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

To: Bill who wrote (217927)	2/12/2007 12:23:32 PM
From: GST	Respond to of 281500

<munitions supply lines> Pretending that the problem in Iraq is Iran is a farce.

To: Bill who wrote (217927)	2/12/2007 12:27:24 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Here is an example to show you the problem. The Saudis set up a hospital in Baghdad. Now them being a "moderate state" and an "ally", and a hospital being a humanitarian project, we cannot tell them no. But it turned out that the hospital was a front for Saudi intelligent operations. Next example, Jordan provides refugee support and legitimate supplies to Iraq. They are also another "moderate state" and an "ally". The volume of the transaction is just too high and you cannot just exclude the Jordanians from the border (them being allies and all). So guess what else slips through the border? Egypt is another "moderate state" and "ally". Egypt is keen on war on terror. So when they send envoys to the region, we cannot really tell them no. Who these envoys contact, what information they give them, and how much money changes hands, is not something that you can control once the envoy is in. I suggest you watch the movie, "The Lord of War" (starring Nicolas Cage). Although a fictional dramatization, all the major events in the movie actually happened and there is more truth to the movie than dramatization.

To: Bill who wrote (217927)	2/12/2007 3:43:13 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Bill, re: It just seems it would be easier to cut off munitions supply lines than go door to door in Baghdad to flush out insurgents. You need to examine your primary assumption. The reality is that it's not possible to do either. America cannot "cut off munitions supply lines" or "flush out insurgents" in Baghdad. And that would remain true even if we were to ramp up our troop levels and increase our involvement ten fold or a hundred fold. The world is a much more complex and a much bigger place than our limited minds can easily grasp. We can't readily find Osama, in part because there are 6 BILLION people in the world and each one occupies just a tiny, tiny piece of the earth's area. We can't police the Iraqi borders because there are thousands of kilometers of borders to guard and some very clever men willing to cross them. We can't "flush out" the guerillas because there are MILLIONS of people in Iraq and we have no way of knowing which of them are active insurgents, which of them are insurgent sympathisers and which of them really don't give a shit either way. We could line every one of them up in front of us and look into their smiling faces and we wouldn't know unless one of them tried to kill our buddy. No matter how good or how bad their motives might be, leaders who fail to understand reality doom themselves, and those who serve them, to failure. With 60+ percent of Iraqis agreeing that it's ok to kill Americans, we CAN fail in Iraq, we will fail in Iraq and we'd better find a way to limit our losses. Ed