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Your blog is very interesint

good!

Well, sounds like Phillip is running with Bill Joy. It’s amazing when competence in one area leads one to believe they know everything everywhere. Honest to goodness. You ought to retract this.

I challenge your premise: the Kurds would be at least as willing to turn out a huge crowd for American soldiers as the Shia were for Syria.

Furthermore, a Syrian soldier has a bit more pacification leverage than an American soldier because of the Hama precedent. We make a tradeoff of additional inconvenience and American lives in exchange for maintaining the American value of not flattening Fallujah completely indiscriminately without regard to civilian consequences. Don’t get me wrong: I’d pick 1000 American soldiers over 10000 Syrians in a second, but it takes more boots on the ground if one is going to obey the rules of war, which Syria doesn’t.

The numbers are not that different actually Phil.

At the peak of the occupation the Syrians had 25,000 soldiers (a soldier to population ratio of 148:1) . After nearly 30 years the numbers are down to 14,000 (264:1). The US today has a ratio of 208:1 (there are actually about 120,000 US troops in Iraq, not 150,000*). This is a mere two years after an invasion and they have a ratio which is significantly better than Syria at a similar stage and nearly as good as the Syrians after 30 years!

* http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33540-2005Jan24.html

I’m lebanese.
First, Syria went in Lebanon as part of an Arab peacekeeping force in 1976, theoretically to help the Christian Lebanese against the extremely well-armed Palestinians. A few months after they went in, the Syrians started switching sides and and working on taking control of the country through a divide-and-conquer strategy. Obviously it worked very well, and the peacekeeping force that came in to stop the war stayed in there for 14 of the 15 years of the ‘civil’ war. Great peacekeepers!

Over the years Syria has very effectively taken control of the Lebanese army, secret services and politics through mostly intimidation. For example, Syria killed the leader of the Druze barely a year after it came into Lebanon to foster dissent. And Syria kept doing it, killing whoever didn’t fit its plans.

Here’s a very simple example of the power of Syria in Lebanon: last October, we were supposed to have presidential elections. Syria decided that keeping its puppet Emile Lahoud in power would be better. So its secret service simply contacted all parliament members and told them to amend the constitution to extend the president’s term, or their lives would be amended.

So yes, the US could be as ‘effective’ as Syria is, but it would have to stay in another 10 years in Iraq, continuously sapping the political infrastructure and replacing it with pro-US puppets, and killing anyone who doesn’t agree. Do you want that?