NOT THAT YOU ASKED
Back during the debate over whether or not to invade Iraq, the opponents of the invasion often mentioned the Pottery Barn rule--If you break it you buy it. Well, all of these years later that is exactly what happened. We "broke" Iraq, and now we're stuck with it what's left.
It should be obvious to even those that were most rabid for the invasion of Iraq, that it was a huge mistake, but don't expect any of them to admit it. What we have to do know is figure out what to do to clean up the mess we made. One thing I am sure of is that we have to hit ISIS hard. As hard as we can. And we have to quit being the nice guys.
The air strikes, military training, and weapons the President proposed last week won't get the job done. The Iraqi Army is a joke. They are so bad, they make the French Army look like a bunch of Rambos on speed. Every time they are faced with an opposing force, they run. Even worse, they leave their weapons behind for the enemy to use later. That's what they did when we came in following their invasion of Kuwait. They even surrendered to news crews sent there to report the story of the war. They ran again when we invaded in 2003, and fell apart when we tried to leave. Now they've run from ISIS.
Also, we have to realize that we will never wipe out ISIS or other groups in that part of the world who hate us and want to kill us. They're never going to love us. We can make them afraid of us. We can start to do that by hitting them hard as I wrote above. We have to hit them with everything we've got, excepting nuclear weapons, and we have to be brutal. We shouldn't do anything illegal or immoral, but we can't show them any mercy. We can never win their hearts and minds, but we can make the consequences of attacking us so severe, that they will be afraid to try.
For all of their bravado about not being afraid to die, and wanting to get to the afterlife, when actually faced with that possibility, most of the members of ISIS decide they really want to live after all. All the proof you need of that is that they never tried an uprising like this when Saddam Hussein was in power. They were too afraid of him to try anything. I'm certainly not saying we should adopt any of Hussein's methods, but we need for them to fear us as much as they did him.
We've done it before. In World War II the Japanese refused to surrender because in their culture that was considered dishonorable. Also, in their culture if a person committed a dishonorable act it also brought dishonor to his family, and that was considered a cardinal sin. The only way to make them surrender was to convince them that if they did not we could wipe their people and their culture off the face of the Earth. That's what we did, and it worked.
Again, I'm not advocating using nuclear weapons now, or ever. We have much better conventional weapons today than we had then, that can get the job done. We just have to be willing to use them, and keep using them until the job is done.
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