|
I rather agree almost completely with this article. SECURITY, SECURITY, SECURITY is the upmost overriding factor in stabilizing Iraq. It has been my opinion from the start and always will be that we needed a minimal of 500,000 + on the ground. Even now I feel that we need more then the 21,500 surge though the army can't physically do that unless we re-instate the draft. In hindsight, we definetly never prepared for the outcome of Bremer's political vaccum his de-bathification created. I also agree that we need to move to smaller outposts when it comes to larger population centers. The more you interact with the population, I feel the better off you are. Instead they see us as an occupier sitting on a huge bases.
This following example is why I believe from the article that controlling the population is important. My base is in a Shi'ite area. Most of the surrounding population enjoy's our presence and supports us to an extent. We do a variety of things to help the locals. But the militia's and the insurgents use fear and intimidation through death threats, though they rarely execute their threats, to scare the local population into becoming a benign entity on keeping them out of the AO. Therefore, the insurgents gain free movement and don't have to worry about the locals reporting their activing for the fear of death. Before we got here, our base had only received 1 IDF incident from 2003 - April 2006 and the locals captured them and the local shiek carried out a death sentence on them. Now, IDF and IED's have become almost a daily occurence and we do get great human intel yet from the population but most of them are afraid to come forward for a variety of reasons.
|