Like i've said before we need someone with the
skills of Carlos Hathcock to remove aL Sadar!
2400 yds I shot one kill...

The USMC has dozens of snipers with that skill..........making many 1200 yd plus "kills" with 308 rounds....I recently heard of a 1400 yd plus "kill" in the vicinity of al Qaim

but I think it would be better to corner the rat in a mosque with his top soldiers and kill a bunch of them in combat, as should have been done in Spring '04

Senorlechero,Not wanting to get into a whizzing
contestbut dozens,1 or 2 mabey, dozens no way!!!!

Hathcock would eventually be credited with 93 enemy confirmed killed, including one Viet Cong shot dead by a round fired from a scope-mounted Browning M-2 .50 caliber machine gun at the unbelievable range of 2500 yards.

Perhaps we should be looking north a bit; the current record(s) for one-shot kills have been by Canadian snipers in Afghanistan.

Maybe a cultural exchange program of sorts is called for here.

Killing Muqtada al Sadr would not have helped us in the past and won't help us now. In the future maybe. He has his own political agenda and is trying to keep a lid on his own "followers". He isn't terribly bright but he does hold some sway due to his father - Sadr City is named after him not the son. I believe that the Iranians would too easily take advantage of his death - especially if we killed him. In this case the tree needs to be killed from the roots up not the other way around.

As for new plans – the current one is working. I learned an old adage in my engineering days: Good, Fast, Cheap – pick any two. We have been going the Good/Cheap route. It appears that the American electorate wants us to trade Fast for one of them. I’m not sure which one will be chosen but in my experience Fast/Good rarely works out.

BTW when I reference “Cheap” I'm talking in relative terms and at a national level – it does not diminish the sacrifices we have made.

We have already missed the opportunity to take out Sadr unless he is dumb enough to get into a direct engagement with our forces. Recall that in recent weeks we have had to release some of his command structure that were captured because the Iraqi government said to. To kill Sadr now would be to ignore Iraqi sovereignty, which we have spent so much effort to put in place. This is not to say that he and his organization do not need to be destroyed. They do, but we do not have the flexibility we had 18 months ago. The Iraqi government could be given an ultimatum of destroying and disarming his militia or we will pull out. It will take something like that at this point.

As for additional troops, the current plan is to add additional Iraqi troops. That is more of a long term effort and perhaps adding additional US troops in the meantime might help. We have always had a force to space problem in Iraq, but Rumsfeld has not been the architect of that plan. This is Gen. Abizaid's plan that we have been executing. Perhaps the joint chiefs have some better ideas on how to proceed, but they are not in the chain of command. It could be they may want to change personnel at Centcom.

Any plan to 'stabilize' Iraq must deal with the fact that the external suppliers for the terrorists are: Iran, Syria and al Qaeda KSA. The first two, fielding their Foreign Legion of Hezbollah do not appear too interested in 'stability' in the region. And, if Ray Robison's article is correct, Iraqi nuclear scientists that went missing post-invasion have shown up... in Syria with Syrian, Iranian and ex-Russian Republic nuclear scientists.

And after Hezbollah took out that Egyptian merchant freighter, they have put that area on notice that they do not overly care about nicities of diplomacy and 'rules of war'. Cleaning out the current batch of insurgents will give breathing space, until the three mentioned shift more people into the country. Taking out al-Sadr at the time would have been nice, and be seen as a wholly partisan killing by the US taking sides against the Shia unless we could have gotten strong backing from Sistani.

By going after the Ba'athists *first*, cutting off the main riverine supply routes and working to reinforce the quietest of the provinces, the limited forces there have maximized their impact and show that we favored *neither* sect. At rough guess after the last MNF briefing on turnover of territory to Iraqi control, the country by land amount is 70% or so under Iraqi control. The major cities were left for last to do two things: constrain violence to those places and to finally cut off other places to run *to*. Work the tribes first, get them to have their taste of Sharia law under al Qaeda or Iran and they do not like it. It is a slow process to build trust as an 'honest broker', but after 1992 that work is necessary.

The path to Peace in the Middle East and addressing the long term stability of Iraq lies directly through Damascus.

If it's deniability you want, use proxies. Or send in your Hathcock with a Dragunov instead of a Remington. Or a captured Iranian IED.

Or first snatch him, sit him down in a room for a few hours with a couple of Iraqis and Americans who can make his options clear to him. (No torture! Just talk, but in an environment where he can most easily shut up and listen.) Then send him home and see if he acts like a good boy.

Meanwhile, "all hands on deck" (or what I call "flood the zone") is I think a clear and constructive option. Balls to the wall, no more excuses on troop strength, saturate the hot zones and root 'em out but good. Handover to the Iraqis, rinse, repeat.

As many at a time as possible, but balanced with putting all needed strength on the borders, supplanted by every Predator, Hunter, and and every other prototype drone that can take to the air with a warload. Supplant also with minefields, smart sensors, etc. Stop the infiltrations, stop the militias, stop the 'resistance.'

Prepare campsites outside these hot zones - no not concentration camps, more like short-stay concentration motels. For when you move everybody who doesn't want to die out of the zones, don't just send them off into the countryside, pen them up and comb them before releasing (or transporting to their stated destinations, or returning them to the city once pacified).

Dear genius Dem Congress, please budget extra $ for the deployments, also:

$ for local walking-around money - I forget the name of that effective US program.

$ for reconstruction as I imagine there will be an awful lotta rubble when complete.

Since ISTM language skills are so crucial to doing the job, where can we whip up some language experts for short tours? Can some CIA, NSA, etc., people be spared for a little while? (Uh, don't tell Osama, Waxman.)

Obviously this can only be a short term effort. Six months? As much as a year? Pelosi meanwhile is I hope/wish joking when she offers 30K troops in exchange for withdrawal in six months. However, once done (and with continued IA growth) perhaps we can draw down to 100K troops? Then to 50K or so?

PS Let's secure the energy supply while we are at it. Coopt tribes; patrols; sensor/minefields.

PPS Am I crazy to think that we will not be totally 'bugging out' for, like, a generation? Where better to situate a Middle Eastern QRF than in lily-pads in Iraq?

I know it's permanently cemented into history but the Bush 1 administration never called on Iraqi civilians to march lock step to their doom into trying to overthrow Saddam. All they said was it was up to the Iraqi army to overthrow the regime for bringing on the catastrophe of the First Gulf War and the 8 yr Iran/Iraq war. And they never stated if they did so we would provide them any support.

As to the present situation. We need to give the Iraqi government an ultimatum - arrest and try Sadr for the murder he orchestrated a couple years ago, disband, destroy or better yet coopt the militias into the Iraqi army under Iraqi army command, and get our forces back into the Sunni areas where they belong rather than playing cops and robbers in Baghdad - if they refuse or vaccilate - begin a final pulldown of troops at 25,000 a month - and also tell those political leaders no sanctuary in America is available if the country collapses. Do or die time.

Don's idea is the best. Flooding the zone with more soldiers doesn't sound very effective. I think reducing our footprint to spec ops and intel with a few other units makes the most sense.

Because in the end, it's the Iraqis that can solve their own problems, and its only the advisors, intel, and elite troops that can assist them without giving them too much of an excuse not to perform.

The best way is more troops on the ground, all-out to wipe out the insurgents in Anbar province and during the cleansing take out al Sadhr as well during the commotion. He'll surely get into it exposing himself. Fat targets are easy to hit.

John McCain said yesterday that Moqtada Al-Sadr needs "to be taken out," and that the "Mahdi Army continues to pose a threat."
------------------------------------------

Now that the NYT is running the country whoever gives the order will face an onslaught of accusations of murder and incessant demands that he be prosecuted.

Given his role in undermining the Bush administration and the war effort it's only right that McCain give the order.

I have no idea how this can be arranged.

You might have a look at "Armed Liberal's" piece "Iraq is F****d" over at Winds of Change. Neither the piece nor its author were what I expected, and it has a lot to say in terms of what to do to salvage Iraq.

http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/009203.php

Wow, what a useless bunch of drivel from the Duke Chapel.

Joshua Chamberlain:

Ah well, you can't please them all. Like I said, "I have my differences with his view, but I'll take it. Whatever is necessary to not abandon Iraq."

The bad guys in Iraq have not decided that the war is over. Ralph Peters said it best: A war is over when the person who loses says it is. That means that the loser feels defeated and asks for the pain to stop.

It would appear we are saying it is over, so guess what? We are the losers. alQ, al Sadr & Co. know this basic truth. Hey, ya'll they told you just this. A vote for a Democratic US Congress was a vote for them - that they had won.

It appears to me that the US has lost the will and resolve to lead in the world.

I agree, to win in Iraq it is "All Hands On Deck". Throw everything we have at the place, clean out the vipers, secure the borders. (I have long written and wondered when someone would wake up that fact.) Make the bad guys in Iraq feel defeated and then and only then, will we have won this particular war.

The same goes for Afghanistan. Clean out the vipers, secure the borders (yes, even that one!) and make the bad guys feel defeated.

Winning the War Against Fascist Islam is going to take lots and lots of dead Muslims, but I would rather it is them than us. I think that the people in this country just cannot believe that the Jihadis really, really mean it when they say that their goal is our submission or death. How many times do the Jihadis have to say that:

They literally want to destroy the White House.

OBL believes he has the right to kill 10 million Americans.

That they seek the return of the Caliphate and dominion of Islam over the world.

One of the goals is the return of the supposed 12th Imam and the accompanying Apocalypse.

C'mon folks, they have a 25 year plan to destroy Western civilization because they believe we are decadent and sinful. It is long past time for the world to awake to this threat and all I see is more of the same self absorbed drivel.

Okay....

/soapbox mode off

The Hobo