Hi NightOwl; Re: "As you have said we own the night, and our armor and medicals are much improved over anything that existed in Algeria or Vietnam."
(a) We own the night in the country. Cities have no night. There are either lights, or stuff on fire.
(b) Our armor is improved, but so are the anti armor weapons in the hands of the other side. For that matter, armor is famous for being vulnerable in cities. The main problem is that cities tend to channel military forces into predictable lanes of movement, and the enemy will set up ambushes (IEDs or antitank weapons or whatever) for those lanes.
(c) Our medical is also improved, but we're still taking the casualties and taking them big time. In addition, a lot of our guys are getting seriously wounded and are not going back. My argument was based on simple kill ratios, and since the kill ratios have not turned extremely high in our favor, the historical kill ratios are correct. By your argument, the government's reports of 47 soldiers dead in Iraq in 8 days must be in error.
Re: "Moreover, I figure this enemy will not be able to sustain 800,000 KIA, much less a million before caving."
How many Iraqis do you know? Not the white meat type living in the US, but the ones who stayed in the old country?
You used a figure of less than 5000 US combat deaths. Assume a very optimistic kill ratio of 10 to 1. That's about 50,000 Iraqis. Out of a population of 25 million, that's about 1 in 500. Now scale that down to the much smaller problem in Palestine. There are something like 3 million Palestinians. One in 500 is about 6,000. The number of Palestinians already killed in the (very mild) scrabble with Israel is considerably higher than that (over the past 60 years), but still they keep on fighting.
And the Iraqis see themselves as having a far greater chance of throwing us out of Iraq than the Palestinians must believe about getting rid of Israel.
Re: "Let them nuke Chicago and I'm fairly certain that you'll get a lot more than a million enemy KIA."
I'm fairly certain that that's not going to happen. Our security forces are pretty good, and like Bush says, the focus of the terrorists is now on breaking our will in Iraq. (And as Bush doesn't say, their goal now is not to make us more angry per se.)
The assumption that the terrorists are going to nuke Chicago is the same sort of logic that was used to conclude that Saddam wouldn't get rid of his nukes. What you're doing is not making a reasonable prediction for what the other side is going to do, or even what he wants to do. What you're doing is coming up with a worst case.
Hey, worst case analysis is a wonderful thing, but you can only pursue its dreamy logic if you're superman. We're only a superpower, we do not have superpowers.
And there's another facet to your error. You and I both agree that the US will to dominate the Arabs would INCREASE if the US were nuked. In other words, we both agree that nuking Chicago would be bad for the Islamofascists. Okay, if it's bad for the Islamofascists, then why the Hell do you think they're going to do it?
As with the logic on Saddam, you're assuming that the counterparty to this game is stupid. They're not. They have a different belief system than we do, but they're not stupid. If they were stupid they wouldn't be chewing up our forces in Iraq.
Look at the Palestinians. They have been very careful to not piss off the US. The WTC attack was by Osama, not Saddam, and look at the result. We got Saddam, but Osama is not only still running around free (apparently), but his forces have grown. So from his point of view, the pinprick he gave us at the WTC was not a mistake. Especially with Bush blowing it by putting all those targets on to the ground in Iraq.
You don't win at chess by hoping that your opponent is going to make a big mistake. And if you look around at the number of attempted attacks on the US homeland, and compare them to the huge number of successful attacks against our soldiers in Iraq, you will see that the enemy is just not stupid enough to fall for that trap.
-- Carl |
