Hi John Cavanaugh; Re: "Iran was a case where we did all the same type of intervention as in post-war Germany, but there was never any military involvement (advisors sure - but we never fought them)."
If we'd sent troops into Iran in order to give (force) the locals (to submit to) a good (according to our standards) government the result would have been rather predictable. They'd have fought us in a guerilla war that would have continued until we'd extract ourselves.
That Germany and Japan didn't fight to stop us from telling them how to run their lives is not because our systems of government are so intrinsically attractive, but instead because they had pretty much run out of hot heads and young men to give their lives in combat against us.
It's also sometimes possible to convince a nation to submit without killing a lot of people, but only where you have such overwhelming force, and more importantly, the will to use it, that it is obvious to 99.9% of the population that resistance is futile. The Israelis are unable to convince the Palestinians that resistance is futile, and we would have had far worse problems with the Iranians.
While it may be true that "war is never having to say you're sorry", it is not true that all problems have a military solution.
Re: "Killing 7 to 10% of the population of Iraq would just create more problems if it wasn't followed by a Marshal Plan."
I think it would be horribly unnecessary and immoral for us to kill millions of Iraqis. Unfortunately, our humanitarian objectives for the Iraqi people would require us to do so. I've been arguing against such a move for 6 months. In addition, I believe that the US military recognizes the inherent difficulty in such an operation, and they will prevent the civilian leadership from getting sucked into that kind of quick sand. The timing of our invasion of Iraq has been an ongoing disagreement on this thread. I've argued that it isn't going to happen.
Re: "BTW Why is it ok to kill a huge percentage of a countries population in a convential war when decapitating the leadership with a nuclear strike is immoral (and might take less than 1%)?"
I agree with you completely, at least in principle. (Perhaps the primary reason is that I'm a "population", rather than a "leadership.") It is more moral to decapitate a country than it is to force every human there to submit to your will.
Decapitating a country can be ugly as hell though. That's what the Communists did to Russia, for example. And only killing a few of the leadership is not always very effective. For example, Lincoln was assassinated by a Southern sympathizer but it didn't stop the Union from continuing the war.
For decapitation to work, the bulk of the people have to support some alternative to the current leadership, an alternative that is in some way preferable. One problem that immediately crops up is that, in the absence of ruthlessness on the order of the Communist example, there are always going to be a lot of survivors. And if the decapitation is extensive, then there's always going to be a lot of ancillary damage, and that damage will convert more of the population against the foreigner who did the decapitation.
The problem with decapitating Iraq is that the second strongest force in the bulk of the country is the Islamic Fundamentalists. Having the country convert from a more or less secular dictatorship to a fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship would be a step in the wrong direction.
To try to guide the country to some form of democracy would require cowing the population the same way WW2 cowed the German and Japanese populations. And that would be in violation of the Geneva convention.
A more effective technique would be to use the same technique that we used against the secular dictatorship of Franco. Time. And besides, Iraq is a threat only to the region, and the locals are acting like they'll only help the US fix their Iraqi "problem" if we bribe the hell out of them.
-- Carl |
