Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Ilaine who wrote (43879)	9/15/2002 2:33:29 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi CobaltBlue; Re: "When the Nazis invaded the Ukraine, many in the population (Christians, of course, not Jews or Communists) were happy to see them because the Nazis threw out the Communists." This is true, but the application to Iraq is iffy. (1) The Ukraine was not Moscow. Ask any Ukrainian what the differences are between Ukrainians and Russians. (2) The Communists are not the Baathists. As noted in the book "The Longest War", Saddam retained power by being ruthless with higher officials while at the same time being particularly kind to the general public. By contrast, the Communists starved the living shit out of the Ukraine, alienated the common villagers, and rewarded their elite. Re: "The people in the concentration camps were happy to see the Allies. The slaves in the South were happy to see the Yankees. What do all these events have in common? The invaders brought with them a better way of life than was previously experienced." No, what your examples have in common is that the people who were forced into slavery (or worse) were happy to be released. The average person in Iraq is not a slave. What's more, both your examples are of people who were ethnically distinct from the group that ruled over them. In other words, these are examples of people who were freed from the rule of foreigners. My own example of the Afghans is similar. To find decent comparisons to Iraq, you need to find despots who (a) treated the common people well, (b) were responsible for a long period of firm economic growth, (c) was the leader in several "successful" (i.e. humans have a strong tendency to declare victories in wars that end without total surrenders), and (d) where the local people were economically disrupted by the same foreign power that is now moving in on them. I know that there is a strong tendency in the United States to believe that it is impossible for other peoples in the world to misunderstand American motives, but history provides plenty of examples of this. When you saw Iraqi soldiers happy to be surrendering to US soldiers you must understand that those smiles are universal human smiles. They are on the faces of (most) soldiers in all societies that are able to exit a war through surrender and are not mistreated by their captors. After seeing a decent percentage of your friends killed you would be happy to be out of the conflict too. This friendliness is quite similar to the (relative) friendliness that the German and Japanese civilians showed at the end of WW2. But those civilian populations saw many of their friends and neighbors killed or maimed in the war. They were happy in that same, universal way, to be alive. They were not happy because Hitler was gone, they were happy because they were alive. But despite that relief, those populations still provided plenty of soldiers to fight the US right up to the final surrender. This is the nature of populations at war, to fight back. If Saddam hides his soldiers in the city it will be impossible to kill enough of them to make the remainder happy to surrender, unless we also kill huge numbers of civilians. I agree that this will make both the civilians and the soldiers happy to see the end of the war, but killing that many civilians is not possible inside the modern interpretation of the Geneva Convention. The modern Geneva Convention places a limit on warfare that essentially prevents the conversion of civilian populations to "happy to have survived mode". In short, what I'm saying is that unconditional surrender is essentially incompatible with the modern interpretation of the Geneva Convention. The Israeli's inability to get the Palestinians to unconditionally surrender is evidence of this. If we ever do get in a war in the Middle East that requires that we force populations into unconditional surrender, the Geneva Convention will have to be discarded by us. Since I see the US as being an unbeatable empire on the culture front, I don't see why we should try to hasten the inevitable by killing millions of Arabs at an incalculable and perhaps permanent cost to our freedom. If we just ignore the Middle East and don't get involved picking favorites in the pissing matches there, all of our problems there will quickly go away. Re: "We are well-liked by the people who live in the No-Fly zone, who are not just Kurds - some are Shia, some are Sunni, some are Christians. We give them a better way of life." Those regions are not the regions or ethnic groups that have supported Saddam in the past. Of course they like us. That has absolutely nothing to do with what happens in Baghdad. Go back and look at Afghanistan. Make a map showing where US combat injuries or deaths happened. You will likely find that the regions where our soldiers died were not the ones where the Pashtuns (the ethnic group that most supported the Taliban, though the Taliban used foreign Arab soldiers) were concentrated. In Iraq it's not comparable because the Saddam does not use foreign soldiers in Baghdad. You simply do not have a local group fighting Saddam within his own ethnic group. Re: "I posted earlier in the week that Saddam has moved his troops away from the No Fly Zone. It's counter-intuitive unless he is afraid that they will switch sides." I suppose that it is counter-intuitive to you that in WW2 the Russians retreated from the Ukraine unless they were convinced that their troops were going to switch sides to the Germans, LOL. No, correct play for Saddam is to concentrate his soldiery in Baghdad. This forces the Americans to either kill lots (and I mean hundreds of thousands) of civilians (in violation of the Geneva Convention), or take big casualties in house to house fighting. That means giving up the rural areas. Maybe your basic misunderstanding of Iraqi emotional states is that you believe that the Iraqi soldiers in the Gulf War surrendered because they love the United States and hate Saddam. The truth is that they surrendered because the alternative was death. Those smiles you saw on around 50% of the surrendered Iraqi soldiers are on the faces of around 50% of the soldiers in PoW camps in every war where the PoWs are treated more or less kindly (i.e. allowed to live). Go get a picture book from WW1 or WW2. You will see those identical smiles on German soldiers. You will see identical smiles on US soldiers captured by the Germans. (US soldiers captured by the Japanese didn't smile.) Don't look for pictures where the prisoners are still marching, or have been prisoners for years. Look for the pictures that show them when they first realize that the war is over for them and that they have survived. Those smiles were not an indication that German soldiers hated Hitler or that they wanted to surrender, or that the remaining German troops wouldn't put up a fight. Similar for the smiles on Iraqi soldiers. I suspect that you don't have an understanding of how awful combat is. Surviving it is a wonderful experience. Nor is the fact that large numbers of soldiers did surrender an indication that the remaining soldiers will not fight. Huge numbers of German soldiers surrendered in various battles all through WW2, but the Germans fought on. Similarly, huge numbers of Allied soldiers surrendered in WW1 and WW2 but the Allies fought on. Men facing death tend to surrender. The problem for Gulf War 2 is that it will be a lot harder to threaten Iraqi soldiers dug into Baghdad with death than soldiers dug into barren desert. Here's a question for you: *If Saddam's soldiers hate him and would like to surrender to the United States, then why did we have to kill so many of them? (LOL!!!)* -- Carl P.S. It's difficult for me to search for pictures, but maybe I'll dig around and see if I can find something that shows the typical mental state of fresh PoWs.