W. Post. Asumming risks to obtain victory

The President’s plan for securing Iraq has begun, and once it was done in the past, the Army is playing offensive once again. And that’s vital for securing dangerous areas such as Baghdad’s worst neighbourhoods. It is a bold move, but it’s this way wars are won: defeating them in their own ground.

Most analysts will agree Baghdad it’s been the most difficult city to subjugate in all History, but that is, first, because never before the enemy hid between civilians, using them as human shields (“martyrs” they would call), and, second, because in all the History of the Mesopotamian region, cities have been burned to the ground upon conquest.

It is a questionable strategy of liberation what the Pentagon has issued for Iraq, ever since the invasion. Germany was liberated too and look at numbers! The Air Force and the RAF bombed it to the ground.

What’s been done so far, and has, therefore, cost infantry lives, has been a “gentle liberator” strategy, that would grant the population’s support.

Today, not only most Iraqis are reluctant to consider Americans as friends, but have set loose on an underground civil strife that is decimating the country. I’m no one to criticise how the invasion has been done, but what’s clear is that America has been losing the post-war for three years now.

So let’s expect this works. It needs to work, because leaving Iraq for itself is absolutely unacceptable, in political or strategic ways. It would be a way of saying “that’s it. You’ve won.” And that just can’t be.

Surely, the evolution won’t be noticeable on the short term. Only a more intensive action by the Iraqi government, getting strong on the streets, will grant the new regime’s survival. It wasn’t easy for the democratic Germany (not the Soviet one), after WWII, and it shouldn’t be any different for Iraq, either.