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

To: Sig who wrote (117950)	10/28/2003 8:48:18 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi Sig; Re: "Would you care to point out any resemblance between this civilized metropolis of Baghdad and the steaming jungles and mud huts of Viet-Nam?" Vietnam had plenty of "civilized" regions, so the comparison really doesn't follow. In fact, our soldiers were shot at in the cities as well as the countryside. In Vietnam, we never had a solution for pacifying the steaming jungles because the locals hid their weapons and pretended to be innocent farmers. In Iraq, we will never have a solution for pacifying the locals because they hide their weapons and pretend to be innocent whatevers. What's worse, when we find an AK-47 in a house, we can't assume that they're bad guys (like we DID in Vietnam) because Iraq has free ownership of firearms. So, in terms of pacifying the locals, there is little difference between Vietnam and Iraq. The basic problem is that when civilians become convinced that they can make foreign soldiers leave by sniping at them, they snipe at them. Eventually, the foreign soldiers either leave, or massacre so many civilians that the surviving civilians knuckle under. We were started down that road in Vietnam, with the "we had to destroy the village in order to save it", and the Lt. Calley massacre. Such a policy, will, eventually, pacify civilians as many characters through history (Hitler, Saddam, Stalin, Genghis Khan, etc.) have demonstrated. We didn't continue down that road because it was not worth it to us as a people. That is, the blood on our hands would have been worse than the loss of Vietnam to the Communists. The blood that would end up on our hands in the pacification of Iraq (a task that we have not even begun), would also be worse than Iraq's fall to the Islamic Fundamentalists. If the Islamists truly did take over Iraq, then we would again be in the position of having targets again. If the regime displeased us, we could bomb the bejesus out of them as we have done in the past. Our problem with terrorists is that they do not have an address. Giving them an address is half the solution to the problem of terrorism. With an address, we can threaten them in ways that are impossible now. In the current situation, they can threaten us, and there is nothing we can do about it, not a damned thing. If we did care to pacify Iraq, the modern military technique (i.e. without massive massacres of civilians) is well illustrated by the (far easier) example of the British pacification of Northern Ireland. First, the British gave the Catholics what they truly wanted, which was equal rights. Second, the British kept 20 troops per thousand civilians in occupation duties. For Iraq, the 20 per thousand figure amounts to 500,000. Note that Iraqi troops can't be counted in that figure any more than Northern Irish troops were counted in the British totals. This is because the loyalty of native troops, used in quelling a native uprising against foreigners, are not just questionable, they are unquestionably against the occupying power. We are so far away from having enough troops to pacify Iraq that there is no way that it can possibly happen. Instead, Bush is just treading water. And while he treads water, the seas grow higher and darker. Eventually he will have to pull out. -- Carl