Might does NOT make right: Hasn't the U.S. learned anything in Iraq?

In Iraq, it just feeds the insurgency and shifts public opinion to the jihadists. You don't need to flush a copy of the Koran down the toilet, you just need to go in, guns blazing, and take out the perceived opposition without much regard for the complexities of the situation, thereby alienating those who should be your allies. Fred Kaplan's latest in Slate tells the story of Operation Matador, a U.S. effort to crush foreign jihadists in western Iraq. The U.S. was tipped off by nationalist (and anti-jihadist) tribal leaders who had put together a makeshift "vigilante group" called the Hamza Forces. These tribal leaders asked the U.S. and the interim Iraqi government for help, but Operation Matador turned into an all-out bombing campaign. Said Fasal al-Goud, one of the leaders who had asked for help: "The Americans were bombing whole villages, and saying they were only after the foreigners." Kaplan calls it "the big kaboom". How apt.

Here's a passage (but check out the entire piece -- Kaplan bases it on a recent report in The Philadelphia Inquirer, to which he links):

This failure is all the more appalling given that the interim Iraqi government is in shambles -- and the prospects for a free and democratic Iraq are uncertain, at best -- in large part because of growing sectarian splits among the country's three main ethnic groups: Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. The Sunnis, who comprise (or shelter) the most lethal factions of the insurgency, are demanding a greater share of power in the central government. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a trip to Baghdad last week to urge the predominantly Shiite leaders to satisfy this demand for the sake of stability. It's generally accepted these days that merely killing insurgents creates more insurgents and that a peaceful settlement will come about, if at all, only after a political settlement.

And yet, here comes the U.S. military, roaring across the western deserts, strafing and shelling anyone with a gun and everything all around him. In short, Operation Matador was a double-whammy of old thinking: kaboom, kaboom, kaboom -- and in a way that alienated precisely the people we should be assuring. Maybe Fasal al-Goud and the Hamza Forces won't go so far as to join the insurgency. But it's unlikely now that they'll keep up their resistance, consider the Americans as their friends, or -- more devastating -- see the Iraqi politicians in Baghdad as their government.

No, the U.S. hasn't learned much. The bungling continues, but the Iraqi people, forcibly liberated by the U.S. and its so-called "coalition of the willing," deserve better from their liberators.