I was never in the "take the gloves off" camp during the Iraq War. It wouldn't have worked since we could never be that brutal (notwithstanding left-wing criticism of our fight) and I wouldn't want to put our troops in the position of being that brutal.
If we could have been that brutal, we wouldn't have won a war as much as we'd have beaten down enemies into sullen passivity until they regained their capacity to fight.
But if you are brutal enough and don't care if you turn your troops into brutes, you can beat down your enemies into sullen passivity if you kill enough and inflict enough pain. Russia managed that in Chechnya. Chechen hatred still burns (with terrorism that reached even to our Boston Marathon bombing last year) and eventually they'll relaunch large-scale resistance.
Russia is so eager for a victory abroad that they are supplying Assad's killing spree that has killed more people in 3 years than have died in Iraq in 11 years:
Dr Assad's army, seeking to end a three-year civil war that has killed 150,000 people and displaced 9 million, started using longer-range Russian Smerch and Uragan rockets for the first time in February, according to Jane's Defence Weekly and Stratfor, a US geopolitical research company.
"Russia is now doing everything to ensure that Assad wins convincingly," Alexei Malashenko, a Middle East analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center, said by phone. "If Russia can show it's capable of carrying out its own foreign policy, regardless of America's wishes, it will be a major achievement for Putin."
The only thing to be said in favor of the strategy of grabbing them by their balls and counting on their hearts and minds to follow is that if you face enemies absolutely committed to resisting you, hearts and minds are unlikely to be receptive as the first line of approach.
We got the hearts and minds of most Shias and most of the Kurds in Iraq, but it took al Qaeda as a Sunni Arab ally in Iraq to get the Iraqi Sunni Arabs to commit their hearts and minds to our side. I worried that Iraq's new government would have to use the alternative strategy to pound down the Sunni Arabs if the Sunni Arabs didn't get a grip on reality and come to terms.
I thought Assad might have a shot at winning hearts and minds by exploiting the al Qaeda presence in Syria. But with too few troops to secure the population of Syria, the Syrians are just going to try to kill their way to victory.
And Putin is happy to supply Assad the means to kill lots of Arabs. You'd think our information operations could contrast our efforts to save Moslems in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait in recent years with Russia's support of Assad for killing Moslems.
