Thats not a personal insult to the marines. I think anyone occupying a country and fighting guerrilla rebels could find themselves in ambiguous situations in which it is difficult to discern enemies from civilians.

For example. http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wocheck0120,0,532599.story?coll=ny-world-big-pix

I doubt that opinion is based on reality any more than mine (which wasn't at all, I can admit that. It's just something I wrote to criticize the madness). If replacing combat troops with engineer troops would suddenly cease the bombings and other terrorism, it would have been done a long time ago.

Unless you mean the troops really are there for oil or other external reasons.

There are a lot of countries that fought a bitter civil war before things settled down. The USA and Finland included. As ruthless as it is, maybe Iraq should be allowed to join that bloody club.

i'd like to know how many people here have taken a class in US Foreign Policy.

No, the ROE are not secret. You can probably find fairly up to date criteria on Google. I'm also surprised that Spook's experience with Army ROE was so restrictive. Soldiers are always allowed to fire to defend themselves. Beyond that the basic requirement is to positively identify enemy. I can say that it certainly is not lax enough to say that we can shoot at someone we feel is a threat. That certainly sounds contradictory to the ROE in theater for all forces.

I wonder why I thought that.

The point isn't that changing American troops to pogues is going to help, it's that eventually the support channels for the problems will have less chance to prosper if the country is doing better.