July 14, 2005, It's not nice to fool Mother Nature
And nature, as we all know from our elementary physics, abhors a vacuum. But a vacuum seems to be what's going on in... Fallujah! According to this from the Grey Lady, some eight months after a bloody siege cost the lives of over 1,500 Iraqis and quite a few American marines... that troubled (and troubling) Iraqi city may, once again, be a power vacuum used by insurgents to carry out nasty shit attacks in Fallujah and elsewhere in Iraq.
This is a chronic problem our military faces: the occupations of (First World) Germany and Japan involved an occupying force of something like one soldier per 50 or 60 civilians; in (Third World) Iraq, our ratio is closer to 1 to 200. Hence, frequently, even after a town is captured from insurgents, our forces tend not to have the manpower to hold it all that long. Iraq's own military is years away from being up to the job, though it will have to learn fast, as the key military and strategic goal of defeating our enemy... the Democrats... dominates the agenda starting around this time next year, thus ensuring around a 60% or 70% force reduction by the 2006 mid-term election.
Hmmm.... Let's just say that the military could use some help with this problem right now. I suggest some of you folks who have recently shown such damned fine bravery with your keyboards might consider, oh, joining up and helping out in Fallujah... no? Didn't think you would. Funny, that.