Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[goodluck]

I dont disagree. if you remeber my psots, and yours going into this, I was hopeful and optimistic that iraqis would be able to be humans and control the jihadists.

you said they would not

1400 years of jihad genetics is hard to overcome.

It has nothing to do with genetics. Nor does it have to do with the Iraqis controlling the jihadists. It isn't the jihadists that are committing most of the violence. Not now and not before. What I wrote both before the war began and throughout was that there is too much money, too much hatred and too much history to overcome to make a decent outcome probable, or even plausible. If there ever was a plausible chance to create something decent it was lost when Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al kept their eye on the prize of overthrowing Saddam and installing Chalabi without adequately considering other possible scenarios or preparing for them. hence too few troops. Hence Rumsfeld's "dead-ender" comments. and Myers estimates for the first 2 years of this conflict there were only about 5,000 active fighters against the US. They were idiots. They didn't even pay attention to the Army's own handbooks on fighting guerilla wars.