Good thought. Non-Westerners can sometimes fight bravely, but they frequently fight stupidly, disregarding basic military principles. The Japanese army in WWII was a case in point, making uncoordinated attacks, seriatim, in instances where a massed offensive would have achieved the objective.

Please don't try to suggest that the North Vietnamese won their war: what they won was the post-Treaty of Paris dolchstoss.

The camel-jockeys, on the other hand, are very much bereft of military virtue. Their combination of incompetence and cowardice did not begin with the last two Gulf Wars. Suicidal fanaticism does not equate with valor. It is rather a manifestation of thr consciousness of failure

Those areas may be no-go areas for our troops, but apparently not for our JDAMs. That's a big difference from previous wars.

Belmont Club has mentioned this classic insurgency/counter-insurgency dynamic, the attempt by government forces to corral or lure the insurgents into areas where they can be killed. The difficulty for CI forces is finding the insurgents, not beating them, so if you can lure these idiots into believing they have safe areas, then trap them in them, you have half the battle won.

My feeling is that the US public is distracted with the election, allowing the army a good chance to kill alot of terrorists without the bleeding heart international left intervening.

I notice it's now practice to evict journalists too, and recently an Arab newman was killed by an American helicopter. All good.

Oh Harry, where art thou...

I notice it's now practice to evict journalists too, and recently an Arab newman was killed by an American helicopter. All good.

The story is that the bad guys blew up a bradley. But the crew escaped. They called in air support which rocketed the bradley. Why haven't they done this before. 13 Arabs, including the aforementioned "journalist" died.

If we start doing this more frequently. they will start saying away from our vehicles.

There must be fewer sights more agravating to a combat airman than a shreiking mob of savages jumping all over a disabled US vehicle. I wonder how many of his missiles 'strayed' slightly from their intended target into the nearby crowd? And exactly how surgical his 3mm counterfire was?

Kill a few swarms, and they will all go away.

Flies to honey, flies to honey.

Meanwhile, we're busy creating an Iraqi national consciousness where none existed before.

Can it coalesce before we kill everybody?

It's a race we shouldn't even be running, and wouldn't be if one of two things had happened:

1. We had pulled out and let the Iraqi settle their own scores, as Orrin advocates.

2. We had had enough infantry/police to squelch the resistance early on.

Now, if we can get out of this, we'll have to kill a lot more people than we would have had to earlier. Not that I see a downside to that.

Nor is there any downside to a national consciousness--in fact, there's a huge upside. But it's unlikely that the Sunni are forging bonds with the Shi'a by resisting their rule.

My point from the start, Orrin.

It wasn't me that imagined an Iraqi destiny.

But given enough effort, one could be created, the same way Rumania was created out of material just as unlikely

Kurdistan was already gone ten years ago.