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

To: Bill Ulrich who wrote (79845)	3/6/2003 10:09:00 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Bill Ulrich; Re: "Japan loved their Emporer and the troops were ready to fight to the death on the mainland, and they significantly outnumbered the invasion forces we were considering putting against them." This is true. But Japan's Emperor gave a radio address where he explicitly asked his obedient subjects to stop fighting. Now if Saddam Hussein ordered his subjects to welcome the Americans, maybe your example would be realistic. But even if the Emperor hadn't made that famous speech, we would not have required high garrison percentages in Japan. As I've repeated several times, the historical record through 5000 years of warfare is clear. When a nation is bloodily defeated, the survivors put up little fight against the occupying power. This historical fact even applies to situations where the occupying power has explicit and overt plans to exterminate the defeated population. It is a simple fact of the human species that when sufficiently beaten down we give up fighting. Killing 10% is almost alwasy enough, and while there are some nations that have continued to fight with higher death rates, it is an historical fact that those nations eventually gave up, and there was little violence in the resulting occupation. This is an historical fact that is backed by hundreds of examples. Nations that suffer around 5% or greater fatalities during war, and that surrender, do not fight back with guerilla warfare. With Iraq, we killed about 20,000 (i.e. 0.1% of the population) back in 1991, but the new crop of cannon fodder has forgotten this completely by now if they were ever even aware of it. The sudden war Bush is talking about sounds like it will kill even fewer, and therefore have an even more negligible effect on the will to fight of the survivors. Comparing Iraq to Japan is hopelessly unrealistic. We killed as many Japanese as we possibly could, civilian or military, for most of 4 years. By the end of the war, between their adventures in China and our mauling, they had had 2.35 million people killed out of a population of around 83 million. To get to the Japanese example, we'd have to kill at least 30x as many Iraqis. And that just ain't gonna happen. The number of troops required to garrison a hostile population increases as the Geneva Convention is more closely adhered to. For that reason, the example of Northern Ireland is far more cogent than what went on in the Punjab. Another significant difference is that the Sikhs are an ethnic minority (in India). It is a historical fact that ethnic majorities fight much harder against foreigners than ethnic minorities do. I know that this seems topsy-turvy to those who haven't thought about it, but the fact is that ethnic minorities generally know that they don't stand a chance in a fight with the majority, so they don't pursue the military option as much as ethnic majorities do. The reason that most violence is due to ethnic minorities is not because minorities are inherently more violent, but instead because majorities almost always get their way and consequently have nothing to fight about. But before you want to rely on the Punjab data, take a good close read at what the author said about it: Ongoing operations in India's Punjab state against Sikh militants deploy a security force of about 115,000 (regular troops, paramilitary security formations, and police) to secure a population of about 20.2 million, giving a force ratio of 5.7 per thousand.[7] The counterinsurgency campaign in the Punjab has been denounced as routinely violating human rights by causing hundreds of disappearances and summary executions. In the face of some popular support for the insurgents, even such a harshly punitive campaign has required large forces to protect and coerce. carlisle-www.army.mil By using the Punjab data, do you mean to say that we could control Iraq by "routinely violating human rights by causing hundreds of disappearances and summary executions"? If so, as a purely theoretical exercise, in this I agree with you. But reprisals and other Gestapo-like behavior is not what the US is about. For this reason alone, the Northern Ireland data is far more cogent, and I won't bother to go to the effort to fact check the author's numbers for the population and the garrison size. Of course you can keep a minority population in line by flagellating the Geneva Convention. It's been done that way for thousands of years. But it's not exactly a non-violent occupation, you can't call it "democracy" or "nation building", Israel has already proved that similar tactics wax rather than wane terrorism, nor is it something that the American public would stand for anymore than they would have stood for similar barbarism in South Vietnam. This is the US. We prosecute our Lt. Calleys. Running a "Punjab" is not an option for us. -- Carl