¿Otro Vietnam?

Sigo convencido de que si EEUU realmente busca tener éxito en Irak es necesario dejar la corrección política de lado y empezar a manejarse como en un conflicto armado de verdad.

Salvando las distancias, el maestro Thomas Sowell piensa más o menos lo mismo:

You cannot have law and order in any country where armed bands of competing militias can terrorize the population. Instead of confronting these militias at the outset with an ultimatum to disarm or be killed, we let the Iraqi government veto what our military forces could do, leaving Shi'ite militias intact in Baghdad's "Sadr City" neighborhood and elsewhere.

Having pushed the "democracy" vision for Iraq, we could not simply disregard the country's elected government. But democracy arose in western civilization centuries after law and order had been established. We tried to do it in the reverse order in Iraq.

When push comes to shove, people will support tyranny rather than suffer lethal chaos that makes normal everyday life impossible for themselves and their children.

The success or failure of the troop surge in Iraq may depend far more on whether those troops can again be hamstrung by politically restrictive "rules of engagement" than on how many troops there are.