“fred:
Mike Sylvester,
I am 100% in agreement that the Baath Party had to go and a new military model created. Plus, the new model is more robust and would do a better job of resisting Iranian incursions.”
Mmmwellp…
1) The Garner plan could have been tried.
2) What I was actually for was keeping the Iraqi Army – locked up in their encampments. Then you have three options:
a) Shake-and-bake debaathification and US standard basic training, to hand over to Chalabi/Maliki/etc and walk away.
b) Long, thorough debaathification and AIT, etc., to be used as they are now.
c) Organized demob with pensions, background checks, monitoring, etc., and offers to retain the best X%.
d) Hold ‘em as detainees, hostages or “honored guests” and/or wipe ‘em out at leisure.
Even d) has advantages. The chief pool for insurgents has to be demobbed servicemen and their families. If you do nothing except keep them from going home, you increase the greatest threat to US forces. Then the only force out on the street (AQ or any popular mobs aside) is Uday’s (Qusay’s?) Fedayeen, the combings of the prison scum released to fight us.
In any case, the problem was not Bremer’s not keeping them as was, but his sending them home rejected and penniless. Never do your enemy a small injury, and better to take his life than his income (pace Machiavelli). The worst of all possible worlds. c) attempts to address this. Even if you send them home, do it with a pat on the back and a full dossier on this potential future enemy and all his generations.
a) probably not as good as b) but you would still be in the wings as deus ex machina, I don’t think we would have ever left lock stock and barrel. But either a) or b) has all the advantages of c) or d), or keeps them as options.
Or perhaps I am much confused because whenever I raise this on any blog or board, it gets dead silence. Sure, d) is a bit outside the box but would be approved tactics of any government except that of post-WWII America. Where’s thinking outside the box? I mean, DUH, you don’t just send them home!
