Hi CobaltBlue; Re: "Given your track record in predictions so far, I think you ought to give up the prediction biz. You suck at it."
I said that a war with Iraq was impossible because it would be a military, political and diplomatic disaster, and that the administration knew this and that it was therefore impossible and they must be bluffing. At the same time that I was saying that 250,000 soldiers was barely sufficient to attack Iraq, the neoconservatives were saying that the war would be fully prosecuted by a handful of special forces.
What I wrote over the past year must be haunting you, now that the blood of all those Iraqis (who didn't want to have to die for their country) and Americans (who didn't want to die for theirs) is on your hands.
This war has already been a diplomatic disaster for us of the worst magnitude. The military disaster is now unfolding in front of us. The political disaster will be obvious long before the 2004 elections prove it.
Bilow, March 5, 2003
The Iraqis won't be shooting at us to bring back Saddam Hussein. They'll be shooting at us for being foreigners who've invaded their land. #reply-18662336
Bilow, February 23, 2003
Hi tekboy; Re: "I'm not sure I understand: you're worried that after we've won the war and are occupying the country, then some months later on there will some kind of violent resistance by the Iraqi populace against the occupying forces?"
I'm not worried, I'm certain. This is a military fact of life that dates back several thousand years:
(1) If you send boys with weapons into a foreign neighborhood, the local boys will fight them. The exceptions are when you're there helping them get rid of another group of foreign boys (like the Arabs in Afghanistan).
(2) In an occupation, once the fighting starts, it is very difficult to stop it again, except by pulling out. To suppress violence with violence requires extremely high kill numbers. Five to ten percent is enough for most situations, such as was executed against Germany before her WW2 occupation. But these sorts of kill rates are no longer diplomatically possible.
(3) Humans have a higher interest in holding their own territory than they have in controlling foreign territory. This (along with a large number of other factors) gives the defense an intrinsic advantage in an occupation. The US was only able to politically accept 60,000 deaths before Vietnam was given up as a lost cause, but by that time the Vietnamese had taken far greater casualties. This is the point that McNamara didn't figure out until too late.
Israel won its conventional wars with the Arabs quickly and almost painlessly, but never forced the occupied peoples to be peaceful. The above three factors apply to that conflict, except that part number (3) does not apply to Israel proper.
If we copy Israel's foreign policy, we will end up with Israel's problems. And eventually that means living in constant fear. (But before it reaches that point the US will pull out, as our homeland is not in the Middle East.)
Also note that the Vietnam war was not supported internationally, and the result was that the US was isolated diplomatically. This is the consequence of what can only be described as a foreign policy disaster. #reply-18127182
Bilow, October 2, 2002
If we follow my guidelines, every war we get into will result in a foreign population cheering our soldiers (not the agressor population, like Germany in WW2, of course, but the freed populations like France). Instead, we got into Vietnam for theoretical reasons that were described at the sound bite level. It was a f'ing disaster.
By the way, if we hadn't already pissed in the Iraq pot, the people there would probably welcome US soldiers there for a liberation from Saddam, and I would be in favor of the attack, just like I was in favor of the attack against the Taliban. #reply-18065981
The basic problem is that our leaders are idiots, and our national news (especially FoxNews, the program for the brain dead who want to feel good) tells our sheep-like people only the news that they want to hear. (I.e., that Americans are loved all over the world, that our military is as powerful as Clark Kent, and that other countries basically exist as tools for us to use to obtain what we want.) And when the military gives a realistic invasion plan to our civilian leaders, the elected officials keep sending it back to them until they come up with a plan that is sufficiently "cheap" that they think it won't hurt the economy much.
A few weeks ago I said that the invasion would have to be postponed because it would take the US 4 to 6 weeks to get the troops who were going to go in from Turkey around to Kuwait. And now the press is stock full of accusations that the administration forced the military to go into Iraq unprepared.
Now you have a "situation" where the Syrians have told us to GFY and are sending thousands across the border to fight us. The Russians, after repeatedly telling us not to do it, are sending anti-tank weapons into Iraq (sort of a gift for what we did to them in Afghanistan). Our troops have essentially zero support among the locals, except for the Kurds, who in addition to not trusting us, are the hated enemy of the Turks, a necessary ally of ours.
Yeah, I know that you guys think that the situation is under control, but you still haven't bothered to read the US military's description of the Siege of Beirut. The military took it off their website (I wonder why, LOL):
www-cgsc.army.mil
But here is the google cache copy, read it and weep:
216.239.53.100
That's right. The Israelis put a siege on a highly divided city 1/4 the population of Baghdad, only 10 square miles in area, with the assistance of one of the local ethnic groups, with supply lines of a tiny fraction of our lines to Kuwait, without our soldier's compunction to avoid civilian casualties, with the limited objective of uprooting a foreign occupier (the PLO, which had "overstayed its welcome in the country") as opposed to a very long time domestic government (the Baathists), with Beirut surrounded on one side by an easy to control water barrier, and the siege nevertheless took 70 days and resulted in a negotiated agreement. The Israeli experience in Lebanon was a disaster not only for them, but also for their Christian allies.
Our problem in Baghdad is harder than the Israeli one in Beirut on every single point of comparison. Baghdad is bigger, the people are more united against us, our war aims are broader, we care more about what the civilians think about us, our supply lines are longer, Americans care less about Iraq than Israelis care about Beirut, our level of protest against the war is much larger than that of the Israeli public, and despite all these advantages that the Israelis had over our situation, it took them 70 days to achieve only a negotiated settlement.
-- Carl |
