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

To: Neocon who wrote (151788)	11/17/2004 12:50:48 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

My posts on this topic have been trying to point out that: 1) They are willing to die. 2) They fanatically don't like us for various reasons. 3) We can't hide. 4) Their current tactics are not very effective. 5) There exist tactics which can leverage 1 - 3 AND do not require ANY of the classical components such as territorial base, population intimidation, planning, weapons, communications, etc. However, I maintain that so far the insurgents have not shown much innovation to figure this out. I think it is very easy to commit hit and die attacks on the order of 3 or 4 per day. WE could respond by trying to isolate our troops in Iraq from the population, but then why have them there. Look at what Israel is doing, they have been at it much longer than us: a wall. The only effective strategy that I see against hit and die attacks is to control the media so that the average Iraqi does not know that US troops are being killed each day. But it is hard to keep neighbors from talking. "Hamid, praise Allah, died today killing a bastard American soldier" "My cousins husband died in the next town after poring boiling oil on the heads of two American soldier, who where burned so badly that surely they must die, Allah willing" so on and so forth... From your post: It is not, which is why the terrorists started resorting to suicide attacks. and Of course, few people are that suicidal, and one rapidly depletes the pool of those that are. may or may not be at odds. It could be that the latter is true in which case 1) in my list is not true, and everything I have been trying to point out is incorrect. However, 9/11 blindsided us precisely because 1) was a weapon we didn't take seriously. Given 1), there are many novel strategies that insurgents could use if they could analyze a little. Please note that IMHO way to much has been made about the required planning and organizational capabilities required for 9/11. There are at least two single individual events (Egypt 767? and SilkAir 737?) that could have been similar if the individual had wanted to take out a building instead of just die. The effect on the US would not have been a lot different if 4 guys took out one building, particularly if they had succeeded in getting a higher death toll. I do however tend to agree somewhat with your 2'nd point above, that maybe the pool of suicidal fighters is smaller than it would appear. Given the 72 virgin incentive plan, it argues quite strongly that most fanatics actually don't take their religion at face value, or perhaps that biology trumps religion in general (I suspect the latter). It also points out the the Prophet could have done a little better: 72 virgins if you die in combat, but ONLY if you succeed at killing one unbeliever first. Attention to detail is oh so important... It is possible, that they are not stupid, and as you say might have other goals, but dying at the rate of 2000/38 or whatever the current Falluja ratio is strikes me as a very odd goal, and indeed, is only marginally removed from mass suicide. I suspect that 2) in the above list is actually the most important, and I wish that Bush and the US military would put more effort into that aspect. Oh, well, I have cluttered the thread enough with this.