Centerfield

If you are against a war; all news is bad news (Until the war is over and even then it should have been over sooner!)

I'm against the Iraq war, Chris. But, I want the US to be successful and I want the president's long term vision/doctrine behind this course of action to be successful, also, so that the country will be safer.

If we're not successful, we still need to focus on keeping our country safe.

There is a lot of bad news about Iraq from many sources. But, when Tully posts the good news report, I read it, too.

Read ALL the news. It's the only hope you have for gaining anything resembling perspective. And it's still no guarantee.

I post the bi-weekly Good News Report because all I see in the MSM is the bad news, and the troopers report a much different picture. All good? Hell, no! It's a war. But it's actually a war we're winning. Now that the campaign's over I hope we see more balanced and comprehensive reporting. But we still won't get it from any single source.

Just so it's known, Yglesias was originally pro-war. I think it was the absence of WMD that turned him against it.

There's still a valid point to be addressed.

A US sergeant recently asked why we didn't just send in a hit squad to take out Saddam, that it didn't seem necessary to destroy so much infrastructure, annihilate so many people, steal so much resource.

With all the technology, and military power and genius and information, how is that this so-called "SUPERpower" can't deal with a simple assasination?

If it's OBL, or Saddam, or Zarqawi, or whichever you want.
You've got to ask the obvious question some time : who benefits from these prolonged battles ?

Valid point?

I think that is already a dry bone.

Assasinating Saddam would not gurantee an US friendly govenment and not the revesal of the decision to ask Euros for the oil instead of the Dollar.

Also with most of the infrastructure intact, how would Haliburton making billions?

I think there was 3 main purpose of the war.

1.) Free access of the best quality Middle East oil.
2.) Establishing a foothold to eventully control ALL middle east.
3.) Get the Iraqis pay for the rebuilding their industry by the same country who destroyed it.

A dry bone indeed.

US policy has banned direct assassination attempts for decades, since the Castro fiasco. This didn't stop us from trying "precision strikes" aimed at killing Saddam as early as Bush 41 (and continued by Clinton) but they missed, eh?

And the obvious--you have to know exactly where the target is going to be, and when, to even try.

And Matthew, do you think that our primary objective is to capture or kill Zarqawi? Or is it to make it possible to hold elections in late January? If we force the terrorists out of their sanctuaries and into tents in the desert, it'll be a lot harder to make bombs and their command and control system will be dysfunctional.

In the short-run, yes. In the long-run, no. Keep in mind that this was the same "logic" Rumsfeld & Co. used when talking about Sadaam's elite military guard. The initial push towards Baghdad managed to dilute them by scattering them far and wide. In the long-run, it gave the loyalists time to re-group, re-think and re-organize. It's a whole hell of a lot harder to deliver a deadly blow when they are dispersed. I'd much prefer they stay where they are at than become desert dwellers.

Zarqawi's real name is "Emmanuel Goldstein"...(read Orwell if you don't get it).

Yglesias is absolutely right; it will make little difference if Zarqawi's caught because he is not the evil genius behind all of the violence in Iraq. The reasons are much more complex than that, and they will never be solved by an administration which has proven time and again that it prefers determined commitment to short, simple solutions, even after those solutions have been proven inoperable.

Why all the consternation? John Ashcroft just told us that our objective of defeating crime and terrorism has been achieved.

Marc,
What makes you think that terrorists will be banished "into tents in the desert"? Will they be riding camels with their harem women? I don't know if you intended to stereotype them, but that is the way your statement reads.

The resistance has not survived because they are stupid. If history is repeated, they most certainly will be moving on to other well prepared locations, and moving again...and again. That is the nature of insurgent warfare. Lets not underestimate them. As far as C and C, the insurgency, by all accounts, is decentralized and cellular(again the nature of insurgent warfare). If anything, the taking Fallujah's real estate will prove a short lived victory, more than counterbalanced by the degradation of America's image in Iraq and the world at large. We will be associated with Fallujah like Russians are associated with Grozny. Yglesias is correct.

Pericles over at Daily Kos has put up a great post about AL Qaeda's strategy; http://tinyurl.com/6w44c

The un-stupid insurgency is in the process of losing about half or more of its foot soldiers in Fallujah. There's some definition of "smart" there that eludes me.

OTOH, it is a good demonstration of evolution in action. The smart insurgents ran away. We get to kill the dumb ones. But even the dumb ones were not worthless.

Killing even stupid insurgents would, in the limited context of battle, be "worth" something if there were a finite number of insurgents. I recall thinking this morning during the drive to work, when I heard that U.S. forces had blown up a mosque (that apparently was not harboring fighters--just in the way), "There's another several dozen people who are going to be really pissed at us."

The funny thing is that I saw a post at BOP zapping Yglesias. It's hard to stay far enough to the left for those people.