Martial Law in Iraq Would Have Been a Sound Strategy, #2

In this round I aim to refute all of the Pro"s arguments and demonstrate that the Pro has as of yet failed to prove that Martial Law would have been in anyway feasible or actionable. As far as possible my refutations will be put forward in the same order as the Pro"s points. The most obvious issue with the Pro"s statement that " First and foremost, cultural sensitivity would have been a top priority" is that the US government would be unable to accommodate for an increase in "Cultural sensitivity" is that, as the Pro states, the US did not have enough analysts to for any reliable sense of the situation in the Middle-East. In fact "in 2002 only 6 undergraduates in the entire US earned degrees in Arabic Language." Furthermore by October 2004 the FBI still had "120,000 hours of pre-Sept. 11 "terrorism-related" recordings." Which remained translated [1]. This demonstrates two things; firstly the USA was woefully ill equipped to attempt to engage with the people of Iraq on a cultural level, secondly it suffered from a chronic inability to attract those with the ability to bridge the already stated gap between reality and the desire of the Prop. In fact "[from] Title VI-funded centers"not just Middle Eastern ones"only 2.3 percent worked for the federal government, while another .9 percent entered the military."[1] This demonstrates that the shortage would be far from easy to overcome and that the Prop"s strategy of "cultural sensitivity" first and foremost is little more than a pipedream. However without the cultural awareness the Prop suggested it would be nigh impossible for US to take on the role of Law Giver in Iraq, undermining the feasibility of the project. The next issue with the argument is the Prop"s use of the example of Japan as an idyll of functional Martial Law. The primary issue with the use of the Japanese example is that it is fundamentally incomparable with the situation in Iraq. The biggest excluder being that Japan was pacified with the use of the Atomic Bomb and remains the only nation in the world to have been subjected to such an attack. "The essence of what I saw and heard was that Japan was on her last legs when the war ended. Morale, which began to ebb in the latter part of 1944, had reached an exceedingly low level by the early summer of 1945,". This quote from Dr. Alexander H. Leighton [2] shows that the spirit of the Japanese was broken in the wake of the WW2 a phrase that simply cannot be applied to the peoples of Iraq after the invasion by US forces as evidenced by their continuous resistance to US occupation. A second excluder would be the fact that the Japanese can be considered (to a certain degree) a single people (Ethnic makeup-Japanese 98.5%, Koreans 0.5%, Chinese 0.4%, other 0.6%)[3] whilst Iraq cannot be (Ethnic makeup-Arab 75%-80%, Kurdish 15%-20%, Turkoman, Assyrian, or other 5%)[3] the ethnic makeup of Iraq was one of the key issues faced by Coalition forces faced and was correctly identified as such by General Shinseki who declared Iraq to have "the kind of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems" [4]. Furthermore the Pro attributes the recovery of Japan to the imposition of Martial Law when it had far more to do with the Cold War dynamic as America"s "strategic interests led the U.S. to allow Japan to export to the US while protecting its domestic market, enabling the formation of cartels and non-market driven factors in Japanese economy"[5]. This undermines the Pro"s assessment that the success of the Japanese model is in anyway applicable to the situation in Iraq and renders the comparison void. The Prop"s description of the deployment of academic "Peaceniks" as a method of showing the US intent of "securing" the region after 9/11 lacks any proper evidence to back it up and is for all intents and purposes an opinion. "Moreover, as the late Edward Said argued in his immensely influential book Orientalism (1978), Western writers and scholars were complicit in the further subjugation of the region." [1] The move proposed by the Pro of implanting a learned American Elite into Iraq has more than slight imperialistic connotations and may in fact do more to damage the credibility of the US with Iraqis. This would decrease trust in any American lead regime making Martial Law an increasingly preposterous suggestion. Furthermore the Prop makes the assumption that the US government would be able to attract such people with bribery in spite of their political opinions without providing any form of evidence that such a scheme has or will ever work I will consider it opinion and move on. The core of the Prop"s argument stands on the assumption that America was capable at the time of implementing a state of Martial Law on Iraq. The Prop uses the example of General Shinseki"s occupation and implementation of Martial Law in Bosnia as an example citing that General Shinseki succeeded in implementing the regime in Bosnia (Population 5 million) with 50,000 troops a ratio of 1 soldier per every 100 citizens. The population of Iraq in 2001 was roughly 25 million [6] at their highest US troop figures in Afghanistan totalled 157,800 (during the troop surge in 2007) [7] in other words the troop to citizen in Iraq was 155 citizens per soldier in other words an increase of roughly 3/5ths in the ratio. Against this backdrop Martial Law becomes in-actionable, in the words of Senator Lindsey Graham "[The US] never had enough troops to begin with" [8]. This proves that the Pro"s suggestion that had the US could "Utilise overwhelming force" is nonsense. The US lacked the resources to implement Martial Law in Iraq. The Prop"s idea that coalition forces may have been capable of securing the entirety of Baghdad is an impossibility whilst maintaining nationwide Martial Law. General Shinseki in fact advised against "fighting a 12 division war" with a "10 division army" [8] To move on to the Prop"s final point I would like to point out that the Prop"s assertion that the Patriot Bonds would have covered the early expense of the mass occupation of Iraq is a complete fantasy and is again not backed up with any facts or statistics. In 8 years the Patriot Bond system managed to raise $10.9 Billion for government usage [9]. For a war that cost the US $500,000 a minute according to the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes. [10] Considering that the Prop has already conceded that the implementation of Martial Law would be "orders of magnitude" more expensive than the historical invasion the Prop"s assertion in no way stands up thus subverting the Prop"s theory of balanced budgets producing a happier populace. In conclusion the US had neither the manpower nor the money in order to make Martial Law feasible in Iraq. Furthermore the concept of importing cultural knowledge makes little to know sense and may even be viewed as antagonistic. I await the Prop"s response. [1] http://www.slate.com... [2] https://www.google.co.uk... [3] https://www.cia.gov... [4]See Pro"s video in round 1 [5] http://www.iun.edu... [6] https://www.google.co.uk... [7]http://www.fas.org... [8] -http://www.nytimes.com...; [9] http://www.nytimes.com... [10] http://www.washingtonpost.com...