Mario Loyola spots the logical fallacy inherent in the current argument for sending more troops to Iraq:
I still don’t see why everybody assumes an inverse relation between the prevalence of security forces and the strength of the insurgency. I hate to keep coming back to this, but the Islamist insurgency in Algeria during the 90’s arose volcanically in the very teeth of an enormous army that was fully in control of the security situation everywhere.
While increasing the number of troops works very well in a conventional military conflict, the same is simply not true in a non-conventional guerilla war. Even extreme brutality doesn’t work particularly well, as has been seen in Chechnya over the last 15 years.
Once it becomes clear that there is a genuine non-conventional resistance, there are only two options, the Roman and the British. In this case, the British is unlikely to work due to the religious aspect, while the West simply doesn’t have the colonists to support the Roman method.
Unless, of course, that plan for colonizing the Middle East with millions of Hispanic illegal aliens is put into play. If the US truly wants to “win the war” in Iraq, that is the only option with a plausible chance of success.
Which means, of course, that it’s never going to happen. All this “triumph of the will” nonsense from the neocons is simply balderdash, it’s remniscent of Hitler’s latter-stage rantings when the Third Reich’s fate had been sealed two years before.