that they had succeeded over the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the late 80s; a victory which emboldened them to form organizations with more global reach. That was a domino effect which led to the WTC being destroyed.

So here's our problem: The US can't win in Iraq unless we're their, with a massive army, for at least a couple of decades. But the US can't pull back because that would embolden the terrorists (who, I should add for irony, weren't in Iraq to begin with).

I hate to be a pessimist, but I think I have trouble deciding what to do because no matter what decision the US makes, we're completely fucked. The decision that we fuck us the least is to pull back our troops and fortify the homeland against future attacks that we now know will come. I'm not saying that this is a good or honorable decision, I just think that it could be the best one given the situation.

Wow, I should check grammar before posting comments.

You know, if only Republicans used listened to what the Left had to say before the war...

I didn't support the war until one leftist said "we should rely on sanctions to keep Saddam from developing WMDs. It worked in North Korea"

Lawrence of Arabia should know something about the topic since he led an Arab force in guerilla warfare tactics against the Ottoman Empire during WWI.

Lawrence of Arabia was a great movie, but after WWI, Lawrence's Britain handed Mecca and Medina over to the Saudi Wahhabis. That was an act of pure boneheaded idiocy unmatched in history; it was the equivalent of handing the Vatican over to the Nazis. Currently, the British government is the most tolerant of terrorist groups living within their midst, worldwide. (well, maybe Somalia and the Sudan are worse). If we follow the advice of the British, despite their honestly good intentions, we will lose this war.

Our government is currently following the strategy established by Jimmy Carter, of using Islamist groups to intimidate the commies...and there's always the need to protect the worlds' oil supply. The left and the right have no intention of fighting terror-supporting states because our policies have made us dependent on them. Neither side is willing to make any large efforts to change those policies.

The Left, the Right and governments around the world will not put much of an effort into the fight against terrorism until terrorism/political Islam threatens their own power. Until that happens, everyone will probably continue using halfway measures.

I didn't support the war until one leftist said "we should rely on sanctions to keep Saddam from developing WMDs. It worked in North Korea"

I'm not much of a "leftist," but I have to admit that the person who said that had a point. We did have sanctions on Iraq for the past decade, and they did keep Saddam from amassing an arsenal of WMDs.

Of course, that hasn't worked for North Korea. But there are different arguments to be made for that... To me, the point is to do as much as possible to avoid going to war. War should only be waged as a last resort.

Taking North Korea into account, we still have other options. An apt comparisan can be made to the Soviet Union... Sure, throughout the time that we negotiated with them they still had nukes, a massive military, and the would constantly go against those agreements that they signed ... But continuing diplomatic relations with tme slowed down their progress. Success wasn't perfect, but it was achieved given the fact that the US exists as an advanced nation today.

While North Korea doesn't pose nearly as large of a threat to our livelihood that the USSR did, we still have to avoid war on the Korean Penisula at all costs. We don't know how many nukes NK has, nor do we know where they are located. If we amass hundreds of thousands of troops there to stat a ground invasion, within half an hour NK can kill tens of thousands of them along with wiping Seoul off the map. Of course, they wouldn't be able to do much beyond that and we would eventually win the war, but this is one example why war should only be waged as a last resort.

I think we're seeing another example of this in Iraq.

Lawrence of Arabia was a great movie, but after WWI, Lawrence's Britain handed Mecca and Medina over to the Saudi Wahhabis. That was an act of pure boneheaded idiocy unmatched in history; it was the equivalent of handing the Vatican over to the Nazis. Currently, the British government is the most tolerant of terrorist groups living within their midst, worldwide. (well, maybe Somalia and the Sudan are worse). If we follow the advice of the British, despite their honestly good intentions, we will lose this war.

I never said that we should follow the advice of the British government, I said that we should pay attention to what TE Lawrence had to say. If the Brits and France had done the same thing almost a century ago, the Middle East wouldn't be as big of a mess as it is today. So I agree with you there: the Brits royally fucked up when they carved up the Ottoman Empire.

Additionally, I also wouldn't take much advice from the British military on how to fight guerilla warfare. After all, we did kick their ass in the Revolutionary War.

Britain's Iraq adventure was notably unsuccessful, so Lawrence would not be very helpful. The conventional wisdom then was that Arabs were congenitally unsuited to democracy, just as most liberals (secretly) think today. The accomplishments of American military and ideological power in Afghanistan over the last four years are unmistakable and astonishing to any rational observer. The war in Iraq has been over for more than two years. We're just cleaning up, at a very low rate of casualties from car bombs, IEDs and assassins.

Of course, that hasn't worked for North Korea.

No, it hasn't, and it was necessary for us to do something to prevent Saddam from getting to the same point.

War should only be waged as a last resort.

War should be waged as a last resort, and it is usually the only way to stop fascist states that are engaging in ethnic cleansing. The leaders of Iran, the Sudan, Mauritania, Syria, Saudi Arabia and (Saddam's) Iraq have been cleansing the Middle East of Jews, Kurds, Zoroastrians, blacks and other minorities in the pursuit of Arab/Muslim unity and lebensraum. Saudi Arabia is exporting this campaign of ethnic cleansing/jihad to Southeast Asia, South Asia, Russia, to the rest of Africa. The jihad has its paramilitary groups in Europe. On 9/11 they brought their war to us.

A response is necessary, but the goal of a war shouldn't be to work out an "exit strategy" or to make our enemies nicer people. The goal of war should be to completely defeat and dismantle the states and the paramilitary groups that are our enemy. If we were going to take the risks of war, we should have planned to defeat every fascist/jihadi group and government in the area. I don't think we can install a Marshall Plan type of thing while fascism/jihad is still being sponsored by terror-supporting states. I hope I'm wrong.

North Korea hasn't attacked Americans on American soil, so there really is no reason to consider war against them. Diplomacy and other cold war tactics that we probably were never told about have been working for years.

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