Let me say a few things: 1. I was virulently against this war from long before its outset. 2. Every ounce of my bones felt it was a prescription for disaster for everybody concerned. 3. Our boys are fighting for their absolute lives, and the lives of everyone around them that they are trying to protect. We need to support them in every possible way, even it involves supporting the most despicable Commander-in-Chief since Benedict Arnold to do so. 4. The question I'm trying to get at is this: if the insurgents scatter our boys across the country, cut off the back lines, etc., i.e, and create an abosolute worst case scenario, and our boys have to make a run for it, what will the insurgents be like if they control Baghdad? 5. I saw a brief interview with an "insurgent" on tv last night. He said he was all for free and fair elections, as long as they weren't run by an occupying army, and an obviously biased one at that. 6. Do we even have the remotest reason to believe this guy (whoever he was)? Or do we presume that if the "insurgents" (whoever they may be) when they make it to Baghdad (i.e., control it), that they'll turn out to be the "Khmer Rouge of Islam", and after going through some of the most bloodthirsty two or three years of living that most people can't even imagine, that once they take over Baghdad, they'll just be getting started... 7. What do you think?
If you and I are fighting, and you run inside your house*, saying "I'm winning the fight!" but do not really leave your house* when you wish for fear of the things I can do to you outside your house*, who is in control? "Control" is an open question right now, let alone in the scenario you painted. When the area outside the house* is claimed as safe as the house*, that's when we'll have a better idea of "control" of the city. Right now, the employment of the house* IS definitive proof that control outside the house* is absent or sorely lacking. * aka the "green zone."
Reading between the lines, I can tell you're as worried about it as I am. I hope someone else is too.
Well, I doubt the insurgents will ever win in Iraq. Iraq is now the primo base in the middle east for our troops. We ain't going anywhere for at least a dozen years, unless we shift our new center of control a couple hundred miles east or west. Anyone who tells you differently is clueless or a flat-out liar. We ain't going back to Saudi Arabia, cuz look what that did to the new york skyline. Stupid little islands in the gulf can't hold our might. And keeping loads of troops in germany makes no strategic sense. Iraq is ours. Whatever puppet or friendly ruler is there knows it. Why do so many other people not get it?
As ********ed up as the occupation is turning out, I don't think any reasonable--or even sane--person wants to find out what the 'insurgents' would do if they somehow came to power.
The rest of the world is worried too. Even Saudi Arabia has offered troops. The insurgency is doomed but the question is how many are going to die. If it gets really nasty, i.e. Iraqi troops aren’t willing to fight for the government, then other countries will step in. I think Arab troops would be willing to do the things that Americans are not, like kill the families of insurgents. This problem will get fixed but it could get really nasty if the Iraqis won't fight for themselves.