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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (177609)	11/5/2003 8:13:06 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1574042

If this is true, then our eventual retreat in failure is even more discouraging. More discouraging at the time perhaps. I'm not sure why it would be more discouraging now. The Iraqi opposition is more of a classic guerilla, or even terrorist resistance rather then a guerilla resistance with effective conventional support. Also the guerilla part has less broad based support then it had in Vietnam (it might have broad based indifference, where a lot of people support neither side). If we can damage the guerilla resistance in Iraq as much as we did in Vietnam there will be no regular army to take over. Vietnam was more conventional then most people think but even the NVA used aspects of guerilla warfare. Sometimes they fought pretty much as guerillas. They had many of the advantages of both guerillas and conventional armies. They could use the firepower of a conventional army, but still slip away from combat when they didn't want to fight. What helped them do that was the fact that we wouldn't invade the North or make any large scale overt invasion of Cambodia and Laos. Also the terrain of hills and jungles obviously helped. In Iraq there really is no organized conventional army any more. Some people who used to be in the Republican Guards (formerly a conventional army) are fighting as guerillas but they don't have the ability to wage a conventional war. People fight as guerillas because guerillas are hard to completely defeat but you can't win fighting as a guerilla. To impose your will on a country you have to take and hold territory. North Vietnam did that in the end against South Vietnam. Even to kill enough Americans so that people thought the war effort was unsustainable and the Americans would stop protecting the South, the North had to use conventional attacks. They also defeated the French with a conventional attack at Dien Bien Phu. Of course its possible America's commitment to staying the course in the Iraq is less then what it was in Vietnam. If so we might leave before the job is fully done even with a much lower casualty level then what we experienced in Vietnam. That's really the only way we can lose IMO. I don't think you will see Vietnam type casualty or a military presence that lasts (or has to last) as long as Vietnam. Tim