Also, IMHO, one of the things we did wrong in Iraq is not pacify, with extreme prejudice, those towns and cities that support the insurgents and terrorists. It has caused the fighting...again, IMHO...to last much longer and cost many more of our own than it otherwise might have.
I think of Fullujah as an example. No way did we need to go in there and lose 120+ of our boys fighting an urban war made to order for Jihadists and their perverted notion of martydom. We should have ringed the place with steel and offered 72 hours for everyone who wanted to get out to do so. Women and young kids one way, fighting aged men another...who would then be used to rebuild their city and to rebuild it in such a fashion that is not only much more modern and with better sanitation, but with wide avenues and clear fields of fire.
Then we should have waged an around the clock bombing campaign that reduced the entire place to rubble. Any innocents dieing in the exchange are on the heads of the terrorist and insurgents. A clear message would also have been sent. A 'demonstration" that I bet would not have had to be repeated too many more times before the Iraqis in those areas where insurgents were abetted...stoppoed abetting them.
...but that's why I will never be in charge of such operations.
We don't discuss it.
After we took Baghdad, we needed to have thousands of hard-core Fedayeen disappear - but they didn't because the place was crawling with journalists.
And so it goes.
Dude - we bombed Dresden in February of 1945. The war lasted a scant two more months. The will of the German people was completely broken at that time. The German army was completely broken. Everyone knew the war was over and Germany had lost.
I am totally on board with that thinking.