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

To: Bilow who wrote (101446)	6/13/2003 5:59:09 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Okay. So Vietnam was a country that was "proud of its tradition of fighting off foreign powers". Please point out to me a major ethnic group that is not proud of "its tradition of fighting off foreign powers". Vietnam was exceptional in that regard. The tradition was both ancient and recent. It had just kicked out the French, and had long frustrated the much bigger and closer China. Iraq had no such tradition. It was a Turkish territory until it became part of the British empire. Most of the British soldiers that where killed in Iraq where killed by Turks. It was not a country until the British empire fell apart. What you call "national character" was only small part of my argument, basically amounting to a statement that Vietnam had a stronger (and more recent) history of successfully fighting off powerful invaders. I don't think that ignoring the history of people in the area being discussed gives you a better understanding of the possibilities and I don't think paying attention to this history is at all racist. The majority of the argument dealt with issues like the lack of an active large regular army opposing us in Iraq, lack or large scale coordination of enemy forces, the lack of superpower support and other possible logistical problems, the terrain, and the fact that it looks like a much lower amount of Iraqi's want to fight us right now. Bur rather then dealing with those points I guess you prefer to call me an ignorant racist with his dick stuck in a hole. and now go back and reread the history of US interaction with the Barbary states. Once we decided to actually do something about the Barbary states we had a whole lot less problem with them then we did with Vietnam despite the fact that we where a minor power at the time. This has little to do with the fact that they where Arabs. And more to do with normal military and political factors like lack of a coordinated defense between the various enemy Barbary states, and issues of numbers, training, logistics and so on. I don't think the American experience fighting the Barbary states is really relevant to the situation in Iraq. Too many things are different now. But if it was massively relevant it would still seem to indicate a lot less difficulty then Vietnam. Tim