Anbar: the high cost of living

The US re-took Fallujah in al Anbar province by using pretty much the same approach that Russia used to re-take Grozny in Chechnya, i.e. by unleashing enough ordnance to "make the rubble bounce”.

I’m not suggesting that the military acted irrationally in either case, rather that there are definite limits to the use of military force as an instrument for achieving foreign policy objectives.

The Russians could arguably maintain that they were reclaiming their turf; the Americans are hard-pressed to avoid the foreigner/invader/occupier/Crusader label.

One of the startling facts of the war against terror as fought to date is the broad refusal to look at costs. From time to time, war critics offer estimates that first reached the trillions five years or so ago: officials see no reason to respond with accurate, official, frequently updated figures.

Remember when Johns Hopkins and the medical magazine, The Lancet, two of the most respected sources in the world, came up with a millioin-plus estimate of Iraqi lives lost to that point? Not a nine-day wonder, not even a two-day one. Bush said with details he'd heard the survey methodology was suspect and everybody shut up pronto.

Similarly, patriotic folks from time to time claim the total death toll of the Vietnam war was 58,000. The real figure: two million-plus.

Folks in other nations don't have such short memories. The 1997 raid on the Tehran embassy and Iranian attitudes in this decade right up to 2009 continue to be formed by unhappy memories of the CIA unhorsing of the Mossadeq government in the mid-1950s. This however continues to be listed among the CIA's greatest hits.

Making enemies never seems good foreign policy. The suggestion that such occurs to help US corporations make a buck over the fairly short term no longer seems the crackpot leftwing idea it was generally dismissed as a generation ago.

Though it is not the first generation of children growing up without a father:
France and Germany after the WWI for example, and entire Canadian villages after WWII.

As an aside to your comment about Rand: Didn't Kubrick call it the "Bland Corp."?

That Lancet Study has been widely discredited. The researchers refuse to answer basic questions about their research and won't share their work with others. Most of the major groups that follow Iraqi deaths estimate just over 100,000 Iraqis have died since the U.S. invasion. In comparison, Saddam killed about 200,000-300,000 in his Anfal campaign against the Kurds and his suppressing of the Shiite uprising after the Gulf War.

I've not read much of their COIN research, but RAND has done excellent work with counterterrorism analysis. There's a reason CIA swiped Bruce Hoffman to be their scholar in residence a couple years back.

People taking either side of the argument are expressing more than their hopes or prejudices. There can be only one test of how successful or otherwise the Iraq war has been, and it's what happens after the US has gone home. The eagerness of sundry official layers of the US government to stay there effectively forever suggests they're far from eager to face that test. Ever.