The Iraq mess dissected!

To bring Democracy even by force to countries whose population is in desperate need of it because of suffering under the boot of some tyrannical regime is never wrong, never! Some kind of Freedom and Democracy is the dream and hope of 99% of the world's peoples, except for those twisted and dark people out there that are controlled by hate and extremism.
The problem of Iraq and the invasion and subsequently the occupation (even from the beginning) has been that not enough troops were used and still are not been used. The invasion plan and execution was brilliant, a German style Blitzkrieg armored attack straight to the heart of the enemy military and its command structure in Baghdad, which achieved the collapse of the Iraqi regime quickly. But even from the beginning mayor problems arouse, including the failure of Turkey allowing the 4Th to come in from the north, which reduced considerably even the initial amount of forces in-country, a failure from which the whole Iraq invasion occupation has never recovered.
After that, the occupation phase ran into problems which unleashed or allowed forces the violence to flourished and which we see today. During the initial phases of the occupation, more critical mistakes were made, beginning with the lack of policing of the country, again due to not enough forces to maintain control. This gave a chance for the different anti-democracy interests in the region to begin to further destabilize the country with more and more violence, forces like the remains of the Saddam regimen, who did not surrendered but just disappeared into the population to fight another day. They were waiting for precisely these conditions to take advantage of, and start the violence that they have know all along would shake the confidence of the US. You must remember, these people also know the history of its enemy, us!, and know about our failure on Viet Nam and count on it to be repeated in their soil.
Other forces also working to get us out of there by fermenting violence are also well known, like Alqaeda, now in full blown operations in Iraq, and tyrannical forces like Syrian and Iranian, which backed extremists groups who do not want to see a democracy of any kind flourish in Iraq, because, well... how do you think the people of Iran and Syria would feel like if next door to them all of a sudden have an Islamic based democratic government which listens to its people flourished, while they are still under a tyrannical form of government? They would start think..."wait a minute? How come these guys next door in Iraq have Democracy and we don't?" "And why do we have to live under this crappy tyrant we have in charge here?" And the seeded of unrest would be planted....! The tyrants in Syria and Iran understand this, and that is why they are trying everything they can to maintain the violence going in Iraq. They have to for their survival, it is simple really.
But again the core problem allowing all this to happen has been not enough troops to control the occupation properly. There is even a formula in military circles used to occupation calculations, it says you need 1 soldier for every 40 occupied body in-country, there is an article in the Washington Post highlighting this point :

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10161-2004May8?language=printer

And if we follow this formula clearly there has never and there are STILL not enough forces in Iraq to bring about stability in the country, Iraq has an estimated 26 million people, that is 26 with 6 zeroes behind it, so 150 thousand US troops is not enough occupation forces. In addition, remember even 150 thousand men does not mean they are all combat forces, more that half are support personnel, including cooks, supply clerks, etc. So clearly the occupations forces are not big enough.
Well how about the Iraqis themselves, why can they do it, you may ask? You must also remember that creating an Army is not done overnight, it takes years of training, and most importantly experience to be able to have an effective soldier that can hold its own and perform his duties, generally from recruit to effective unit it is about 4 years, and that is even in our American military world. Now in Iraq, through in the instability, the chaotic lives they are under, etc and it becomes clear that to expect a fully functioning Iraqi army to appear overnight is unrealistic, and that of course it has taken all these years for even to see some Iraqi units that can hold their own, of course. So that leaves you with us to make the stability happen, and since there have never been enough forces there to make it happen....whoa la! The Iraq mess..!
As for my solution, get every able soldiers we have and flood Iraq with them now! Have our presence felt in every corner of the country, to get hold of the situation there, and to let everyone know we are not going anywhere, and specially the bad guys that they are severely outnumbered and out of luck. An example of this is New York in the bad days of the gangs running wild, and then after the police force got more than doubled in size and more cops were put in the streets the gang violence, and crime in general decreased almost magically.
Iraq can be fixed, but again, like in Nam, we Americans are (again) more worried I think in fighting each other on "who is right", on what is going wrong and NOT in how to win the fight in Iraq!

And that is the sad really of today.

I hope you read this letter and reflect on the lessons here.