Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

Part of it must be that these Iraqi servicemen are there to stay in their country long after the US goes home. They probably don't want to be treated as treators by fellow Iraqis once the dust has settled, blood has dried, and are therefore hedging their bets...

More commentary on the war from Richard Hart Sinnreich, as appeared in this Sundays Wash. Post

'Its not war'
"Observing them, Americans might be pardoned for wondering just what we think we're doing. One week our troops are clearing Fallujah of Baathist insurgents. The next week they aren't. A month later they're clearing Najaf of Shiite insur- gents. Then, a few days later, they aren't. Meanwhile, casualties and insurgents alike multiply.

Somewhere behind all this, there must be some coherent strategic intention, but for most of us it isn't easily visible. As far as we are able to judge, the war in Iraq has become a sort of military perpetual motion machine, producing plenty of activity but not much evidence of progress."
the perpetual motion comment really caught me.

......"Rather, as recent events in Najaf reveal, military operations in Iraq continue to fall between two levels, destructive enough to provoke Iraqi resistance but not ruthless enough to suppress it."

He also is making comparisons to the resistance to "occupation" in the Civil War, Grant, & Lincoln. Good reading for anyone interested

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20338-2004Aug20.html

What makes you think we are trying to win?

I think we are using our combat and sigint capability to find out who our enemies are by provoking attack, measuring who calls whom, and logging them down for future attention. It's called traffic analysis.
We can easily pay people in Iraq one thousand dollars each to kill them, later. Think Phoenix program. It worked in Vietnam and it works on the West Bank, so why won't it work in Iraq?

In what way and by what standard did the Phoenix program work in Viet Nam? If the policy was a success in Viet Nam, Israel should tremble at the prospect of success in the West Bank.

Back to the original article: it depresses and terrifies me that the unwillingness of Iraqis to die for America should be a revelation for anybody. Outside of Kurdistan, the USA could not have expected to have a single sincere friend since April.

Outside of Kurdistan, the USA could not have expected to have a single sincere friend since April.

And how long do you expect this exception to last? I imagine that, given that Kurdistan has little oil, they'll be tossed overboard when Allawi or his successor tells the US to choose between them and him with the oil. Honestly, how stupid a foreign leader do you have to be to imagine that US support lasts longer than a newscycle?

Kurds have oil. There's a lot around Kirkuk, which is why Saddam had many of them expelled and replaced by Arabs. The oil had been discovered by the 1920's (see Yergin's opus).

The only friends the Kurds have are the yanks. The Turks, the Iraqis, and the Iranians have been fighting them for ever, if the yanks don't stay to protect them they are for it.

Hey, wanna buy an Iraqi Security Forces AK-47?

Never fired and only dropped once.

That was a cheap shot, Felix, but I'll admit it -- you got a laugh out of me.

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The only friends the Kurds have are the yanks. The Turks, the Iraqis, and the Iranians have been fighting them for ever, if the yanks don't stay to protect them they are for it.
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Hm, what to make of the huge U.S. military assistance Turkey & Iraq received for wiping out the Kurds?