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Subject: My Opinion on cleaning out Baghdad.
commandergy    6/10/2007 6:59:52 PM
I like the fact that the president has sent more troops to Iraq, but I have an idea about cleaning out Baghdad of the Sunni terrorists and the Shi'ite militias. We should essentially do what we did in Fallujah. We should surround it, lock it down, and with troops pressing from the areas of Baghdad we've already pacified and the surrounding area, we should move in from all sides and just overwhelm them It worked in Fallujah. Its so peaceful now that the reporters are leaving it for Baghdad and other areas.
 
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Bob       6/10/2007 8:19:53 PM
That's kinda how it's working - only it's not as simple, due to the city's size. Baghdad is being sectioned off. Fallujah is a city of 350,000, whereas Baghdad is home to 7 million. That's twenty times the size.
 
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shek       6/10/2007 9:51:04 PM

I like the fact that the president has sent more troops to Iraq, but I have an idea about cleaning out Baghdad of the Sunni terrorists and the Shi'ite militias. We should essentially do what we did in Fallujah. We should surround it, lock it down, and with troops pressing from the areas of Baghdad we've already pacified and the surrounding area, we should move in from all sides and just overwhelm them

It worked in Fallujah. Its so peaceful now that the reporters are leaving it for Baghdad and other areas.

Fallujah isn't peaceful because of November 2004.  Clearing it then was necessary because we had allowed it to become a sanctuary, but this didn't pacify Fallujah.  It was co-opting the tribal leaders in Anbar that has led to drastically reduced violence in Anbar.  The problem is that you don't have the same homogeneity in Baghdad that you did in Anbar.  Instead, you have Sunni-Shia fault lines without the same definitive tribal hierarchy due to some diluting from urbanization. 

 
 
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