Hi jamok99; Thanks for another intelligent, well written and sensitive reply. And no, I am not being at all sarcastic. Sorry for any such suggestion. I love reading what you write.
Winning through overwhelming support is not about "detering their determination". Instead, it is simply killing enough of the other side that their determination wavers. You do this by eliminating hope. This is not rocket science, it has worked repeatedly throughout history. Humans are human. They fight hardest when they can begin to see their dreams balloon into reality. When their dreams die, they quit fighting. There is no way of changing that fundamental fact of human nature.
Re: "... I won't continue that debate in detail" Your desire to avoid discussing the actual points of history implies to me that you do agree that overwhelming force (assuming that it is truly overwhelming) has worked repeatedly in the past. Okay. On to the next topic. Vietnam? North Vietnam never had even a single city occupied by U.S. ground troops. Clearly the United States did not apply overwhelming force. In fact, this was repeatedly noted at the time, and the United States military swore to never do it again.
Re: "You don't like the fact, it is brutal, but <<it is sometimes necessary that the stronger party completely dominate the other through the use of force>> as the only effective course of action." Yes, you have expressed my position exactly.
Re: "In effect, might makes right, period." No, in every war that's ever been fought, as far as I can tell, both sides were convinced that what they were doing is right. If you want to discuss right and wrong you will simply fight until one side gives up. Anyone who's ever raised two children knows this.
Re: "Let me make this concrete - in the 1980's when it was a popular idea among some conservative circles that war with the Soviet Union was inevitable, so let's get it over with." This is correct, but there were simultaneously other people in (what would now be called) conservative circles that maintained from early on that simple containment of Communism would eliminate it. They were right, as it turns out, but many millions of people died in that containment. Here's a link to George Kennan's famous telegram:
users.supernet.com
Re: "By that logic, we should have gone to war with the Soviet Union, destroyed hundreds of millions of people, in order to solve our conflicts by the only means possible - brute force." Wrong. The United States never possessed the overwhelming force required to force the Soviet Union to heel. Your own statement that hundreds of millions would have been killed is proof. Did hundreds of millions of Americans die stopping the Ghost Dance uprising you mentioned? While the doctrine of overwhelming force does apply to conflicts between equals, the doctrine is not that is is the only choice. Rather, the doctrine is that if you apply overwhelming force you will win. Every military planner knows this. It's been true since Troy fell to the Greeks. (Did Troy continue to fight?) Deciding on policy is a matter of choosing lesser evils. At this time, the option of not fighting appears to involve living in fear and accepting the destruction of our cities. Just because you have a hammer doesn't mean that all problems are therefore nails.
Re: "Given your belief that overwhelming force ultimately and forever crushes all resistance ..." I would rewrite this as "the application of overwhelming force results in relatively peaceful conclusions." In fact even now, there's still Nazi believers killing people in the United States, but overall, fighting and defeating Nazi Germany was the correct choice.
Re: "If Islamic terrorists were the ones with such force, and applied it to America, would you personally in fact submit to the imposition of Islamic culture, ideals,and interests with the utter resignation you predict our foes will?"" Heck yeah! Of course I would! Deny it as much as you want, but so would most everybody else. In fact, the Muslims have repeatedly proved that Christian societies will accept Moslem rule. Spain was an example, they were "freed from Moslem slavery" by Europe, not by revolution.
I'm not trying to denigrate American patriotism, but the fact is that humans are human, and many many years of evolution have bred into the human race a strong tendency to knuckle under to overwhelming force. The ones who didn't do that are called "dead" humans; they didn't breed; their genes are gone. We're humans, that's all, not idiots, morons, or superhumans. The same applies to the other guys. As long as there is hope, a good fraction of us will fight, even to the point of sacrificing our lives. After hope is dead, the vast majority of us will make the best of it. There will always be a few holdouts. Like the Japanese guy who kept fighting in the jungle until 1980 (or whenever). What do you think? Do you think that Americans would fight forever? If not Americans who? Real life is not a 1943 Hollywood movie. Nor, for that matter, was the U.S. situation in WW2 ever at all hopeless.
Look at the Russians! They put up with the Communist BS for 70 years before they got rid of it. It was self imposed! The people there love freedom as much as anyone else, but when it was clear that the position was hopeless, they did not fight. The word in the U.S. was that since they were descended from "peasants", they were willing to accept "slavery." This was a slur of the worst sort, and it was eventually proved very wrong. Was their position, in fact, hopeless? No! But they thought it was, so they got along with their lives. As soon as the Communist regime was gone they were all saying how much they hated it. Why didn't they fight it? The reason is that they had no hope.
The advantage of Democracy is that it is able to get a little support from everyone. It's easier to impose a Democracy by force than it is an arbitrary society. It's not that Democracy is so much better than other forms of government as much as it is so convenient. The Koran, by the way, includes almost no instruction on how to run a government, at least as far as I can recall. I would guess that the Islamic governments are mostly governed according to the rule of the Torah.
Democracy and capitalism come with promises of worldly wealth, pleasure and power that Fundamentalist Islam cannot deliver or even promise in this life. That's why the clerics are so afraid of us. For that reason, you will find substantial numbers of people who will support Democracy in any area of the world you go to.
The vast majority of the believers of Islam in the United States are productive, happy, healthy and patriotic members of this country. There isn't anything in Islam that is at odds with our nation's values.
If the Afghanistan people were so averse to capitalism and democracy, why did so many of them move here? They've been sending letters with tales of immense wealth, photos of what looks like paradise, and packages of food to their starving relatives for 20 years. This was not the case with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. There's a fairly good chance that when the Americans (and our Islamic allies) roll into Kabul they will be cheered. At the very least they'll bring food and money.
There are a few examples of more or less liberal more or less democratic regimes in Moslem countries to use as templates for Afghanistan or Iraq. Hopefully we will use their assistance. You don't have to be Christian to know how to vote. This planet is filled with human beings, all of the same human race. Our imposition of liberal democracy on these countries is not of the same practical nature as the imposition of Islamic Fundamentalism on the United States, so your use of that as an example has nothing to do with the current situation. It was a great rhetorical device though, and I'll get roasted for telling it like it is!
-- Carl
P.S. The fact is that viewed by a space alien from far enough away, this planet appears to be populated by people who are remarkably similar from one corner of the globe to the other. If they weren't so similar, Coca Cola wouldn't be a world wide franchise. Democracy and Capitalism are similarly successful. |
