Reader comments -- Iraq

M&S Iraq was salvageable in 2010. For that matter, it still is. But to be in the ME without compensation for a mercenary protective force condition is foolish. And Iraq chose ELFI the French petroleum industrial giant, not us, to be ther petroleum infrastructure management agency. The problem with Iraq is that you didn't have the density of surveillance, _at the ground level_, to make it all work. Thinks like Argus IS and Gorgon Stare were not available but more importantly, we didn't have the means to tag every Iraqi citizen so that, when the worst happened, there was an RFID receiver which could record everyone within 200 meters via a national ID card system and more importantly, _tie that recording to a facial recognition HD camera image_. Which is the real sham of Iraq in that the military was in there with million and billion dollar efforts at 'force protection' upgrades but _NOBODY CONSIDERED_ that the Iraqis w ho were on the fence were the largest 'force' we had to save. Just like nobody considered that the way you save cattle from wolves is not to armor the cattle nor to bring in more sheepdogs but to find out where the wolves live and go pay a call in kind. This is what death to the system of terrorist really means. You go knock on their door. Or grab them off the street corner. Or take them in hand as they step off a bus or out of a café. On your schedule, not theirs. Because a man who is bagged for helping put together the truck bomb that blew apart the Baghdad Market is just as important an effect or as the truck driver who is roasting his chestnuts over a different kind of fire. The fact that you could network this kind of capability, securely, using dozens of armored telephone poles to cross-cover thousands of sensors under an "Attacking the surveillance grid is a death penalty offense, no questions asked." condition, all for the price of a single fast ambulance squadron of F-16s on CAS Stack or alert pad response. Is where the military _blew chunks_ in failing to achieve the least expensive, most effective, outcome. Because you don't have to make the system airborne to get the resolution and redundancy needed to protect the population. You just have to have enough secondary (covert) sensors that when they take out two, three or a dozen, the faces still get a Candid Camera moment which buys them a wall with their blood on it. And then a picture of the consequences on National TV. This is how you keep the Iraqis from self destructing in Sectarian genocidal warfare. By making it absolutely clear that war as a coup driven sport that gets you to heaven is NOT what is happening here. What is happening here is _law enforcement_. Break the law and the law breaks you. Know the law. Know that butchery and terrorism without a uniform gets you field courted by a military governance express pathway to a firing squad. Additionally, know that not having your card means not getting food or cooking gas or electricity or fresh water (treat it like EBT to make it more acceptable). Not providing honest work and home addresses gets you kicked out into the street and your dwelling burned down or turned over to someone more dese rving. Trading or sabotaging your IDs gets you a 5 year prison term on a chain gang. And Know that the Americans _mean business_. When the Americans got rough over the Christmas bombings in 1972, the Whole World was shocked and outraged, even before they saw how precise the bombing really was. But the Russians (who were primary bad actors, along with the French, British and Chinese, both in supplying their communist brethren with gear at least 2 centuries beyond their own social knowledge ability to fabricate and providing key advisers at combat support sites like radar and telecoms), thru their Ambassador Dobrynin, sent the word: "Well done and about damn time." The world respects strength because strength can be so overwhelming as to actually /imply restraint/ as a possibility of avoiding violence or at least minimizing it's endless, cyclical, nature. We need to remember that and start thinking about the systems that give us that overwhelming leverage, at cost, to enable a better society in a world where Main Force level engagements in a sterile (non MOUT, non civilian saturated) environment are increasingly less and less likely. We also need to make it clear to Americans that this is not Big Brother. This is a specific system which ONLY the military can use and ONLY in foreign warfighter conditions. Because we are a better people who use words and the vote to change our lives. Preferably through a Constitutional Amendment that says: "No number on anyone's forehead, ever."