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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bruce L who wrote (21967)	10/22/2004 3:09:33 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Respond to of 23153

Bruce, these aren't empty posts, take another look and you'll see that although we may have been missing each other we were certainly not "just talking to ourselves." I'm not sure that "most Iraqis" will risk their lives to force us out. "Most" of any population are sheep. They will support the wolves but they know better than to run with the wolves. That's why I once gave you the example of 100 people in a room, 10 who will die to kill you and 90 who like you but won't lift a finger to help you if it endangers them. If you change the numbers and make that 10-88-2, with the 2 being those who would risk their lives to help you, I think that's the situation that may have developed or be developing in Iraq. Your last paragraph is hard for me to understand. In one sense I agree; Stalin knew how to effectively control an insurgency. Do you advocate the Stalinist solution? By the way, what happened to his government? On the other hand some of your examples seem designed to prove the opposite point depending on your time frame. Clearly the Chechnyans are still insurgents and clearly we did not "effectively put down an insurgency in Vietnam." Just as clearly the insurgency in Iraq will end when we leave them to make their own choices without our "guidance or use of force" and not a moment sooner. And if the Iraqis can't avoid seeing that "in order to equal us they have to become more like us," then why are we sending in our young to bleed out their lives in Iraq? Why not just let them figure it out on their own. Or do you have too little faith in your lessons learned from Greek history? And don't underestimate the importance of modern killing technology which allows the weak, the common and the motivated to kill from ambush very effectively. It has erased the gap between those who could raise armies and those who could not in terms of the ability to inflict appreciable harm. Ed