Iraq Was Probably a “Mistake,” Said Gen. James Mattis, Trump’s Defense Pick

Intercept, the ^ | 05 December 2016 | Mattathias Schwartz

[Future Snake Eater]

I would be OK with that if and only if we applied overwhelming force, utterly destroyed anyone/anything we thought was an issue, and then left.

I’m so done with nation-building in these irredeemable third world hellholes. We need to decide if we want to destroy terrorists or try to make better people. The former is actually possible.

[wideminded]

Iraq worked exactly as planned up to the point O pulled everyone out for political reasons in 2010.

1. 4500 dead Americans and 32000 wounded were not part of the plan.
2. Our withdrawal schedule was negotiated by Bush in 2008. The deadline was the end of 2011 which is when we left.

Iraq is that kill zone. That is the true brilliance of the Iraq strategy. We draw the terrorists out of their world wide hiding places onto a battlefield they have to fight on for political reasons

The problem with this idea is that there is a not a finite number of potential terrorists because more are being created all the time, having a battle causes them to be created even faster, and they are not all going to conveniently travel to one place. Clearly our smartest generals do not believe that this idea is the best way to solve the overall problem.

Iraq is about killing enough of them to make the rest of the Jihadists realize we are serious. They same way killing enough Germans, Italians and Japanese eliminated the ideologies of Nazism, Fascism and Bushido.

The evidence that the number of people you kill changes minds is extremely weak. It was not the sheer number of deaths on each side that determined the outcome of WWII. Russia lost 20 million and did not give up. We killed 100,000 in Tokyo in one night and that did not make Japan give up. If we killed millions of Muslims in Iraq that would only make the problem of Islamic extremism intractable for all time.