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

To: jttmab who wrote (221604)	2/27/2007 8:12:42 PM
From: Don Hurst	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

>>" There are ways that we can protect ourselves. First, we need to identify the Muslims in our country. They are tomorrow’s terrorist bombers, as the English are learning now. They really should be deported, along with all other illegal aliens. However, our political leaders are much too weak to do that, so we have to look out for ourselves. Identify your Muslim neighbors, keep an eye on them, be aware of where they are and what they are doing, and at the first legal opportunity, notify the police of their presence. "<< One of my neighbors is a muslim. I called the police and can you believe it, the policeman was a muslim. Now what do I do???

To: jttmab who wrote (221604)	3/6/2007 1:31:07 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi jttmab; Re Kenyon's saying we're losing the "war". (a) There is no war. (b) In the long run we will do just fine. (c) Our problem with terror is a police problem, not a military problem. Like I said back in 2002, if we ever do have a war, you will know it. Our last war ended in 1945. If you were 20 or 24 years old back then (and male), then you personally know what a war is like. If you're much younger, then you have to learn from the history books, like I did. Wars don't get by on a volunteer army. Wars involve the slaughter of vast numbers of people. Some folks volunteer for that sort of thing, but it is never enough. Instead, the government will force unimportant people to enter the military. And since there is never enough time to train the large number of soldiers needed (in a war), they will be sent into combat with only a few weeks of training. Back at the home front, the government will shut down the production of consumer goods that use resources needed in the war. Britain was famous for this, doing things like requiring men to wear the same suit for four years so that there would be more wool for uniforms. Right now, I look around and there is no war going on here. Our consumer society rolls on. During wartime, freedom of the press will go away. The press will become an instrument of the state and will give out only the information that the state decides is useful for prosecuting the war. Anyone who tries to go against this will be locked up. Back in 1972 we were involved in a "police action", but no war. And that was about 10x worse than Iraq, but still no war. What's going on now is just another unimportant 3rd world police action that will be completely forgotten in a hundred years. We do these things all the time. Now for the Iraqis, what is going on is close to a "war" in that it has torn apart their country, but for us, it is nothing. When a major state like the US gets in a war, you can expect that many millions of people will find that their government has changed. Geography books require the redrawing of international borders. New weapons will be invented and applied to do things that are not done in peacetime, for example, to maximize the number of enemy civilians they can kill or incapacitate. None of this is going on right now. Furthermore, none of it is even getting prepared for. The weapons systems being developed are all the sort of things that rangers and special forces use. Wars require millions of conscripts that really aren't very good at war. Instead of the expensive and precision weapons that special forces use, conscripts are given simple weapons that can be manufactured in great volume at low expense. Our current military is very expensive to train. For this reason, great effort is being spent developing better armor for them. In a war, these expensive professionals would very soon be used up, and with the less expensive conscripts showing up, the concentration on protection will decrease. Conscripts in a war don't get expensive protection. Instead, things happen to them like they are ordered to walk (with a full load of weapons) from Paris to Moscow and back. In war, the idea is to move as much metal in the general direction of the enemy as possible. Wars are not fought between expensively trained snipers that efficiently make "one shot, one kill." They are fought between large groups of men that do not want to be in the military and have little reason to risk their life in order to be one of the millions of "heroes". Because of this inefficiency, wars require millions of rounds of ammunition to obtain a single fatality. The vast majority of the rounds are fired "in the general direction of the enemy", not at any target in particular. The winner of a war is the country that can manufacture the millions of tons of armaments required, not the country that has a more elite, more expensively trained, military. -- Carl