Exterminate the Brutes...With History!

Today Victor Davis Hanson asks the rhetorical question, Can General Petraeus Turn the War Around?

There's an obvious answer to that (hint: it starts with "no" and ends with "fucking way"), but Hanson falls back on his trusty mantra: if the present isn't working out for you, go with historical parallels. So he cites a number of past generals who succeeded in turning around bad miltary situations.

Including this one:

Take, for example, the Boer War between a colonial Great Britain and the Afrikaners of South Africa. Its first year (1899) proved disastrous for British forces. Their conventional forces were ill prepared for guerilla ambushes by Afrikaner irregular sharpshooters and cavalry. But with the appointment of Lord Kitchener in 1900 came the creation of British commandos and new tactics, leading to a British victory and an eventual settlement.

And how did Kitchener do it? Here's Josh Treviño with the answer:

In assessing manning needs for Iraq, one would do well to look to prior conflicts of similar nature… one might look especially to the Boer War, in which a fractious, semi-fanatical culture was slowly ground into submission by an occupying force — several years after the seeming success of the initial invasion...the means of victory there offer an instructive thought experiment for Iraq today.

Make no mistake: those means were cruel. I have stated previously that I endorse cruel things in war — to eschew them is folly. The British achieved victory over the Boers by taking their women and children away to concentration camps, by laying waste to the countryside, and by dotting the veld with small garrisons in blockhouses at regular intervals. The men who remained were hindered in their movements by the wire stretching from blockhouse to blockhouse (a phenomenon that the Morice Line experience has shown would be massively more effective now); they could either surrender or die. Absent women and children, the rules of engagement were lax. From implementation to victory took under 18 months.

Give Treviño credit for embracing the "batshit Nazified desires from the heart of darkness" (as Sadly, No put it) rather than (as Hanson does) simply pretending they don't exist.