Two quick comments: Mostly centered on this bit: ``A counter-insurgency needs police, judges and good governance to dampen it. I think rather than sending in the 101st Airborne and the SASR we should be sending in the Los Angeles Police Department and the NSW Tactical Response Group.\'\'
The LAPD of the Rodney King beating incident? To be honest, I don\'t know how much the LAPD has changed since the eighties, but I do know that many police forces in the states are frequently little better than the military with regards to an us/them mentality. I\'m not convinced that a modern police force on the ground would be viewed as any less of an `other\' than an invading army.
I think the real problem is increasing specialization of the military with regards to its armed hostilities function. The entire armed services organization really ought to be organized around an emergency response mandate, only part of which is defense against other armies.
What is clear is that the Coalition of the Willing did not go in with enough troops to secure civil order after sending the Iraqi army home. In this regard, I don\'t know that de-Baathification was bad per se. Rather, it was only bad because the Coalition left a void by not providing the services (security, utilities, emergency aid) expected of a government in the social contract. This allowed various militias and strong men to step into positions of power and gain the allegiance of civilians.
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