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The point of the article is that military power has limited value in the kind of situation we face in Iraq. Our military rolled over Saddam's military with no problem, but it is bogged down in this guerilla-style war for the last five years. Millitary against millitary, we can't be matched, but a guerilla war like Iraq shows the limits of US military power. I don't see anything wrong with that conclusion by the author. Rebgirl, you disagreed with the article, but then you said exactly the same thing.
Raw military power doesn't help much in this kind of war. Yeah, we could bomb the shit out of the place, or round up and shoot everyone of military age. No doubt we have the military power to do it. But it would never get us what we want. The more heavy-handed the tactics, the more recruits you get for the insurgency. You need to do your fighting in a way that doesn't just dig you deeper into the hole.
This is Vietnam over again, and Vietnam did not show that we forgot how to fight a war. Vietnam showed that raw military power has limited value against an insurgency. The Russians found that out in Afghanistan. The British learned that lesson how many times in how many places? (They probably learned it first in America where it was us who "fought like pussies, not like soldiers." The fine line between "freedom fighter" and "pussy coward terrorist" depends on which side you are on I guess. But now I'm getting off track.)
The biggest blunder (out of many) in Iraq was to allow the insurgency to develop in the first place. By disbanding the Iraqi government and army, Bremmer created the insurgency. Instead of keeping a power structure that our military could dominate and control, he created a chaos and vacume that led to an insurgency that our military power has little ability to control, and we've been paying for that blunder for the past 5 years.
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