“I am a supporter of total war in some cases. The crusades were a good cause.”
Well, you’re there and I’m not, but I’d like you to consider the French experience in Algeria from 1954-1962.
The French waged total war on the Algerians to put down the insurgency. They had 500,000 troops there and used collective punishment, calling in air strikes and artillery barrages on villages that harbored insurgents.
The French tortured to death thousands, shot thousands in summary executions, and put 1.2 million (out of a population 9 million) in concentration camps.
All in all, the French killed as many 1.5 million Algerians, but they still lost. Even more importantly, they lost 18,000 men in eight years, a KIA rate three and a half times ours.
Total war doesn’t always work, and it’s not clear that it would’ve saved American lives, unless you’re talking carpet bombing Iraq with B-52s until nobody was left alive.
We both know that this would never have happened, so it’s kind of a waste of time to contemplate it.
I’ll leave you with this idea: The violence in Iraq got much worse after the destruction of the Golden Dome in Samarra. We’re told by a lot of “experts” that if we just hit these people hard enough and destroy the things they hold most dear, they’ll lose the will to fight.
The strategic bombing of World War II never broke Germany’s will to fight. It took the invasion of Germany to end the war, at a huge cost to the Russians. We ourselves took most of our casualties in the final months of the war in the Pacific. Even after we nuked Japan, several factions wanted to fight on.
In the end, I think we fought the Iraq war correctly, even though of course we made mistakes.
Still, the mistakes we made in this war don’t even begin to compare to the massive mistakes we made in World War II, mistakes that cost many thousands of American lives and resulted in many officers being relieved of duty.
The French did lose in Algeria. They gave up when they were on the verge of victory. They caved in to the “world opinion” that they were being too brutal. Sometimes brutality is called for. That is what will happen to us in Iraq with Obama at the helm.