“What led us into Iraq was essentially Bush’s choice in counsel — Bush had chosen to surround himself with fervent neo-conservatives. While Clinton wasn’t shy about using military power either, he had the memory of our Somalia debacle, and was thus somewhat constrained in becoming too confident with the use of force.”
The Somalia debacle? The one where we were trying to feed starving people, the food was being commandeered by a gang, and we attempted to attack the gang?
What I wonder is, is it really more humane to send in these small supertroop forces rather than just blow the whole target area to absolute hell with B-2s?
We could’ve just killed 50,000 Iraqis off the bat, for example, and arguably provided the kind of clarity that the Anbar sheikhs, for example, have just experienced after 4 years of absolutely needless and pointless “war.”
Call me a deaf mute, but from here it doesn’t seem like the supposed benefits, moral and otherwise, of the light, quasi-law enforcement methods actually earn us anything except a much, much longer problem, during which we are blamed for everything we do, everything we are perceived to have done, AND everything the natives do to themselves and to us.
What kind of calculus is this? Why not just firebomb Ramadi and get it all over with?
