It's All Over—Except for the Shooting

U.S. forces have begun a campaign to mop up the reamaining Ba'athist forces in Iraq, reports The San Jose Mercury News.

"The next few weeks there will be a countrywide, concerted effort to gather up the people that we believe are threats to coalition forces and civil order," says an Army flack. Dubbed "Desert Scorpion," the plan may last through the end of the summer.

Comments

[Warren]

How many dead US soldiers will it take before we put our tail between out legs and go home, leaving Iraq to disintegrate into something worse than it was before we started blowing it up, just like every occupying power in the Mid East has done for all of human history?

[cinquo]

"How many dead US soldiers.."

apparently according to warren and the rest of the anti-war dweebs -- greater than zero.

see their crooked arguments: stay, its a quagmire, or leave and it is "worse than before" which means worse than mass killing fields and kiddie prisions.

oh yes, we should have simply done nothing is their agument, at least then among the killing fields and kiddie prisons "it could be worse."

[Lefty]

Cinquo, you're parroting the same crap as all the other nitwits. We either go to war or we "do nothing".

We bombed that place for years, had inspectors all over it, controlled the economy and totally dominated the airspace. If we had agreed to a 30 day wait for the inspectors to do their thing we could have trumped all the criticism and had all of Western Europe, Turkey and the entire rest of the world in there with us. Instead, we told them to fuck off, argued that there was an imminent threat and now we are totally responsible for the care and feeding of Iraq. Brilliant.

And don't give me that shit about thug dictators and mass graves, 13 years old that we could have prevented. Before this is over we will be doing the equivalent of cutting off thieves hands and stoning prostitutes in the quest to "restore order".

[MS]

How many such plans are going to be needed to finally stabilize "liberated" Iraq?

[omnibus bill]

Oh, BS Lefty. France, Germany, Belgium and Russia were never, ever, ever, ever going to get on board. France had weapons contracts and was shipping Mirage jet parts and Roland missiles (one of which was used to shoot down and kill a couple American pilots) as late as January of this year. Iraq owed all four countries tremendous amounts of money, debts that will likely be discharged with Iraq under new management. The French and German intelligence services were also passing the Iraqis information about US military actions. There was no way they were coming around to the U.S. viewpoint.

It was all about oooooiiiiiillllll(Tm), remember? The only thing the protestors screwed up was in thinking that American companies were the only ones with an interest in it. By the way, how are those oil companies doing, now that gas prices have dropped by 50 cents per gallon?

[Croesus]

Has anyone done a comparison to pacification in post-war Germany as opposed to post-war Iraq? That seems like a good starting point to me.