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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: stockman_scott who wrote (84418)3/24/2003 12:49:12 AM
From: Bilow  Read Replies (1) of 281500
 
Hi stockman_scott; Re article entitled: "Analysis: Calibrated War Makes Comeback "

That one gives me goose bumps. Remember Vietnam, and the theory that by bombing the North just enough we'd get them to behave?

There was an interview on the radio the other day by the guy who wrote the military paper about "Shock and Awe". He was an obvious idiot.

He gave two examples of shock and awe in history. One was the nuking of Japan, the other was Sun Tzu executing girls in order to make them march correctly. Both were examples of the use of overwhelming bloody force.

Now it's clear to me that nuking cities or executing those who can't keep tempo are effective techniques for making humans behave. My usual rule of thumb is that if you kill 5% of a group of humans, the remainder will generally do what you want. But the idiot somehow generalized this to the concept that blowing up empty buildings in Baghdad would cause the Iraqi people to submit. It's like he missed the whole point.

Yeah, fireworks displays are "awesome", but no, they don't shock anyone. Least of all an Iraqi population that has become accustomed to 12 years of regular bombardments.

I guess it's possible that an Iraqi or two are in these bombed buildings, but I would think that the Iraqi military and other authorities would follow the lead of the Baghdad shop keepers and move the stuff they didn't want bombed into their homes.

We could fix that problem by going back to the old "Dresden" solution, but that would get right back to the problem of killing 5% of the population, and we don't have the guts to kill that many people.

-- Carl
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