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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (87418)	11/20/2004 11:46:27 AM
From: unclewest	Respond to of 793578

If they were still fighting with the tactics they used in Hue in 1968, they would have had 500 killed as they did there, not < 50. Even more than the new bullet launchers, the biggest differences are equipment and training. Every American Infantryman is now trained extensively in what used to be called Combat in Cities and is now called MOUT, Military Operations in Urban Terrain. The men who recaptured Hue City were trained for jungle warfare. The equipment that really makes a difference includes the UAVs, all the night vision gear, the wide variety of scopes available for individual weapons and the vehicles. The replacement for the old M-113 APC, the Bradley, is comparatively quite awesome. We used mostly vintage M-48 tanks in Nam (the M-60 was considered too heavy and prone to sink into the mud). The M-1 Abrams tank (with the most advanced technology) being used in Iraq is an incredible fighting machine. The best ever.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (87418)	11/22/2004 11:24:23 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793578

Even if they did know, seeing it implemented is something else entirely. Nothing terribly new. They know they can’t fight us and “win”, in the purely military sense. They also know they won’t have to. We aren’t going to invade them. They know it. I can’t see Falluja as an intimidating factor, and I see no reason to believe that the Iranians are intimidated, though they may well want us to think they are. There's a lot that can be done short of a major invasion, and a newly re-elected President has a certain freedom of action. If you were the Iranian ayatollahs, would you dismiss the possibility of an Osirak-type raid? The noises being leaked lately about the locations of certain processing facilities are certainly meant to imply that the US is thinking about it. Of course we’re thinking about it. Everybody knows we’re thinking about it, and have been for a long time. Certainly the Iranians know, and have designed their program to survive such an attack. It would have to be done on a massive scale, and we’d have little way to know whether it had succeeded or not. There are also serious questions about our intel on Iran: It’s very likely that the Iranians are deliberately leaking the locations of innocent sites, very likely through sources we trust. They’ve demonstrated that they are fairly good at that game, and they would love to con us into blowing up some aspirin factories. We will probably have to pull the air strike option at some point, but it’s not a very good option. Their nuclear program will be likely to survive the strike, and we are likely to make a large mess in the process. The Iranians also have the capacity to stir up major trouble in Iraq, much more than we have seen so far. It’s also very likely that an elected Iraqi government will oppose the use of Iraq-based facilities as platforms for offensive actions against Iran. If they do, what do we do? Ignore them? Remove them? Democracy is a two-edged sword, and we can’t assume that an elected government will be a compliant government. they've got all the hate figures they need in The Great Satan America. Are you really suggesting they would hate a Kerry administration less? Depends on who you mean by “they”. If you mean the hardcore radicals, the Great Satan is enough, and they would hate us as much if we elected Jesse Jackson. It does make a difference, though, in their ability to recruit new operatives, to raise funds, to build effective organizations in countries that our nominal allies. Bush has become the focal point for a great deal of hatred, and losing that hatred would be a bigger problem for the AQ types than losing any geographical base would be. The challenge that AQ recruiters face is to get the guy who is already screaming “I hate America” to cross the line between screaming and actively participating. To do that, they needed more than the Great Satan rhetoric. They needed American boots on Muslim soil, and that’s what 9/11 was designed to get. When Osama was fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, he was the hero of the Muslim world. When the Russians left Afghanistan, he began to slide into irrelevance. Now that he’s dragged us into the swamp, he’s prominent again. The challenge we face is to divide the leaders from the followers. I’m not sure we’re doing such a great job of that. Bush barks - and bites. I think they are convinced that they can goad Bush into biting off more than we are willing to chew. They may be right. They will never beat us on the battlefield, and they know it. They also know that the war of attrition is their strength and our weakness. It’s also very important to note that while radical Islamic governments and radical Islamic terrorists are linked, they are also competitors for leadership of the Islamist movement. They will use each other as much as they can, but they are very uneasy allies. A negotiating environment favors the governments, because they are the ones in the spotlight. An environment of military confrontation favors the terrorists, since we can use deterrence against governments, but not against terrorists. We need to exploit these inherent divisions and play the factions against each other. We can’t do that by lumping all hostile forces together as “they”. Weren't you one of the ones who, before the Iraq war, expected that a move on Saddam would intimidate the Iranians? I seem to recall you saying that they would become "very quiet"... doesn't seem to have worked that way, no?