What we should do now (Plan B for Iraq)

[Mari333]

"
Had the administration been more willing to learn from the past, it would have noted that the United States was involved in several postwar operations during the 1990s. Lesson No. 1 was: have sufficient forces. In Somalia and Haiti, the United States placed too few forces on the ground. The result: it failed. In Bosnia and Kosovo it deployed a large force, which was able to intimidate all potential opposition. As a result, in those two places Coalition forces have suffered zero combat casualties in many years of operation. The Powell Doctrine may not be necessary for war, but it seems to help in keeping the peace.
To match the number of soldiers per inhabitant as we have in Kosovo, we would need 526,000 in Iraq. To match Bosnia we would need 258,000. Right now there are about 150,000 troops in Iraq. The United States Army does not have extra troops to spare. In fact it is currently spread dangerously thin. Ninety percent of all U.S. military police, for example, are on active duty: 12,000 are in Iraq; most of the rest are in South Korea or Europe. There are no more MPs to call on. "

http://www.msnbc.com/news/956615.asp?0cl=c1

[Booberdawg]

1. Right now it's a clusterfuck

<snip>
"It is time to recognize that the occupation of Iraq needs fixing. This has been a massive enterprise undertaken with little planning and extreme arrogance.:eyes: During the war, Defense Department officials explained that the postwar situation was “unknowable,” so no planning was really possible. (By this logic there would be no point in planning for anything.) Even the question of how long the United States would stay involved in Iraq produced a series of varying responses, from the vacuous “as long as it takes” to the absurd “three months” (from Jay Garner). That we had no plan for postwar government was quickly evident to the Iraqis."