Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

How about not invading in the first place?

Shh! Pay no attention to the cattle in the parlor.

To the extent that in rewriting history and proposing alternate courses of action we are not allowed to a) refrain from invading at all, b) refrain from invading without a 1991-style UN mandate and coalition, c) refrain from allowing the country to disintegrate into disorder after defeating its army in battle, d) refrain from dismissing the Iraqi army and police and instead rehabilitate them and use them to keep order, e) refrain from responding to the gruesome murders of the four contractors with disproportionate, unthinking force, then sure -- all alternative courses of action would have landed us into even worse soup.

"Empathize with your enemies" or so McNamara tells us in Fog of War.

I took "alternative courses of action" to mean the Fallujah situation as the Marines faced it a few weeks ago.

Perhaps Brad Marie's question could have been more precisely phrased.

The other comments do bring to mind a question, though. When are we going to pull our top scientists off the Great Ray of Life project and get them to work on building a time machine? I know a working Great Ray of Life prototype, with its ability to animate dead, lifeless matter, would give us Promethean, nay, Godlike power; but speaking for myself I could go for a time machine right about now.

Instapundit would say "How about option 'c': win."

Seriously though, I'll agree with Brad on this one. The heavy-handed fighting of the dual insurgencies in Fallujah and Karbala was making the average Iraqi angrier and angrier. Continuing on this course would not only leave a lot of Marines and civilians dead, but would also have made our image on the Iraqi street worse than it already is.

1) Place a brigade north and a brigade south of the city. 2) Seize the two bridges over the Euphrates, 3) Construct a security barriers of concertina wire and earth berms to the north and south of the city from the Euphrates to just before the clover leaf highway junction to the city’s east, 4) Install the standard networks of motion, sound, electromagnetic and video sensors along the perimeter 5) Allow anyone who wants to leave to leave, carrying only a suitcase, 6) Bulldoze a 250 meter clear zone along the east bank of the Euphrates, 7) Withdraw one and one-third’s brigade strength, leaving the rest on guard duty with an attached air cavalry unit and UAVs for surveillance, 8) watch and wait.

Expensive in terms of dollars but cheap in terms of lost GI lives and civilian casualties.

Right, MTC. That's worked so well in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

It worked exactly as planned in the siege of Holy Sepulchre.

The policy becomes futile only when you have persons moving in and out, when you must provide humanitarian relief to trapped non-combattants or when you attempt to guard settlements within the quarantined zone.

Brad Reed: "The heavy-handed fighting of the dual insurgencies in Fallujah and Karbala was making the average Iraqi angrier and angrier."

It was? How do you know? The "average Iraqi" truly has a voice, and we can discern what that voice is saying?

erratum - "the Holy Sepulchre" should read "the Church of the Nativity"

Joe Mealyus: "It was? How do you know?The "average Iraqi" truly has a voice, and we can discern what that voice is saying?"

The voice of the "Average Iraqi" probably cannot be heard--but an articulate, female and angry Iraqi voice lets loose at:

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

And, inside Iraq and the Islamic world, the story will be that the infidel Imperialists came to conquer Iraq, and the mujahedeen drove them out.

And how is this "story" different from the truth?
Is the point that, in a now standard pattern, the US will live in some alternative fairyland with no real relationship to the truth?

In my reading, The Poor Man is simply pointing out one more instance of the Administration's PR bullshit about Iraq being exactly that: no, we haven't brought order to Fallujah; the insurgents have. And no, we're not bringing democracy to Iraq, because we just plain can't.

Alternative courses of action in Iraq for this Administration? 'Fess up to the truth. Admit to the American people what's really going on over there, instead of trying to paper over a disaster with a bunch of happy talk, so we can have a more informed national discussion about WTF we should do - knowing that *all* the alternatives suck, but we've still got to choose one.

MTC, IIRC, the original Marine force was less than one brigade. It was brought up to brigade strength (three battalions) later. Assuming that similar shortages existed for engineering support, your plan assumes at least 2-3x the available forces. I recall several Iraqi blogs suggesting that it was quite possible to move in and out of Fallujah, because the 'cordon' wasn't very tight.

Precisely. Making an example of Fallujah without massacring the inhabitants required a commitment to the cordon strategy. Commanders made an only a half-hearted commitment, allowing the insurgents infiltration and exfiltration. Marines holding the "lines" were thus condemned to try and break the insurgency through punitive forays into the city--a hopeless task that led to serious casualties among both the Marines and the civilian population.

The Marines could have always applied more air support to Fallujah - lots more. This would have killed more of the insurgents, but a hell of a lot more of innocent Iraqis. Not much of a choice when the goal was to rid a town of insurgents and not to be rid of a town and all its people. Can we all say Hobson?

The Marine commander made a good choice. Spare the rain of steel and give this new Iraqi brigade a chance to police Fallujah.

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

The voice of a female Iraqi who had an incredibly cushy deal under Saddam Hussein, and is *bitterly* disappointed that the deal no longer exists.

For voices of other Iraqis:

http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/

http://healingiraq.blogspot.com/

http://messopotamian.blogspot.com/

Iraq the Model

Healing Iraq

The Messopotamian

The fact that close to 90% of Iraqis now view us as an occupying rather than a liberating army is presumably irrelevant Mark. No sirree, just a slur on someone who writes things you don't like and a few links. Is it *perhaps* possible that there is a degree of self-interest in those "positive" reports?

It takes a special degree of delusion to believe that the catastrophe in Iraq is simply bad PR.

Marc

With so many conflicting stories coming out of Iraq how can we possibly know with any certainty what 90% of Iraqis feel?

Fallujah was lost in the first two weeks of the Iraqi war when chaos and looting were allowed to take hold. There are situations such as prevail today in Iraq where there are no decent solutions. What has to be recognized is to acknowledge the mistakes that lead to the current situation and get rid of the people in charge so they don't do it twice.

We can know that the CPA has been regularly commissioning polls since the fall of Baghdad. Last summer 23% of the respondents picked "occupation" when given the choice between occupation and liberation. ***Before the torture scandal broke*** last April 88% picked occupation. This is as close as we are likely to get to an objective measure of the degree to which the Bush administration has antagonized a population that clearly disliked the prior regime...

Marc

This discussion is symptomatic of the broader problem in Iraq. By definition a quagmire is a situation where a nation can't afford to lose while at the same time it cannot win. Every decision made in that context is a bad one. Falujah is symptomatic of a disease. Deceit, wishful thinking, and a faith based foreign policy has got us into this situation. It will only end when those who foisted this policy on the American and Iraqi people leave office. Then a political and social solution can be crafted. (One can actually look at Lebanon, to see a bare outline of the solution). In the meantime one can only debate, or think about, or be confronted with bad choices. And that will drive you crazy.

MTC, precisely not. The marines did not have the sthrength to implement a successful cordon. I am assuming that the marine commander was not a fool, and did in fact try to cut off the town from reinforcements/retreat.

Marc,

Do you have a link to the original polls (I want to see the original data and methodology) conducted by the CPA I could look at?

Barry,

Again, we are not in disagreement. The decision to draw a line in the sand after the atrocities in Fallujah came from higher up. It was the responsibility of those just below General Sanchez to make sure that the divisional commander in Anbar had everything he needed to carry out the policy.

I got this from the Voice of America website; there were more recent entries on the even worse recent news on Google. This particular entry (from late last year, six months into the occupation) was the best I found including sample size and method information:

--------------------
Mideast
New Poll: Most Iraqis Now View US as 'Occupier'
Alisha Ryu
Baghdad
18 Nov 2003, 15:09 UTC

Listen to Alisha Ryu's report (RealAudio)
Ryu report - Download 653k (RealAudio)

In Iraq, a new opinion poll, conducted by an independent Iraqi research group shows an increasing number of people view coalition forces as occupiers rather than liberators.

Pollsters at the newly established Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies in Baghdad conducted more than 1,600 face-to-face interviews in seven major cities in late September and early October.

The founder of the center, Sadoun Al-Dulame, is an Iraqi university professor who spent years in exile during Saddam Hussein's regime.

He said the new survey shows a much more negative Iraqi attitude toward coalition forces than his first survey showed. The first poll was taken a month after U.S. forces captured Baghdad in April. "When the American troops, the first time they arrived in Iraq, most of the Iraqis perceived them as liberating forces. But after six months, most of the Iraqi people look at them as occupying forces," he said.

Six months ago, nearly 43 percent of the Iraqis polled said that they viewed coalition forces as liberators. Now, according to the survey, that number has plummeted to less than 15 percent....

-------------

End quote (sorry, the search yielded a deeply ugly URL). The recent polls were different in that people had three choices (liberator, occupier, none of the above); the recent polls had occupier at 88%, liberator near zero. Even last fall, however, liberator was only at 15%.

Marc

Marc, the cure for deeply ugly URLs is www. tinyurl.com (there are others). You paste the sow's ear in a box and get a silk purse like short url that you can copy to where needed.

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