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

To: GST who wrote (159435)	3/22/2005 5:25:20 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Killing an American does not demonstrate that we do not have overwhelming force. Overwhelming force doesn't mean that no one on your side gets killed. It doesn't even mean that you win (although it certainly helps), we had overwhelming force in Vietnam, although not to the same extent that we have overwhelming force in Iraq today. To demonstrate that we don't have overwhelming force the Iraqi insurgency would have to be able to hold a position against everything we could throw at it, or demonstrate the ability to destroy American units (not just kill a few Americans). If they can hold a position and not be overwhelmed or if they can overwhelm us than we don't have overwhelming force. This argument is really about more than one thing. The different issues should be broken down and considered separately. One is the semantic issue of what "overwhelming force" means. The other is the relative amount of power in Iraq that the US military and the insurgents have. Some of your comments don't really seem to be about either of those issues but rather about the question "are we winning in Iraq". That might be the more important question but it isn't really the question at hand. We can have overwhelming force and still not win (see Vietnam). Tim