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

To: LindyBill who wrote (30781)	5/27/2002 11:17:32 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi LindyBill; Re: "We had a post, back at the start of this thread, the Pershing, in the Philippines, announced a policy of burying Muslim guerillas in a pigskin, and that this stopped the Muslim guerillas. I don't know is this was true, but, as bad as things have got in Israel, they might give this a try." I really can't see how anyone could possibly imagine that this would work. The Koran is quite explicit that killing civilians and noncombatants is wrong, as is suicide, but still those who are Moslem and want to fight find a way around it. This is a trait of all humanity. If there is something they want, humans will ignore all moral precepts to take it. If it really were such a big deal, the survivors of the pigskin buried martyr will fight to obtain control of the grave so that they can dig him up and give him a proper burial. Or, alternatively, they will fight to avenge the insult. No, the only way that you defeat nations in war is through the annihilation of a sufficient number of their military and civilians that the remainder prefer slavery to freedom. You will know that you have succeeded when the survivors beg you to accept their surrender. By the way, Pershing did a lot of other, undoubtedly effective things that are probably no longer allowed in warfare. Burying corpses in pigskins is in violation of the Geneva convention, but I really don't see why it would be such a big deal. It's certainly no worse than when the Somalians skinned and gutted the Pakistani soldiers in the build up to the US Delta and Ranger disaster there. By the way, I'm reading "Blackhawk Down", maybe 1/5 done, and it's a truly well done book. I didn't see the movie. From reading the book, I think it should be obvious to all that any small nation that voluntarily takes on the US military is run by certifiable lunatics. My own feeling on the situation is that we decided that we needed to take revenge for the Pakistanis, we should have done it the same way as in Afghanistan - by channeling supplies and ground support to the enemies of Aidid. Let Aidid's people starve. What we did instead was basically to train the local population on the details of how to destroy helicopters. If that was a fight that we had to be in, (and I don't think it was), then we should have eliminated the government using the traditional technique of occupation and destruction. Instead, we got the Clinton solution that just pissed off everybody. -- Carl