I am all for revolutions, as long as they are internal revolutions that come from the people. What I object to is the crime of aggression.
Yes, but guerrillas can only stay in the field (real guerrillas, not proxy terrorists like the Contras or Mujahadeen) if they have genuine support from the population. A guerrilla war cannot be waged otherwise.
You wanna open up that can 'o worms, do ya?
To put it briefly, it would have been difficult for the NLF to make it harder on the population, since the NLF was the freakin’ population. You must keep in mind that the Vietnam war was waged mostly against the south, and that it was exactly the civilian population that was targetted.
If you want to get into this, I suggest starting a new thread.
I don’t think so. An internal guerrilla group would do much less damage to the infrastructure. What is infinitely more important, though, is that a guerrilla group would have to come from the people, not from outside.
It is much better to have an internal liberation struggle than to be conquered by an outside power.
shrug You might as well say that from the standpoint of destroying the Confederacy, Gettysburg was quite the failure for the Union because Pickett and Lee got away. You don’t win a war in a single engagement.
I’ve been saying Afghanistan has been a mixed bag, and we may not be able to judge its outcome without the benefit of hindsight and the completion of the war. Prematurely judging it as a disaster overall is intellectually dishonest and skews one’s ability to debate the upcoming battle in Iraq.
How about:[ul][]Saudi Arabia style Wahabis sympathetic and supportive of ObL and anti-Western terrorism in general.[]Iran-supported Shi’a majority sympathetic to anti-Western terrorism and even more antagonistic toward Israel than present Iraqi government.Fragmented collection of warlords with access to WMD’s and no compunctions against using them in the region.[/ul]That’s just off the top of my head.
Doghouse Reilly, if an objective of Gettysburg was for the Union Army to capture Lee or Pickett, than it would be a failure in that regard. I always thought that Gettysburg was an accidental engagement brought on by a Lee offensive. I’ve never heard anything to suggest otherwise.
In the Afghan War, however, President Bush explicitly said that one aim was to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Yeah, we severely crippled Al Qaeda, which is a great thing, but we still failed in a primary military objective.
But, as we all know, the “War On Terror” isn’t over yet. (Will it ever be? No.) We cannot call wars failures or successes until the completion of them.
Yes. It has often been the case that U.S. installed dictators have been much worse for the population than the old dictators.
Iraq was actually fairly well off under Saddam before the U.S. destroyed Iraqi society. That is not to say that Saddam isn’t a monster, but he did invest in the country. Iraq was the most advanced country in the Arab world by far before the U.S.siege.
