Reply #116: It takes lots of effort -- and imagination [View All]

[IrateCitizen]

My point is that just because the troops are already HEAVILY involved does not mean that it is necessarily the best path to take. Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. How many more Fallujahs will we have to suffer before it sinks in that the current methods are clearly NOT working?

For instance, as a former military man, you can certainly appreciate the foolishness of using light infantry and armor for policing duties. None of those soldiers are trained for policing -- they're trained to be the blunt instruments of war. But yet, due to the infinite wisdom of our policy makers, there they are -- doing policing work.

The results of such miscalculations are quite predictable to anyone who bothers to analyze the realities on the ground, rather than seeking to "strategize" above it all. I'm not including you in this ivory tower group, but rather speaking of the wonks in the Pentagon and AEI and PNAC who got us into this mess.

There has to be a time at which we say, "The military solution isn't working. Sure, there are security concerns for the IRAQIS that need addressed, but we must move to address them in ways as quickly as possible, so that outsiders can be removed from the equation." I still think the idea of vastly empowering community citizens councils and the like to carry out policing duties in their own neighborhoods would undoubtedly help matters.

You're right that we can't turn back the clock before the invasion. I wholly agree on that point, and am frustrated with the scores of people on threads like this who seem to operate from the perspective that we CAN do just that. But if we are stuck with this situation, shouldn't we approach it in a manner by which we can actually help to facilitate true democracy? True democracy flows from the bottom-up, not the top-down. Yet, one of the first acts of the CGA was to completely ignore the citizens' councils that sprung up all over Iraq in the aftermath of the invasion. It seems to me that the most valuable resource we would have -- direct democracy by the Iraqi people -- is being wasted in the process.

Which, in turn, leads me to question whether or not true democracy was ever a goal there -- not exactly a "leap" to arrive at that conclusion.