DaedalusAI1 wrote:
In point, your opinion is a political one and therefore is not thinking about the fact that your decision to not bomb the building affects the chance that the people who are doing the fighting get to go home and see their families someday. It is easy to say they shouldn't have bombed the building when your life isn't the one at risk. If innocents died, which may have happened, if I was one of the innocent people in that building then I'm pretty sure getting blown up would be pretty shitty, but that's life. Everyone dies and as humans we do what we can to make sure our selves and the ones we care about aren't harmed.
Exactly, my point was a political/strategic one. I know this sounds flippant and is indeed very easy for me to say cos I'm not there, no members of my family are there, but the "people who are doing the fighting" are professional soldiers. They are doing their job, that they have been trained for and they are enforcing the will of their political masters. It is therefore, for better or for worse, these 'higher ups' who make the final decisions and not the man on the ground. At the end of the day what is the coalition's primary objective? Is it to defeat the insurgency or is it force protection?
The tactics appear to be aimed at clearing areas of insurgents and capturing or killing them. This head on approach obviously invites and indeed encourages head on conflict and the amount of firepower required to protect your troops causes higher and higher civilian, insurgent and coalition casualties.
I believe that history has proven you cannot defeat an indigenous (inc imported jihadis) terrorist/resistance force mearly by killing as many of them as you can. This inflexible straight military approach has failed before, notably for France in Indochina and Algeria, the Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya and the US in Vietnam compared with the success of the 'hearts and minds' syle campaign effected by the British in Malaya in the 50's.
It's very possible that tactics are evolving to a more political approach but as Determined said "these things take time", Malaya took 10 years for example and I do worry that in this day and age of 24 hour news channels and shallowness in western politics the resolve just isn't there.
Lastly to quote Daedalus
"Everyone dies and as humans we do what we can to make sure our selves and the ones we care about aren't harmed". You've hit the nail on the head mate, if this sentence in anyway reflects policy, then how are we ever going to win. If the everyday Iraqi feels that we truly do not give a toss about them, and that we feel 1 of our soldiers is worth 10 of their civilians we might as well just pull out now. We MUST care about them, the troops on the ground must respect and care about them because the population is the ultimate prize in this war. Without the support of the population the insurgency withers and dies.
Territory doesn't matter, Bodycounts don't matter, the population matters.