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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (27676)	4/29/2002 8:13:16 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi CobaltBlue; Re: "I agree with your basic point, but to nit-pick, actually there were revolts in Germany towards the end of WWI, and the Russian Revolution began during WWI." You're right, I didn't phrase it well. The only way to make a nation quit fighting is to kill a substantial percentage of its population. After you do that, they'll start talking about surrendering. When they start talking about surrendering, it's also possible that a dictatorship will fall. But this won't happen until after you get the substantial percentage deaths. I included this argument in the post but didn't make it explicit: "As I've repeated ad nauseam on this thread, in order to make a nation roll over you have to kill a substantial percentage of their citizens. With Germany and Japan the figures were around 10 and 5%, if I recall correctly. This is not an option with Iraq." Russia and Germany both had incredible losses in WW1 and were close to suing for peace before they had revolts. If Iraq defends only their cities, it simply not possible for us to kill enough soldiers in them to induce the numbers we would need. Heck, Iran couldn't kill enough Iraqis to make a revolution in eight years of slaughter, and the Iraqis have a whole new generation of bright-eyed, enthusiastic cannon fodder grown up since then. Like with the Germans in WW2, we will have to start over from scratch. The only hope we would have is that the Iraqis would pull another complete bonehead mistake and get themselves caught out in open country. It's possible, I suppose, but I would really be surprised if they did that twice in a row. I would bet that they've been thinking about what they did wrong for most of the last 10 years. Generals tend to fight the last war. -- Carl