Quote Originally Posted by Ski View Post
A pride of lions? Please. You give the Islamic radicals too much credit sir.
Not really, but I'm incredibly easy. Not lions then. How about a pack of Jackals -- or even wild dogs? Still propose to do nothing? If so, we have a different approach to life.
Iraq had no lions, they had a broken country that had the illusion of stability and strength.
If you were under that illusion, as were many, not my problem. IMO, they were neither stable nor strong but they did have the misfortune to have an unloved dictator and be smack dab in the geographic center of the ME, they thus became an easy target.
The surveillance program under Desert Spring and other Iraq tailored operations worked quite fine. It was undoubedtly cheaper, both in blood and treasure, and kept a modicum of stability in the region.
Stability in the region was not the issue -- export of nominally Islamic fundamentalist terrorism to the rest of the world was the issue and, in particular, attacks on the US (read: Afghanistan, here we come) and more importantly, US interests worldwide (as in Khobar towers, the embassies, Beirut and all that -- read Iraq and the greater ME, here we come...) were the triggers to do more than passively accept them -- which Desert Fox and such did absolutely nothing to deter. One could argue that such halfhearted foolishness merely encouraged the Jackals...

The object in attacking Iraq was not to produce a stable ME, it was to get bases in the area in order to facilitate the local development of greater stability and to deter local adventurers in the field of global terrorism by cutting the time to accomplish that from four or five generations to only two or so. May not have been the best plan in the world but it'll probably work and it is certainly vastly preferable to continuing to encourage the attacks by NOT responding significantly.
Now there is a power vacuum that we are temporarily filling. I am of the opinion this cannot be sustained indefinatly.
Shouldn't need to be sustained indefinitely, just another 15-30 years or so. Hang in there, it'll get worse before it gets better.