What is really going on in Iraq?

[Beren Son Of Barahi]

You realize how naive about the military your initial part of the post sounds. Three divisions on the ground destroyed the Iraqi Military with abosolutely no problem. Criticize the United States Military's ability to conduct an occupation and your dead on. Critizing the ability for the military to fight battles against other armed forces and your going down the wrong track.

Fighting battles the US military is good at, keeping the peace and performing occupation duty we suck. We can not handle the political aspect of doing so. We don't train for it, and we don't learn lessons from other nations in regard to that. Our political appratus within the military often gets itself in trouble,

Care to guess how long a man can function in a combat environment before they should be rotated out? Several studies by different militaries have been done in this regard.

No one ever doubted that the biggest military in the world could destroy the Iraqi army, by all reports it (the iraqi army) was not that strong after all. the point i was making was, that fighting armies is the easy bit, reaching bad-dags is the easy part. staying there and sorting out the god-forsaken mess that it creates is hard part and thats the part where things went seriously wrong.

The politics is another area where things went very wrong, both the administration and also the armies ability to handle the local population, blend in a little and not being seen as all that different from the locals. also not arresting people for no reason would of help as well.

the point with the 6 months rotations is that the locals and the soldiers start to understand each other and things start to almost become a state of "normal" then the solders up and go and the locals need to get shot to bits while the new guys get used to it all over again... this was not very well thought through at all, and could of saved a lot of ill will towards the army. This is something that the british and even better the australians do very very very well.