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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group

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To: smolejv@gmx.net who wrote (129855)	4/23/2004 11:44:54 AM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) of 281500

Fighting in the cities may be as difficult as fighting in the jungles given today's advances in military hardware. We're able to "look through" dense jungle cover with today's technology but during the Vietnam war we could not. In many respects it was far more difficult to fight in the jungle during the Vietnam War than it is to fight in the cities today. In deep, triple or double canopy jungle there is so much cover that the ground is literally blanketed from the air. On the ground it is usually difficult to see farther than a few meters. In the jungles of Vietnam there were vast areas of land that "could" have hidden the NVA or S. Vietnamese fighters and they were dispersed in much of it. The jungle not only concealed them, it also fed them and they dug into it so well that they were protected from all but our B-52 bomb strikes. Sometimes they were dug in well enough to have some protection from those as well. If they were faced with overwhelming force the NVA or S. Vietnamese fighters could melt away using the dense vegetation as cover. The true "cover" in the cities lies in the fact that the insurgents look like every other Iraqi and thus are not identifiable UNTIL they strike. Once they strike they must cut and run because at that time city fighting presents much different parameters for those who oppose superior forces than did jungle fighting. Superior forces can cordon off the areas where resistance is located and then cut off avenues of escape. The result is that there will not be the fierce resistance that we saw in Vietnam as long as we are prepared to fight as savagely as we did there. Of course we are currently constrained from all out attacks on pockets of resistance for several political reasons. One reason is that we are attempting to perpetuate the fiction that we are facing only a handful of "thugs, fanatics and foreign fighters." We don't want to engage in the type of actions that will reveal that we are really facing a much larger number of insurgents who are united in their hatred of our occupation. A second reason is that we don't want to create a "tipping point" where the blossoming resistance solidifies into a full blown uprising that captures the "hearts and minds" of even the more moderate Iraqis. It's an old testament place and the people we're currently fighting are Iraqis with families, friends and connections. We, on the other hand, are in danger of being perceived as the "evil empire." There's no coming back from that tipping point. The third reason is that with an election looming there is no possibility that the number of lives we'd lose in using the necessary force would be tolerated. It would be a death knoll for the Bush administration and in this, as in many things, their dogmatism is limited by their desire to hold onto power. Perhaps the best reason is that while we could use our force and "win the war," what would we win? That "war" would turn out to have been only a battle. One thing that Vietnam should have taught us, or that we should have learned from the French experience in the Sudan and Vietnam and the Soviet's experience in Afghanistan, is that you cannot defeat ideas like nationalism and religion with force of arms. The pain just never stops and finally the cost/benefit considerations require that you get the hell back home where you can protect yourselves. It's better to understand the limits of superior military power than to be so giddy with it that you fall into the trap of fighting a war where it is marginalized. Of course we do have the "nuke them and solve the problem" thinkers. The last fallback for those who hide behind words like freedom and democracy but actually mean just freedom and democracy for those that agree with them. PS. This discussion addresses the problem from a military strategy perspective; if you're the man walking point into triple canopy jungle ambushes you're likely just as dead as the man walking point into a building with armed and deadly men waiting to open up. That's the guy we ought to ask whether the cause is worth it, not the guy that sent him who's eating lobster and spinning the facts while he counts votes.

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