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

To: Sig who wrote (112742)	8/25/2003 8:20:47 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

<We had plans A, B, C, and D.> Too bad Plan E (the one they didn't have), was the one needed. For the implementation of any Plan, there is some crucial Limiting Factor(s), whose scarcity decides the degree of success for the overall Plan. In order for the whole plan to succeed, the decision-makers need to identify and focus on those Limiting Factors, and do everything possible to make them UnLimiting. What is the Limiting Factor in Operation Iraqi Freedom? It is not anything to do with conventional war. It is not chemical weapons suits, or helicopter gunships, or even numbers of military boots on the ground. It is not money, or even allies (although the lack of allies, especially Moslem and Arab allies, is a symptom of the real Limiting Factor). Increasing the amount or quality of any or all of those NonLimiting Factors, will have zero impact on the final result. Doing so, may even be counter-productive. For instance, if we send another division of U.S. troops (English-speakers, hanked from jobs in logistics and administration), and sent them to do area searches in Baghdad neighborhoods, this is going to worsen the already severe shortage of the real Limiting Factor. The Limiting Factor is: Our success in separating the guerrillas from their civilian base of support. The People there don't like us, and they don't trust us. They hate us, actually. The civilian population on the battleground, is of a different tribe from us, they are profoundly foreign to us, and they don't want us running their country. We have got on the wrong side of both Iraqi nationalism, and Islam, and those are the two most powerful ideologies in that part of the world. The only way we have any chance of winning this war, is to create conditions in Iraq, so the civilian population doesn't hate us. We are doing a spectacularly bad job at this. This Administration has a consistent track record of pissing off all foreigners all the time over every concievable issue. They have managed to piss off even our natural allies, people with whom we share a religion, culture, even language. We know it's the human factor, and not material resources, which decide the outcome of war. - General Giap