Posted by
Dawnsblood on Wednesday, January 17, 2007 6:55:25 PM
He also spends the last half of
his post explaining the mistakes we made getting where we are in Iraq today. I do wish to point this one small part of the piece out however.
6. Assuming Iraq will conform only to unreasonable expectations which are based on ignorance of counterinsurgency warfare.
The troops in Iraq will tell you about three successful American
occupations if you ask them–the Philippines, Japan and Germany. The
latter two took five years to go from defeated enemy to ally, and
decades after that before they really stood on their own feet. The
Philippine insurgency took 8 years to quell and that country still has
myriad problems that keep it from enjoying true First World status a
century after the US put down its insurgency. Iraq is a far more
complex place than either Japan, Germany or the Philippines and should
therefore be expected to take longer to make the full transition to
standalone state. But not knowing the history of America’s
counterinsurgency operations has led us to want quick, clean victory
where it just isn’t possible and never was.