May is correct. Our own morality hurts us in this campaign. If we were to have entered Fallujah and in our best Classical Roman manner murdered everyone in the city it would have sent the clear message to the Sunni community that playtime is over and it is best for them to acquiesce to the new reality. That is the way the game is played in much of the world. Ho understood this. Mao understood this. Saddam and Daddy Assad understood this. Mubarak understands this. Witness how all of the above have dealt with insurgencies.

By not following the Scipio Africanus model in a world where failing to do so is seen as a sign of weakness, we open ourselves up to a whole series of attacks from the terrorists, without mollifying the America-haters of Europe, Canada, San Francisco and the Upper West Side one jot.

What good did it do any of them?

Ho won. Mao won. Daddy Assad won. Saddam would have stayed in power had he not overreached in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Mubarak is in power without serious challenge. And Scipio Africanus certainly won.

This is a different kind of war and dealing with it through rules best suited for the playing fields of Eton doesn't get it done.

What good is our current strategy doing in the Sunni triangle now?

Won what?

All the people I mentioned won their wars and/or internal battles against insurgencies. Has anyone heard a peep out of Carthage since about the 3d century BCE?

Yes, Rome won using such tactics 2300 years ago. None of the others you list achieved anything worthwhile.

They all achieved their goals, except when Saddam got too big for his breeches. That's not a bad track record.

Bart,

You are confusing your Scipios. Africanus beat Hannibal and won the Second Punic War. He granted a remarkably generous peace to the Carthaginians. They had to give up all their territories outside of Africa, forsake war unless given permission by Rome to engage in one, and pay an indemnity and an annual tribute. He did not raze the city or sell the populace into slavery.

It was Scipio Amelianus that leveled the joint, against his better judgement, on orders from Rome after the Third Punic War. Carthage had reestablished itself as a major trading center. Cato the Censor led the charge against them because he could not accept a commercial rival to Rome in the west, he was a political opponent of Scipio Africanus (taking a shot at the great man's legacy) and he felt that the Carthaginians had never been adequately punished for Hannibal's campaign in Italy.

The Romans drove them into violating the treay. One of their other African client states (Numantians or Mauritinians, can't remember which--Massanisa's people) began pillaging Carthaginian territory and raiding their caravans. The Romans refused to intervene until the Carthaginians fought back, at which point they promptly declared war on Carthage and dispatched Amelianus to do the dirty work.

The Third Punic War had nothing to do with Roman security, it was simply a matter of greed and spite.

Their goals. The point is to achieve ours, not theirs. Theirs aren't worthy of achievement. Ours are.

What are our goals? They are quite simple. We want the territory that is Iraq to stop being a terrorist haven, to cease being a place that undermines American interests. Anything else is just wasting the lives of American soldiers.

What gets that done? If we had decided to slice the place into its three constituent parts, the Shia and Kurdish regions would be more or less democratic, but they would certainly be peaceful. Most Shia concerns have been that we would stab them in the back like Old Bush did in 1991. An independent Basra would atone for that.

All that would be left is the Sunni Arab rump area around Baghdad. Nobody in Kirkuk or Basra would shed any tears if we plowed the whole place with salt. Another option is cutting a deal with one of the Sunni thugs and let him run the place so long as he doesn't cause any trouble in the neighborhood.

Fanciful notions of democratizing the savages are only going to get a lot of American soldiers killed.

Note that your plan calls for concession, not salted earth, but why should the Shi'a give up Baghdad?

Because it's not theirs. We are demanding that the Serbs give up Pecs, aren't we?

The Shi'a are our allies.

As are the Serbs.

The Serbs should have been, but aren't.

Concessions can make sense when the cost of not making them is excessive, either militarily, economically or politically. The correct decision from a moral perspective would be a scorched-earth policy, just as that would be the correct policy for Israel in dealing with the so-called Palestinians and the Serbs in dealing with the Kosovar Albanians and the Bosniaks who live in the Serb parts of what is now Bosnia-Hercegovina. However, we can't always do what morality demands.

The demonization of the Serbs, a policy jointly encouraged by the Wahahbists and the Vatican for different imperialistic reasons, is a very stupid one for Americans to engage in. Now is not the time to be in a confrontation with Russia, and had we not supported a genocidal campaign by Catholic Croatians and Muslim Bosniaks and Kosovars against Orthodox Christian Serbs we would be in far better shape vis-a-vis Orthodox Russia than we are. Anti-Western biases in Ukraine and other former SSRs were strengthened by our criminal actions in the Balkans.

We were in a position to unite the most powerful nations of the Balkans and to make vast inroads in the CIS countries but in order to placate the Muslims we punted that away. (If one were a cynical misanthrope with no faith in the honesty, integrity or decency of the American political leadership, one might think it was the result of Saudi cash that we did this._) We could have said after the theatre bombing in Moscow that we and Russia are on the same page, facing the same adversary and just as we are bringing law and order to Iraq, so Russia is doing the same in Chechnya. We blew it and now we have the temerity to condemn the Russians for thinking and behaving like it's 1919 all over again, and that Mother Russia is being encircled by enemies. Our policies have played into the hands of the xenophobes and hard-liners in the Kremlin and have made any reform or any openness or anything resembling rule of law anathema to the Russian voter.

Our failure in Bosnia has led directly to the current confrontational status with Russia that ain't going away soon. The lack of a united front against Muslim terror will harm us immeasurably in the years to come.

No, it won't. We'll turn the Serbs loose and tell Russia to use it's nukes if we ever need to. It seems unlikely at the rate we're winning.

If a group of xenophobes reaches ascendancy in the Kremlin and takes the view that surreptitiously arming Muslim terrorists with the latest technology will hurt America and that hurting America is good regardless of the risks to Russia, we could be in big trouble. The liberal distribution of suitcase nukes through Mafiya connections could be a huge problem.

What has enabled us to 'win' to the extent we have since 9/11 has been the absence of a major military manufacturer backing the terrorists. That is precisely why the Vietnam analogies have been so dopey. A sea change in Russian opinion from its current vague sympathies with our cause to active hostility tilts the playing field against us, strengthening the terrorists. This is not a good thing.

What do we care if the Russians sell the Islamists the rope with which they liberate Central Asia?

Because 5 or 6 Russian-built suitcase nukes detonated in Wall Street, Rockefeller Center, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and Hollywood could pretty much devastate the American economy for the rest of history, as well as killing millions of the most productive Americans.

Russia still has plenty of Primakovs around, guys who think because they and the Islamists share a hatred of America, that they can cut a deal to mutual advantage. If the Islamists had access to Russian intelligence advice, they would be a real problem.

Bart:

It wouldn't have much long term effect.

9/11 wrecked the economy for at least a year and that was little more than a firecracker compared to what the Muslims could do with Soviet technology.

Bart:

The economy grew in the year after 9-11.

The stock market took about a 20% hit. And our economy always 'grows.' The question is by how much and whether it exceeded population growth and inflation. I am pretty sure you will find it did not.

I know in the insurance industry we took a serious beating.

Bart:

It did.