Reply #3: In the next two to three months...

[lapfog_1]

The new Iraq commander, Patreous, promises to implement his plan to fight insurgents, and that plan is 180 degrees from the old plan of basically staying in secured bases and venturing out on raids if intelligence is developed on locations. The new plan will send our soldiers out on foot patrols to all of neighborhoods where insurgents are thought to be, and then we knock on doors and search for insurgents (I'm guessing that knocks will really be "kick that damn door down"... and later "kick the damn door down and shoot anything that moves"). Very similar to the neighborhood policing that many US cities have tried... only, well, everyone hates us, very few troops will be able to communicate with the people they meet, and the troops we will be using to do this are tired of being there and very tired of being ambushed and blown up every time they drive anywhere and there is a very well funded civil war being fought (Iran on the Shia side, Saudis on the Sunni side).

It would be like dropping 10,000 Chinese imperial troops into Virginia during OUR civil war and telling them to find "blue soldiers" or "gray soldiers" and disarm them. Only in Iraq, the blue and grey soldiers look and dress more or less the same, and they aren't hanging out in military camps... they meet up in secret and at night and then go on hunting parties to find members of the other side to butcher.

Everyone expects that the new commander is going to get a dozen or more KIA every day.