What do you think is going to happen if the US just packed up and left Iraq?? Do you support US troops going into Liberia? They may die there too...
I never suggested packing up and leaving Iraq. I suggested taking the situation seriously, and not trying to sugar-coat the situation that we’ve gotten ourselves into.
I don’t really like the idea of US troops going into Liberia, but I think it’s probably necessary. I wouldn’t want to argue the point without a lot more study; I’m not terribly familiar with the situation. I think the complications in Liberia are probably far less severe than those in Iraq, for reasons too numerous and obvious to list.
Iraq is not Vietnam.. There's no jungle to hide in..
Iraq has cities, and those are a thousand times worse than jungles. If you are pretty sure that a given square mile of jungle is hiding enemy troops, you can carpet bomb it. You can’t do that with a city slum, or an apartment block. An urban scenario is the worst guerilla warfare there is, bar none.
There's no "untouchable" Ho Chi Minh supplying the enemy..
There’s Osama, maybe not untouchable, but very likely untouched. There’s a rather long border with Iran, and the Iranians have every reason to aid anybody making a mess in Iraq. There’s Syria, and Hezbollah, and I don’t believe for a minute that the border is under control.
I don’t think the Vietnam analogy is at all relevant, in any case. This is a very different situation, and the tactics and approach have to be completely different. We have to remember, above all, that they don’t have to defeat us. They won’t try to defeat us. They just have to wear down the political will. They know very well that America is divided on the issue. They know that Bush barely got elected. They know he’s popular now, and they know that could change in a heartbeat.
I cited certain items as déjà vu because we have in fact heard those things many times before, and not only in Vietnam.
There's no sanctuaries for the enemy to hide in (in any quantity)..
Baghdad?
Remember, we have no reliable police, no FBI, no investigative capacity with a network on the ground. They can blend very easily, and sweep-searches are the least efficient way of finding them.
There's no superpowers sending hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid..
They don’t need hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. All they need, and more, can be supplied by Islamist sympathizers.
There's very few foreigners or Syrian Baathists willing to step in and don Fedeyeen uniforms when the local guerillas are wiped out (as happened during the Tet offensive)..
Let’s see… 150,000 ex-Republican Guards, 500,000 ex-secret police types, half of Hezbollah, a few thousand hardcore Islamist imports, infinitely replenishable. I don’t think manpower is going to be a problem, and the more aggressive our responses get, the easier their recruitment will be.
I don’t think weapons are a problem, either. The stuff we’ve found is a drop in the bucket, I’d guess. I suspect that most of the small arms once issued to the Iraqi army are at this point stashed in various places.
I’m also sure that the Shiites are not idle. They aren’t aggressive now, because they have no need to be. The Baathers are doing the work for them. You can bet your last peso, though, that the Shiites are stashing weapons and training people as fast as they can, and that includes the ones that appear to be working with us. Don’t think these people are stupid, or naïve: they survived Saddam, and they have every intention of surviving us and emerging in control.
Just a bunch of whining people who couldn't care less about the number of US troops who DIE EVERY DAY in training accidents, but suddenly think it's unbearable that some of our boys die in Iraq...
That's what we get (in my case, got) paid for... We accepted the contract, the money, the free health care, the low salaries, the long hours, and the knowledge that the media and whining liberals without alternatives would spend every waking moment undercutting our mission, our morale, and our very lives...
Personally, I object to the idea of American soldiers serving as sitting-duck security guards, and consequently being routinely shot and blown up, because a bunch of blowhard politicians more concerned with macho posturing than the lives of their people were too f*cking STUPID to devise a way of removing Saddam that included an exit strategy and a multilateral peacekeeping force to get our people off the streets.
A lot of us said that this was going to happen, and it’s happening. I remember writing things before the war that described what’s happening now almost exactly. I told you that we would sweep the war, but that once the offensive was over and we took on a static occupation role, we’d be vulnerable to hit and run attacks, which we’d have no effective way to prevent. This required no great prescience, just open eyes.
A lot of people called me a whining pessimist, but the things I said were going to happen happened. (Not all of them, I expected a quick WMD find).
Now I’m telling you that the tactics we’re using are not going to work, that our forces are being forced into a role for which they are untrained and inappropriate, and that this situation is going to get worse before it gets better. We are perilously close to going into the “guerilla cycle”: small attacks followed by large, highly visible reprisals that do little damage to the guerillas but infuriate and humiliate the populace. We are not yet facing the most dangerous possibility: urban uprising on the intifadeh model. Our enemies are trying to herd us in that direction, though, and they are succeeding.
Of course you don’t want to listen, because it’s not what you want to hear. I’m sorry about that, but I don’t do affirmation. I say what I see and what I think; if you don’t like that, don’t read the posts.
This was not, no matter how much prattling goes on, a binary choice. It was not fight or flee, Conan the Barbarian or Casper Milquetoast. There were possibilities that were not explored. We had more time than we were lead to believe we had, and we could have been a whole lot smarter.
Steven... if you have a viable solution to the problem of militant Islam, terrorist states, and the general economic and social degradation occcuring in the Middle East, please offer it.
A solution? One neat little solution, to the whole problem? Surely you jest. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll be looking a long time. It is possible to approach each sub-problem with an overall vision of where you want to go, and to devise pragmatic, forward-looking, intelligent strategies. They won’t always work, but they’ll have a better chance of working than the current approach, in which fealty to ideology and domestic political concerns take precedence over common sense.
And while you're at it, provide us an analysis and prediction for what happens in despotic regimes that have 30 % unemployment, and where 50% of their population is under 18??
Bad things. Very bad things. Very hard things to avoid, too, when you thrash about the way we’re thrashing now.
IMO, we were going to have to fight there one way or another.
I agree. I think we chose a really dumb way to do it.
Either way, the Arab street were still going to blame the west for their state of being...
I agree. I don’t think the route we’re taking now will improve that situation at all.
Would you have pre-emptively dealt with Mussolini and Hitler, Kim Il Sung, Hideki Tojo.. etc, had you suspected the carnage they would unleash upon the world and their own people??
If I had the means and the prescience, maybe. Hardly relevant, since nobody then had either the means or the prescience, and nobody now is prescient.
Would you like the idea of living in a society in which one very tough individual declared himself prescient, and bestowed upon himself the right to deal pre-emptively with anyone who he thinks might become a problem? A lot of people around the world are starting to see us in that light, and if you walk a km. Or two in their footsteps, you might see that their view is not entirely without foundation. That may not be our intention, but that is the image we are starting to present.
That's the kind of "deja vu" I'm worried about...
People with their heads in the sand who ignore the demographic and economic repercussions of what has been transpiring in the Middle East over the past 15 years.
I worry about people who think the only available responses to these problems are ignoring them and sending armored divisions. Think in simplistic terms, you come up with simplistic answers. These answers are often very comforting, and they make lovely little sound bites, but they seldom produce the desired results.
Some of us, I think, are so concerned with the repercussions of what’s happening in the Middle East that they ignore the possible repercussions of what is happening in the US. Free people around the world are not withdrawing their support from the US because they are pro-Saddam, or pro-Osama. They are withdrawing it because their greatest fear is not radical Islam, but the possibility that America may fall victim to the corrupting influence of power.
This is not an irrational formulation. Radical Islam is a reactionary and fundamentally limited phenomenon; it can do damage outside the Islamic world, but it can never take power in a non-Islamic country. The corrupting influence of power is a phenomenon long known and observed on many occasions; there is no reason to suppose that Americans are immune. The extent of American power is such that in corrupted hands, it could do damage on a nearly inconceivable scale.
People are worried, and they are worried for a reason. Many outside America look at the narrow, boasting, political/religious chauvinism, the open derision expressed toward nations not boasting large military forces, the contempt directed at dissenting views, and they see the first signs of such corruption. They see us turning away from the presumption that all men are created equal, and toward the presumption that power grows from the barrel of a gun. That view may not be accurate, but when you look from outside at the face we present to the world, it is by no means irrational.
This whole problem is abundantly expressed in an exchange that has become common here. People declare, often, that America is the sole hope of the world, that all we do is right, and that any who oppose us are dupes of the enemy. Some poor timid moderate comes along and points out that Americans have made mistakes, that many of our actions have had unintended adverse consequences, and that the record is a lot more varied that flag-waving ideologues want to concede. The immediate and inevitable response is a condescending sneer of “Oh, yeah, blame everything on America, you whining liberal”.
That sort of thing makes me want to click elsewhere.
Will be ever be able to look at what has happened and what is happening outside the blinding confines of ideology? |
