Had he REFUSED BATTLE and placed himself between the Union Army and Washington D.C., this would not have happened and Lee might have even taken our capital city and earned a negotiated war end with the south becoming its own nation-state, but his judgment was clouded by NARCISSISM.

The North under Lincoln's leadership finally got the message: take or create the situational high ground. Lincoln soon thereafter put non-vain, practical warfighters in charge who knew that the proud, narcissist Confederates would never refuse battle, so he obliged them with battle-after-battle by Grant in the Wilderness wearing them down, while maneuverist mastermind Sherman in the south flying in two mobile columns free of railroad supply dependence offered them two choices for battle---and he ignored whichever choice they made---to instead destroy their logistical means to fight.

The Civil War was won by no-non-sense operational maneuver and appreciation for the terrain but the history books are filled with romantic lusting over Stonewall Jackson, JEB Stuart and Lee's feel-good battlefield maneuvers and duels with the Union Army connected to no lasting political effects. They lost the war accordingly.

Most career military people are narcissists who want to be seen of men, gaining their peer approval to "self-validate" themselves. It was only after 3 years of military disasters before enough of them were fired in enough quantities to clear the way for Chamberlains, Grants and Shermans to rise to command to win the war.

Iraq is our Gettysburg

In 2003, the invasion of Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom; we got there "first" with the U.S. Army's tracked mechanized 3rd Infantry Division taking Baghdad but didn't exploit the situational like a Buford by immediately getting reinforcements by rehiring Iraqi Army Soldiers and government workers we promised jobs to. To pump up our egos, we instead moved into former dictator palaces and built forward operating bases (FOBs) around them, surrendering the roads/trails to the enemies we created by disenfranchisement and constant civilian house raids looking for Saddam Hussein and his loyalists. Hussein & company had escaped because uber-narcissist marines mostly in wheeled trucks who "pride" themselves that they don't fight mobile mounted warfare (which is for "weak pussies" so they say) didn't know what they were doing and were thus easily ambushed and stopped so they were 6 days late reaching their sector of Baghdad. Another failure was the unimaginative heavy tankers at CENTCOM who did not even make capturing Saddam a task on their to-do list and wimpy 173rd Paratroopers who sat & held as 1st Infantry Division troopers in M113 Gavins and a handful of M1 Abrams heavy and M2 Bradley medium tanks flown in one-C-17-load-at-a-time into the seized airfield in Northern Iraq who did not employ decisive 3D air-mech maneuver to "close the back door" from Baghdad to Saddam's home town in Tikrit. With Americans on a 9-to-5 routine in the FOBs like it was garrison and they were being sent out on lawn care missions: the rebels were then free since we neither looking or there on the ground 24/7/365 to stop them from laying roadside bombs and drive their car bombs into civilian areas to slaughter them.

Instead, we began doing Robert E. Lees: either daily "Pickett's Charges" down landmine filled roads in wheeled trucks or large sweeps that created more rebels than they found. The daily sight of burning Humvee /Stryker trucks does not inspire any confidence in the civilian populace that we can defend them nor strike any fear or "respect" in the minds of our enemies. Our willingness to die stupidly does not impress even those with their own nihilist death cult mentalities if its a result of our own INCOMPETENCE. Slapping armor onto Humvee s and buying expensive Canadian Stryker or V-hull shaped wheeled trucks to feed our narcissism does not work for long if at all and I have been warning everyone in DoD since my U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings article in November 1989 about these road-bound, non-combat vehicles and explaining why on the non-linear battlefield all our troops must be in 28% more space/weight efficient than wheeled trucks, M113 Gavin-type light and heavier tracked Armored Fighting Vehicles (AFVs) so they can go cross-country at will in any direction to avoid landmines and other ambushes and be adequately armored to prevail when they must fight. The Israelis think we are nuts for patrolling Iraq in wheeled trucks instead of sound, well-armored tracks.

"Anti-Islamism" is Islam in another form in the opposite direction

Today's volunteer Army is permeated with narcissism in all the ranks at all the levels. We are the clones of the impatient and lazy Confederates who do not want to invest in the ground for lasting outcomes but want to be feel-good shooters doing Pickett's Charges as if war was some sort of group duel between mirror images for self-validation. Rather than REFUSE BATTLE in Iraq, we insist we must stay, doing daily "Gettysburgs" lest the Islamics see us as "weak", which is surrendering the initiative to the other side just like the Confederates did to the Union Army in our Civil War. War is NOT the ultimate test of manhood validation, it is a necessary evil and no more; to think otherwise in an American "Anti-Islamism" form is just another form of Islamist (hate attempted to be excused by religion) narcissism wrapped in red, white and blue. Call us the "American Taliban". We berate social conformists for being "weak" and "following the crowd", but those who are NON-conformist are just pretending to be different from the crowd because they are REACTING to and rebelling against what the crowd is doing--what drives them is what the crowd is doing not an internal, moral compass. America should not operate in a knee-jerk against whatever the Islamists are doing which would then empower its death cult mentality to be the thing that dictates who we are and what we are going to do lest we want them to own us as Grant/Sherman owned the Confederates in 1865.

In American football, the advent of the computer led Tom Landry to profile the tendencies of his opponents and prevail upon them until Bill Walsh and the 49ers decided to "jam the computer" and MARCH TO THE BEAT OF THEIR OWN DRUMMER and run scripted plays created at random that Landry's Dallas Cowboys couldn't anticipate. Walsh's adaptive 49ers owned the computerized Cowboys from then on and dominated football for 2 decades.

What America must do is stop replaying Robert E. Lee and refuse battle situations in Iraq or anywhere else where the enemy has got there first and holds the ground to decided advantage. Like Bill Walsh, we must start stacking-the-deck in our favor according to our moral and tactically sound playbook and stop worrying about whether the enemy will cower before us or "respect" us. We are not playing to their approval. Respect will come when its EARNED through VICTORY by fighting on our terms on ground of our own choosing, where we have first prepared it by combat engineering (blocking). You cannot "throw the ball" or "run it" without first "blocking" and "tackling" the enemy so you deny him the ground and instead control it yourself.

Take the Situational High Ground and Stop Charging into Ambushes

There are actually 4 "wars" going on in Iraq. 3 are sub-national conflicts and one is a nation-state war. In order of precedence:

1. Internal Civil War (Sunni vs Shia Islamic factions)
2. Rebellion to U.S. occupation
3. Iran vs. Iraq/U.S.
4. Militant Islam vs the West

To do an Union Army "Anaconda" strategy on this situation, we need to fully ANSWER each one of these "wars" with a grand strategy and tactically be pro-active Buford/Meades and Grant/Shermans not be re-active 1863-1865 Robert E. Lees and Picketts.

Option A: Block & Separate

To stop the civil war, we build a 20 foot high wall across the middle of Iraq and divide a generation of Sunnis/Shias from free movement to park car bombs or plant road land mines for a about 20-40 years. Make this generation cool off and get a civilian "life". We screwed them up and caused a civil war and the best we can hope for is to separate the combatants and hope the next generation will want something better. To pay for this, we cut the $1B/week U.S. occupation forces of 130, 000---most of which are doing nothing but consuming supplies---in half so $500M is freed for separation wall construction and our eyesore obnoxious presence causing rebellion is reduced. Those that remain "picket" (British term not in our playbook) only the main supply routes (MSRs) we need to sustain ourselves every 1, 000 meters by a string of forts made up of Soldiers in mobile but fortified ISO container BATTLEBOXes and M113A3 SuperGavin light tracked AFVs doing security creating maneuvers (SCMs) laying ambushes and waiting on the rebels to appear instead of vice-a-versa. Overhead, aerostat balloons and guard towers with ground surveillance radar in each picket fort and roaming manned 2-seat observation/attack planes scour the skies looking down below 24/7/365 to help the pickets deny the ground to enemy landmine layers and car bombers and monitor the oil pipelines. Like we need to do on our own SW border of the USA, we build a security sensor fence on the Syrian/Iranain border and use the proven French Morice line-type techniques of constant air/ground patrolling backed by tracker teams and quick reaction force (QRF) paratroopers in Mini-Gavins sized to fly inside C-130/C-27J transport planes and CH-47 heavy lift helicopters to hunt down and kill any intruders to keep Iran out of Iraq. This will also keep the militant Islamist Mufsidoon out of free live-fire demolition training at U.S. taxpayer's financial and offspring expense.

EXAMPLE: needs to be done all across Iraq

http://news.aol.com/topnews/articles/_a/iraq-war-violence/20070412050609990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001

Updated:2007-04-20 09:41:38

U.S. Walls Off Baghdad Neighborhood

By THOMAS WAGNER
AP BAGHDAD (April 20) - U.S. Soldiers are building a three-mile wall to protect a Sunni Arab enclave surrounded by Shiite neighborhoods in a Baghdad area "trapped in a spiral of sectarian violence and retaliation," the military said.

When the wall is finished, the minority Sunni community of Azamiyah, on the eastern side of the Tigris River, will be gated, and traffic control points manned by Iraqi Soldiers will be the only entries, the military said.

"Shiites are coming in and hitting Sunnis, and Sunnis are retaliating across the street," said Capt. Scott McLearn, of the U.S. 407th Brigade Support Battalion, which began the project April 10 and is working "almost nightly until the wall is complete," the statement said.

It said the concrete wall, including barriers as tall as 12 feet, "is one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence" in Baghdad.

U.S. and Iraqi forces have long erected cement barriers around marketplaces and coalition bases and outposts in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities such as Ramadi in an effort to prevent attacks, including suicide car bombs.

American forces also have constructed huge sand barriers around towns such as Tal Afar, an insurgent stronghold near the Syrian border.

There has been little sign of the U.S. military using concrete barriers to divide Baghdad neighborhoods by sect, but at least one similar construction has been re