(10-10-2019 07:48 PM)EigenEagle Wrote: (10-10-2019 06:06 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: We have two options:
1) Stay there forever; or
2) Bring them home some day, and whoever we do we will inevitably "abandon our allies."
You got any other alternatives? If not, do you choose 1) or 2).
I actually do have another alternative. Never fight a war that you don't intend to win. But that will never happen, and in this case I'm afraid it's too late.
The longer things go, the more it looks like we didn't learn anything from Vietnam. By the way, we "abandoned our allies" there too.
Of course, Trump has managed to give us the worst of both worlds...we still have troops over there and we abandoned allies. don't move our troops to a different part of the country that will put Kurds in danger and give me this crap Trump is ending forever wars.
OK, I'm betting that had Obama pulled our troops out, you would have been 100% supportive, despite the fact that would have been "abandoning our alllies" as well. It is quite disturbing to me to see so many people who have spent 15+ years calling for us to bring the troops home, now complaining when Trump starts the process, for no reason other than Orange Man Bad.
If you wanted us to bring troops home, then you wanted us to "abandon our allies." You can't have one without the other.
The whole Iraq adventure may be characterized as how not to do it.
1) The first thing we need to realize is that military forces, in the words of Norman Schwarzkopf, are good at two things--killing people and breaking things. Winning hearts and minds, particularly of people disinclined to like us, is not a military mission. We have the Peace Corps for that.
2) We should have waited until we had killed everybody who needed killing in Afghanistan (we still haven't done that), and broken everything that ended breaking there, before splitting our effort and going into Iraq. Had we gone into Afghanistan the right way, that would have been done within two years and we could then ave focused on Iraq if necessary (IOW, if Saddam hadn't gotten the message from Afghanistan that he needed to fly right). I have heard from sources which I believe to be reliable that we had drone shots at Osama and Mullah Omar during the first week of the war but we passed them up because of worries about collateral damage to civilians. The only way to end the practice of human shields is to be willing to accept collateral damage in order to prosecute high priority targets.
3) If and when we went into Iraq, we should have gone in full force, unburdened by ridiculously restrictive rules of engagement, killed everybody who needed killing, broken everything that needed breaking, then within two years GTFO and stay TFO, except leave the people in charge with the specific understanding that if they screw up, we will be back to kill them. US troops coming into your country should be every world leader's worst nightmare. Then maybe they will behave, and we can take care of the few who don't.
4) Once Iraq was done and dusted, we should have addressed as best we could the errors that the west made at San Remo in partitioning the region. Iraq should have been split into three separate countries--Kurdistan in the north, Shia Mesopotamia in the east, and Sunni Iraq in the west. Kurds get Mosul and Kirkuk, Shias get Baghdad and Basra, Sunnis get Fallujah and Samarrah.
Turkey did not want Kurdistan, but that was a problem that could be handled. Trukey's number one economic and foreign relations priority at that time (not today) was membership in the EU, which looked like a good deal back then. Give the Halliburton contract for Kurdistan to Schlumberger, tell the French that this is the makeup call for the way they got screwed at San Remo, and that it's their job to convince Turkey that Kurdistan is the price of admission to EU. France would send some troops to protect their commercial interests, and we could equip the Kurds, and that should be enough to protect them without our having to sacrifice American lives and limbs. I don't think either Syria or Turkey would have been willing to surrender any territory occupied by Kurds, but if we gave Kurdistan enough help, and made it large enough to absorb an influx, I think it would have attracted significant inward migration of Kurds from those countries. For Turkey, that would have been not a bug but a feature.
The Shi'a east would pretty much work. They have oil and agriculture, and we could have installed a UN force to assist them in maintaining their borders.
Instead of totally dismantling the Ba'athist power structure--pretty much the only effective administrators in the country--we could have left them in control of Sunni Iraq. They still had something of a fighting force left over, and they would surely have gotten Saudi help. By giving them something, we could have hoped to avoid the radicalization that led to Daesh/ISIS. I would expect that at some point they, very likely with Saudi help, would have allied with the Syrian Sunnis--2/3 of the Syrian population occupying the eastern 2/3 of the country--to oppose Damascus. We could have hoped for sort of ISIS without the radical element. Russia would probably have tried to help Damascus, but I think they would have had a hard time overcoming the religious and ethnic splits. If we retained some influence over the Sunnis, we could probably have talked them into letting the Kurdish area of NE Syria go over to Kurdistan.
We would have ended up with the map of the region that we probably should have gotten in 1920.