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

To: d[-_-]b who wrote (794559)	7/12/2014 1:02:31 AM
From: RMF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578660

The ONLY reason we have troops in Japan today is so that we have a presence in that part of Asia. I believe we also have troops in Germany. I'm not sure what your point is...we're trying to maintain a presence in Afghanistan too. I'm NOT sure that I like that we have to pay for troops all over the world though. I'm a bit tired of the U.S. being the world's policeman.

To: d[-_-]b who wrote (794559)	7/31/2014 10:42:02 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 1578660

Hi d[-_-]]b; Re the difference between the surrenders and occupations of Japan (and Germany) versus the crap going on in Afghanistan (and Gaza). The problem is that "counter insurgency" only works against insurgents that have only tentative support from the local population. When the local population is the insurgents, counter insurgency simply amounts to failing to make war against them. When you're running a counter insurgency operation you try to avoid civilian casualties. When you're fighting a war, as in our recent war against Germany and Japan, your objective is to destroy all war making capability of the enemy. Since their civilians are making military equipment, their civilians are also legitimate targets. After a few years of total war, a substantial percentage of the German and Japanese populations were dead, a lot more were wounded and huge numbers of them had their houses and personal belongings destroyed. The survivors welcomed peace. It would have taken an insane person to continue the war on their side. By contrast, the Palestinians civilians have never faced true defeat. Of course they are still all about fighting. At the end of real defeat the survivors are happy to see the occupying army because they know it means that the bombing will stop. A "solution" for the Israelis would be to simply fire back at rocket launches with a couple dozen 155mm artillery shells. It would be a lot safer and cheaper than trying to separate the military from the civilians and the devastation to the civilians would eventually change their minds. The Gaza civilians voted for Hamas the same as the Germans voted for Hitler (though I don't mean to say that Hamas is in some way like the Nazis). The Israelis could let them pay for their votes the same way. I write quotes around "solution" because it's really not a solution. If it were, the Israelis would have already done it. The reason is that Israel's opponent is not just the Palestinians. They've got to deal with the whole Arab nation and that's a huge number of people. Killing a hundred thousand Palestinians might get the rest to unconditionally surrender but it would really piss off the rest of the Arabs. And Israel is not a great power like the US. When the great powers go at it they beat the crap out of each others civilian populations and the inevitable complaints are simply ignored. Great powers stop neutral shipping and search it. Again the complaints are pointless. Who would they complain to? The great powers are already involved. But when little powers go at it they frequently have to fight a propaganda war instead of a real war. If they didn't, they'd risk having the non-weak powers come in on the side of the enemy. So Israel has never truly defeated an Arab state. Her troops have never marched into the capital of an Arab state. The great powers stop her before it gets that far. Well she did get invited into Beirut but she couldn't stand the heat of the kitchen and had to pull back. Since the US is a great power, Bush could probably have gotten away with beating the crap out of the villages in Afghanistan who supported insurgents (i.e. any village from which an attack was made, unless the village reported to the US that an attack was imminent and they needed assistance). But it's harder to keep the press out of a more advanced country like Iraq and I really don't see how it would have been practical to beat the Iraqis into submission. What they could have done was to take the cities by artillery bombardment instead of fancy mobile tactics. The press sees all civilians as "innocent" even when it was those same civilians that voted for the government that insists on continuing the war. I don't get that. Just because some 18-year-old kid gets drafted into the military he suddenly becomes "guilty"? No, it's the whole society that prosecutes the war. The basic idea of (permanently) winning a war is to make it so horrible for the other side that 90% of them agree that they have been completely and totally beaten and never want to get involved with that sort of stupidity again. The only way to reach that level of agreement is what amounts to legalized mass murder. It is an ugly thing to do and nations are not driven to that point very often (thank God). It is not sufficient to merely defeat the military or kill their leaders. It is the civilians that have to be beaten. This is why Britain could not defeat the rebels in the US. Even if Washington had been caught and hung the US would have fought on. Counter-insurgency requires massive numbers of troops possibly in occupation for decades. And total war means you will involve the rest of the world (and requires a lot of troops in itself). -- Carl