Iraq, Bush, Nate cont....

Trust in one has a interesting post about different Iraq strategies. I particularly like the 2nd one, promoting someone with more on the ground experience with irregular war to lead the charge, bypassing the old guard Pentagon folks. In fact, I'm reading this Malcom Gladwell book, Blink, which is all about trusting quick decisions as opposed to drawn out contemplative decisions. He gives this great example of a war game played in 2002 between a rouge military commander in the Middle East with support from terrorist groups and the US. The military hired an ex-Marine, known for being a strategic, aggressive, gunslinging fighter who thought very quickly on his feet. He played the rouge commander and beat the Pentagon generals in a war by fighting "wildly, but in control." He thought very quickly about what types of decisions the generals would make and subverted them. A couple of examples:

1. He knew the first thing they would do was take out his ability to code communication, so they could read every move he was going to make. As soon as they did this, he started using bike couriers and coded prayers to communicate with his commanders in the field, so the Pentagon never knew what he was up to. Sound familiar? It's exactly how OBL operates.

2. He knew the Pentagon was gearing up for a preemptive attack, mostly likely using aircraft carriers and huge battleships as the main lauching pad for strikes. He deployed little boats to spy on the locations of the huge boats and ordered a massive cruise missile strike against the boats. By doing research how many missiles the boats could withstand with counter missiles, he simply lauched more...he sunk 5 of the 6 big boats, causing 20,000 American soldier casualties in one day of the game.

So yes, I agree, we need to promote someone like this to kick the living shit out of Zarqawi and company.

Believe me, I'm all in favor of changing, adapting, trying new things in Iraq. To the extent that Bush hampers these efforts and continues to plodge forward making stuipd mistakes and wasting time, money, and lives, I think absolutely, he should be criticized and held accountable.

But I don't believe in direct democracy and simply because a lot people don't support the war some for the Nate-esque pragmatic reasons or more commonly, those who never supported the war in the first place, isn't for me reason enough to think we shouldn't be over there trying and learning and adapting.

The 1990s were the decade of making choices based upon their popularity, instead of their rightness. We didn't get rid of Saddam in Gulf War I because the Arabs and Europeans didn't want us to. We didn't get involved with Rwanda because the "American people wouldn't support it." A leader is supposed to do what they think is right - not what they think is popular. If we sufficiently disagree with him, we vote him out of office. That's how it works.

Yes, we go to war with the country we have...but I am convinced that Americans are smart enough to realize when a war is right and when it is wrong, even if it takes us awhile to sort it out.

I believe between the Iraqis and us we can figure out a way in the long term to transition to a government that is preferable to both the Iraqis and us than the Saddam option.

I think Americans would be better served by using our energies to figure this out than bitching and moaning about GW Bush.