From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com> Sent: Nov 22, 2004 11:35 AM To: cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report
...
I'm pretty heretical about this. I think if we had decapitated Iraq, went after our military objectives, like securing what was a threat to us, including Iraq's senior military and political leadership and their weapons stockpiles, and left political order to emerge there on its own, like we did in Afghanistan, we could have done it with Rumsfeld's original 50,000 troop estimate.
It seems like there would have to have been someone to take over in a fairly clean way, or we'd have wound up setting off a civil war. Note that in the Kurdish parts of Iraq, there was someone to take over, and those parts are generally not a problem for us. (Once it's not our people getting shot at, we probably don't care that much if it's a pain for someone else to police.) But I think the parts of Iraq that Saddam was still ruling had few high-profile leaders with forces that could have taken over quickly--he wasn't especially fond of potential rivals. Maybe we could have cut a deal with some local strongmen and gotten something stable together with minimal US involvement if we'd done it early, I'm not sure. ...
Cheers, RAH
--John