Quote Originally Posted by Zaknafien
actually, according to Petraeus' own doctrine in FM 3-24, we dont have near enough forces still to pacify Baghdad. The "surge" is a shell game to keep the war going at any cost. Its downright criminal the lengths these men will go to to maintain their profits.
I have never accepted your premise that the war is being purposefully run in a "low-intensity but long duration so that we can milk the money cow" fashion.

I still worry, however, that Patreus is not being given the full support to actually win/suppress this thing. I worry that our government/nation has not truly accepted the need to increase the Navy, Marines, AND put the Army up to 1.5 million boots so that we can actually apply the appropriate amount of force to win these kind of wars.

Xiahou: Hadn't known that the ISF had managed to field 350k of fairly reliable troops. Where'd you get that? Obviously, if they're all more or less field ready, that would get us almost to a 7-1. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that Patreus is enjoying a measure of success?

Rebuilding a nation is not a quick process. There will always be an insurgency as -- even if all of your personnel qualify for sainthood -- they are still "damn furriners" to the locals. Suppressing that insurgency takes boots, time, and a track record of diminishing success on the part of the guerillas until they (save for the inevitable 0.01% whack jobs) finally call it quits. The USA marginalized the insurgency in the Phillipines (1899-1903) in about 4 years -- and that was an almost completely "local" insurgency. To expect faster results with fewer troops per rebel in Iraq seems silly.

Pan-man and the Lemury one, as they often do, have hit upon the biggest potential problem issue of all -- Iraq's ability to move "forward." So far, too many of them are choosing a tribalistic model and reveling in a level of graft and corruption that makes the Mexican govt. seem like a group of amateurs. This will cripple any hope of a Democratic Republic of Iraq just as -- if not more certainly than -- guerilla warfare. It is at least possible to shoot the guerillas and make them stop. This is the harder problem.