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

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (131578)	5/5/2004 5:38:28 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hawk, re: "I believe that once we initiate a policy decision, the time for debating the correctness of that policy should be set aside and the full determination of ALL political parties focus on deriving a positive and sucessful result." Hey, how do you do that italics thing? With respect to to your statement, how do you handle a policy decision that is so misguided that "the full determination of ALL political parties focus[ed] on deriving a positive and successful result" will NOT achieve the result desired. In other word what if you're dealing with a situation where part of the success is dependent upon the actions of another nation and that nation's people will not cooperate? In that event do you "debate" the correctness of that policy again? I think you have to; either that or travel a longer and more painful road to failure. And yes, I think Iraq presents that kind of choice.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (131578)	5/5/2004 5:53:03 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hawk, regarding the possibility of military success in Vietnam, it wasn't a matter of controlling area. There was no controlling area in Vietnam. In the populated areas the VC hid out among the population and were indistinguishable from the harmless villagers. That's what's happening in Iraq. You basically know who they are when, and if, you catch them in the act. Otherwise they're protected by the mass of people that surround them. In the jungle it was even worse. The NVA were shielded by hundreds of thousands of square miles of the wildest, thickest and most inpenetrable jungle you could imagine. You could "win" ground and that next day you'd have to "win" that ground again. Sometimes when you thought you'd won the ground you were dead wrong; they were there a few meters away and you just didn't know it. 20 kilometers might not make much of a difference on a map but it was a long, sometimes impossible trek in the jungle. There just wasn't any taking and holding country in the jungle. You could clear some of it and hold that clear, but that's as good as it got and when you left the protection of the wire you were on "their turf." Finally, the S. wasn't going to "invade the North." For some reason they, like the Iraqis, seemed a little ambivalent about the war and about killing little brown men like themselves. In fact the S. Vietnamese, as a general proposition, weren't too excited about fighting the VC or the NVA, ON THEIR OWN GROUND. Now if they'd all been Montanyards we'd have had to give them a few rifles and get out of the way, and then we'd have had to stop them before they attacked China. You see that's the determinant; are the locals willing to die for the cause we see as our mission. In Vietnam the answer was "no," in Iraq the answer is "no." We need to learn, again, to take "no" for an answer and we need to ask the right questions before we send our soldiers to die in a strange and hostile land. You don't "force [a government] to take their own defense as seriously as [we think] they should..."