Ratissage, Ratonnade and Hama Rules

The basic flaw in the Iraq war (and in Afghanistan, too) is the thinking that to fight the Muslims on the ground, we needed to observe the rules of conventional war; fight them straight up in military engagements. The ultimate goal, of course, is to bring "democracy" and a decent way of life, as we know it, to these louts. This is utter fantasy. Unfortunately, the only way to deal with these Jihad-besotted people is on their own terms. The British and French (before they lost their nerves) knew how to deal with them.

On the North West Frontier, the present locale of the "tribes"; the Taliban and Al Qaida, the British would conduct punitive expeditions ("The Malakand Field Force" and all that) whenever the tribes got too rambunctious (like NOW); they would arrest, hang and burn until the tribes were sufficiently decimated and pacified. This would have to be done again and again, as the occasion required. Naturally, this would set off great consternation in right-thinking people back in Britain (the ones who were not exposed to the savages).

In North Africa, the French had the same approach with the tribes in the hinterland, called "Ratissage", where the French military chose to punish whole villages and towns from where they felt guerrilla attacks were taking place.. In the Algerian war, they also resorted to "Ratonnade" (literally a rat-clearing) in the cities; also useful for the accumulated Muslim human debris in US and European cities.

Of course, the British and French were amateurs compared to the Arabs themselves. The Syrians disciplined their own Muslims in the 1980's by destroying half the city of Hama after a terrorist attack on a military academy. One can only speculate on the positive outcome if we had applied "Hama Rules" in Falluja after they killed the four Americans and mutilated their bodies. the object lesson would have done a lot more to "pacify" Iraq than any any surge we could execute now.