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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (790044)	6/15/2014 11:18:53 PM
From: Bilow	3 Recommendations Recommended By bentway gamesmistress Thomas M. Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577177

Hi i-node; Re: "It isn't warmongering to look out for your country's national security interests. I'm not promoting war, but sometimes wars are necessary to solve problems. "; I'm a right-winger. I read a lot of history. Your basic problem, and the problem of the Bush #43 administration, and the problem of the Obama administration, and the problem of the administration that will be elected in 2016 (whether it is republican or democrat) is that you are ignorant of the nature of war and what military power can and cannot do, and how it does what it can do. Only an idiot who never cracked a history book would think that we defeated Germany and Japan with "shock and awe" and therefore shock and awe would work to make the Iraq occupation peaceful. No, that's not what we did to Germany and Japan. What we did was to kill as much of their population as we could. We dropped as many bombs as possible on their cities. We killed as many mothers, children, infants, dogs, cats and house plants as the air force of an industrial powerhouse was capable of. We cut them off from importing food so that they were reduced to starvation. Did we drop k-rations on them to help? No, we let them starve. We used science to figure out how to more efficiently light their cities into fire storms. At the end of the 2nd world war, no one in Germany or Japan could doubt that we were complete barbarians that would be willing to kill the remainder of them if they gave us the slightest excuse. When our army marched into occupation and we didn't rape and pillage the locals they must have considered it a wonderful miracle. It was obvious to them, even from the air campaign alone, that we did not have the slightest hint of morality, no hint of compassion, and had the industrial might to make it stick. This is why these occupations were peaceful. There was no "shock and awe", no harmless fireworks displays. The wars were murder on a mass scale (on all sides) and they brought the conflict to a conclusion that was accepted as permanent by all sides. Our Iraq war was like a butterfly hunt organized by brownies. --------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm reminded of one of the stupid things that Cheney did back in 2002. The US Army was developing an advanced mobile artillery system called the Crusader. Of all the things we had on the drawing boards, short of nuclear weapons, this is what you want to kill people. Artillery has always been the queen of the battlefield and Cheney cancelled it. Twelve years ago, before the invasion of Iraq, I wrote the following. It's still true: Bilow, June 8, 2002 My contention is that the Crusader is being cancelled because the military is concentrating on preparing us (badly) for anti terrorist warfare. Against terrorists, the Crusader is useless (as it would be used nowadays, anyway), but so is most of the rest of the military, as is well illustrated by the Israeli Defense Force's ongoing inability to suppress terror. We were lucky that Osama bin Laden was operating out of Afghanistan with the permission of the local authorities. He could have run the same operation from Los Angeles. I've previously noted that our revolution in military affairs is decreasing our ability to influence civilian populations to cry uncle. Like the Israelis, we can quickly eliminate military opposition to us, but our efficiency decreases our ability to influence the irregular or guerilla opposition. History suggests that getting civilians to knuckle under to force requires killing about 10% of them or so. When we march into a city and take it over with no real casualties on the other side (because of the pin-point accuracy of our military) we're left with an unbeaten civilian population that's still boiling for a "fair" fight and will snipe at us forever. Getting the enemy's military to surrender has been easy, it's the civilians that are the sons of bitches. To bring them to heel we will probably have to do the same thing that has historically always been required in this sort of thing, kill around 10% of them before entering the city, or in the process of taking it. The Israelis are slowly figuring this out. Used judiciously, artillery is a wonderful way to convince civilians to surrender. A sniping incident? Flatten a couple city blocks. Only artillery provides you the ability to do this any time at a moment's notice, over city-sized distances, and at very little cost to yourself. Message 17575843 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Our basic problem is that both political parties are too squishy to run an effective war. In fact the very nature of war is misunderstood by both sides of the political debate. And my opinion is that the WTC action was not enough to make us fight an effective war against the populations that supported it. It should have been treated as a police problem. Let the FBI and the CIA run the terror wars; we value human life too much to kill the millions of people that would be necessary in a war against the Sunnis. And for that matter, why should we pick the sunnis over the shia? It just isn't our fight, we should stay out of it. The business of America is business, not war. Foreigners like us because of Apple not the USAF. The military is a drag on our economy and does not support our business. And did invading Iraq protect our oil supplies? No, Iraq still doesn't make much oil, the country falling apart isn't changing that. If we'd simply normalized relations with Saddam we'd have gotten more oil out of the place. It's impossible to protect oil production from an insurgency. Oil burns really well and requires extensive pipelines that cannot be defended. An oil industry is the perfect target. Ruling with an iron fist is an ugly thing. We should stay out of that sort of thing until we are actually attacked by a real foreign country. And, in return, we should begin killing as many of their population as we can, until the survivors beg for us to accept their surrender. War should be the ultimate in horror and very rare. These "limited wars", Vietnam and Iraq, should be avoided because they (like terror itself) are ineffective. -- Carl