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

To: KyrosL who wrote (129253)	4/14/2004 7:21:35 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi KyrosL; Re: "Bilow, it seems that Fallujah has been selected to test the 5% solution. What do you think?" I doubt it. The basic problem is that you can't pick a tiny city and make an example out of it. When fighting nations, you have to make an example out of the whole nation. The US is about the same population as the Arab nations, so what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If the terrorists managed to kill 5% of a US town of population 250,000 that would mean about 12,500 deaths. That might make a real impression on that town, but the rest of us would be madder than Hell. You can't put down a hornet's nest by making an impression on one hornet. You have to deal with the hornet's nest as a single organism. This applies to the US just like it applies to the Arabs. From this principle, one might think, like NightOwl recently, that there is no solution, but in fact, nations in conflict usually decide to simply pull back to their own national boundaries, and to continue the fight only far away from the "heartland". Iraq is in the Arab heartland, just like New York City is in the Anglo heartland. The eventual peace with the Arabs will involve each side leaving those heartlands alone, with possible conflicts in other places. This is a mirror to our relationship with the Soviet Union and China, where we left each other's heartland alone, but had conflicts with each other in peripheral parts of the world. Thus the 40 million Vietnamese ended up providing a battlefield for the 1 billion Chinese to take on the 200 million Americans. Now the people in the US who make these decisions (on Falloujah) may not understand the situation in the theoretical manner that I've described above, but they do understand it in the practical manner of being able to guess what will happen if they keep killing citizens in Falloujah. Or at least I hope they do. Now the basic problem with keeping the US Marines in close contact with civilians around Falloujah is that these Marines have been horribly devastated by the very high casualties they are taking. Each individual in even the most regimented Marine company is different, but a substantial number of these guys are out for the 5% solution in Falloujah. That small number of guys are consequently shooting at anything that is alive. But there are not nearly enough of these "madder than hell" guys around to produce even a 5% solution for Falloujah. A 5% solution even on just the town of Falloujah is something like 12,500 civilians. The Iraqis are talking about 800 or so civilian deaths. That means that we would have to see something like 14x as much killing to reach that 5% tipping point, just in the town of Falloujah. That would mean keeping operations going at the current rate (which for the units involved is something around 7% KIA or severely WIA per week) for 28 more weeks. The rate at which we are losing Marines in the area is incredible. Compare the figures for the past few weeks to other time periods: defenselink.mil defenselink.mil The Marines are an elite force, they cannot be used in a war of attrition for that kind of period. In fact, the whole US military is an elite force. We cannot win if we fight without high population allies in a land war in Asia. -- Carl