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

To: paul_philp who wrote (72038)	2/7/2003 2:33:27 AM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

<Until the knife is no longer at the throat, passions won't likely lower enough to allow for what you suggest.> You're thinking that self-analysis is an armchair exercise, a luxury we can afford, while relaxing after winning the war. I think self-analysis has to be done, before we have any chance of winning the war. It's not an "extra", it's "core". Victory will come from CorrectAction, which flows from CorrectThinking, which we haven't even begun to do. Right now, we're just acting like a big, successful hammer, that sees nothing but nails. We've fought a lot of conventional wars, and won them all (well, almost all; the Brits did burn our new Capital in 1814). We've fought one war against a guerrilla army, and we lost. Our present enemy is organized in a large number of independant cells and small mobile groups, that hides in remote terrain among sympathetic civilian populations. They avoid battle unless they can surprise a soft target. These are all classic methods/organization of a guerrilla army. In order to defeat the guerrilla army we face, we have got to study things we've ignored up till now, learn to do things we've never been good at. Start by watching all the Bin Laden tapes. Twice. Read the "Quotations of Chairman Mao". Do a lot of public opinion polls in Muslim countries. Analyse General Giap's tactics, that he used to beat us in Vietnam. See the connections. Understand that this war is not just a straight military fight. Yes, that'll be part of it, but not the main part, and not the hard part. The hard part is convincing all those young men memorising the Koran in madrassahs (and polishing their box-cutters), that there is a BetterWay. Do this, and we begin to separate the fish (Al Queda, Hesbollah, etc.) from the ocean they swim in (a billion Muslims).