Kevin wrote:
Both the Sunni Awakening in Iraq and the recent experience of Pakistan demonstrate that terrorists are often their own worst enemies in this regard. The more they target civilians, the less support they have in the surrounding population.
But the Sunni Awakening is more of a Western sound-bite than it is an encouraging reality, as I think Kevin himself has acknowledged previously.
There are two reasons why I think the principle I quoted from Kevin above is not resulting in a dying-off of terrorism in Iraq in the long run. First off is that there are too many factions inside Iraq, too many enemies for the average Iraqi inside Iraq, and not enough allies inside Iraq. Everybody belongs to a group that has a reason to kill someone else, or a reason for someone else to attack them- at least, their friends and neighbors and relatives have these characteristics. When there is so much general alignment with one faction or another, you don't try to gather intelligence and sort civilians out by who they're subjectively aligned with. You go into a rival neighborhood and kill.
When Akbar from Faction A kills Ali's daughter (because Ali belongs to Faction B), I doubt that Ali thinks, "Damn that Faction A!! I sure don't want any civilians among them to be hurt, though, and I don't want to promote terrorism." He probably thinks something more like that he wished Akbar's daughter, his wife, and all his kids would die. Maybe in Pakistan, less people are aligned, and when civilians get killed, they're more like innocent civilians. But in Iraq, it's more like a country where everyone is either a Blood or a Crip.
The second reason I think the "more civilian victims - less terrorism" principle doesn't work in Iraq is they have no peaceful alternative in sight. We're not giving the terrorist-ridden neighborhoods enough benefit they can see manifesting itself and see as something they're likely to be able to hold onto. Abandoning infrastructure aid in Iraq was a sign the conservatives have really abandoned Iraq. The writing is on the wall (there have been other signs) and the plan just has yet to come to fruition (because the conservatives still have to save face for now, by acting like they still think we can win and we're trying to do so- but winning the November U.S. presidential election is now, I think, the only conservative goal remaining for the Iraq war).
If we did a better job (of fixing and securing things) in the first place, Iraq would be in a lot better position now, but unfortunately the conservatives who mounted this expedition never cared about the average Iraqi even a little bit and purposely avoided making real meaningful efforts to fix the place-- it was more like a macho bullying and self-adulation festival by our people than a real re-building from the get-go (that goes for the military efforts, the re-building contracting, the mercenaries, the training of Iraq's military and police, the planning for re-building-- everything).