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

To: Neocon who wrote (138010)	6/25/2004 5:11:00 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Neocon; Re: "We have the upper hand militarily over the entire Islamic world." It was a simple minded analysis of military power that got the US into trouble in Iraq in the first place. I see that you've failed to learn anything, LOL. Like I said before the war, our military power is primarily defensive in nature. That is, we have the ability to defeat enemy militaries, but we have very little ability to wage offensive war in the sense of conquering hostile enemy civilian populations. The US military presence in the "entire Islamic world" is quite small. Even in Iraq our soldiers are few and far between, and our power is small. We do not exert control over the vast majority of the population or area of Iraq, never have in the past, and never will in the future. For example, we only occupy about 5% of Baghdad (i.e. the Green Zone). The simple fact of the matter is that Saddam's military kept the peace in Iraq for decades without much help from abroad. We've barely been there a year, and the situation has gotten so unsafe that our ability to rebuild the country's infrastructure is more than just at risk, and we're begging for help from other countries. By that comparison, Iraq's military was stronger, at the task of pacifying Iraq, than our own is now. Saddam's army quickly put down revolts in the Shiite and Kurdish areas, at least when our military aircraft allowed it. And Iraq is only a tiny fraction of the "entire Islamic world". By comparison, the Sioux and Paiute were quite quickly forced onto tiny reservations that were completely under the military control of the US. Comparing the Ghost War to the conflict with Islamic Fundamentalism is silly. Just a post ago you were talking about winning the conflict with Al Qaeda using "attrition". Are you now claiming that we won the war against the Ghost Dancers using "attrition"? -- Carl