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

To: Dayuhan who wrote (110325)	8/7/2003 1:09:45 AM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 281500

A very well-written post, as usual, much better than anything I could do. So I'll keep this short and as sweet as I can. There's one little thing which must be incorrect though: There’s Osama, maybe not untouchable, but very likely untouched. ....a few thousand hardcore Islamist imports, This must be wrong because another poster just this evening assured us that Al Qaeda has operatives everywhere, everywhere but Iraq.... Message 19185636 And I understand that this poster is definitely not a narrow-minded, boastful, chauvinist, flag-waving idealogue so she must be right. :-)

To: Dayuhan who wrote (110325)	8/7/2003 6:13:10 AM
From: spiral3	Respond to of 281500

War and Aftermath Beware technology that disconnects war from politics By Frederick W. Kagan policyreview.org [… this guy makes an extremely cogent case that when it comes to War the current Admin is it’s own worst enemy, aka the difference between winning in Combat and winning in War, aka the Means determine the Ends…] >>>> snip from a long article Why has the United States been so successful in recent wars and encountered so much difficulty in securing its political aims after the shooting stopped? The obstacles in the way of establishing stable polities in Kabul and Baghdad were always considerable. It was never likely that the road to peace and stability in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan would be short or smooth. The nature of the American military operations in both countries, however, multiplied those obstacles instead of reducing them and greatly increased the chance of failing to achieve the political objectives that motivated both wars. The reason for this fact lies partly in the vision of war that President Bush and his administration brought into office and have implemented in the past two wars. This vision focuses on destroying the enemy’s armed forces and his ability to command them and control them. It does not focus on the problem of achieving political objectives. The advocates of a “new American way of war,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Bush chief among them, have attempted to simplify war into a targeting drill. They see the enemy as a target set and believe that when all or most of the targets have been hit, he will inevitably surrender and American goals will be achieved. War is not that simple, however. From the standpoint of establishing a good peace it matters a great deal how, exactly, one defeats the enemy and what the enemy’s country looks like at the moment the bullets stop flying. The U.S. has developed and implemented a method of warfare that can produce stunning military victories but does not necessarily accomplish the political goals for which the war was fought. If these two wars represented merely isolated cases or aberrations from the mainstream of military and political developments in the U.S., then the study of this problem would be of primarily academic interest. That is not the case. The entire thrust of the current program of military transformation of the U.S. armed forces, on the contrary, aims at the implementation and perfection of this sort of target-set mentality. Unless the direction and nature of military transformation change dramatically, the American public should expect to see in the future many more wars in which U.S. armed forces triumph but the American political vision fails.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (110325)	8/7/2003 8:17:05 PM
From: marcos	Respond to of 281500

Liberia presents an opportunity for the neocons to learn diplomacy, maybe .... they wouldn't have a hard time collecting allies for an effort there, they could maybe just call a time-out and say ok guys, leaving aside the question of our invasion of Iraq, how about Liberia, would you like to go in with us The liberians are calling for made-in-USA, so obviously the US will lead the mission, that's not going to be in question .... but subject to how the liberians perceive this, it just seems to me that you have more force of moral suasion when you have broader and more democratic backing, the more democracies involved the better Take just the three of North America, Can-US-Méx, if you had a force comprised of all three you would be demonstrating an ability of an entire continent to cooperate on a joint venture, this has to pack some weight, then if you could get kiwis and irish and chilenos and indians et cetera, you have to be making it more acceptable, at the same time as you are sharing the cost in blood and treasure Some of us would like to see mexicanos on peacekeeping forces, it goes against the deeply ingrained isolationist ethic of the nation, but it is inevitable, and the sooner the better imho ..... Fox gets quoted here as saying he is in favour, but as i recall his statement was tightly qualified, he was playing to a home audience who mostly don't want to remove the constitutional prohibition against the military venturing beyond the borders - globalpolicy.org