Well, to be nitpicky in the best dope tradition, the source of enmity is both finite and exhaustible! It’ll always be finite, barring some sort of alien mathematico-philosophical tinkering that my puny brain cannot begin to understand. And ‘exhaustible’… well this whole thread is about one method of ‘exhausting’ it.
(And to counter the first logical objection you might come up with, simply think bigger!)
Allow me to defend Scylla. I’m no friend of his, but he’s right.
America no longer has the stomach for war. This was evident in Vietnam. Kuwait and Grenada was easy and quick, little loss of American military life and little loss of civilian life of the populace, but when the war is protracted, when technological and precision superiority doesn’t work, when the opposition is effective, Americans cave in. That is not how it worked in the previous worlds wars where America was respected for their performance and achievement. There was tremendous loss of civilian life in order to achieve a positive result that no one today would dispute.
Yes, the response to 911 was emotional. But very few of us in the western world wants to give up our respect for civilian life. We banked on precision technology but the enemy relies on the time honoured effectiveness of civilian terror and the value of retribution which is very human and why America finds itself in the present predicament. Americans jumped the gun. Weapons of mass destruction? America had the ability to wipe out any facility for that purpose like the Israelis did.
Yes, I believe the situation in Iraq is out of control and unless America can show the resolve and ruthlessness that Saddam employed or the Taliban of Afghanistan, Americas military option is simply futile. I don’t say its a bad thing. I think its time that the western world consolidates itself and gets on with self sufficiency and a degree of isolation from the bullshit of despots and terrorist avenues of infiltration. That is the only way I see for a future given to me by those who died in the ugly world wars of the past and for my children, given our present attitude to war ethics.
With what army? We are hanging on by the skin of our teeth as it is, when the main focus isn’t on us. Were we to show the “resolve and ruthlessness” you seem to recommend, we would finally unify Iraq: everybody would hate us. And this country is a gun-nuts dream, every damn fool and his uncle owns an AK-47. Give me a guess as to how many times the present number of troops we would need to commit in order to execute your policy of “resolve and ruthlessness”. Ten times? Twenty?
When it comes to fantasies, I prefer sexual fantasies, they aren’t nearly so bloody. YMMV.
“Just.”
Well, we should get right on that then.
Well, that’s certainly a relief! For a moment there, I thought we were talking about nearly impossible tasks, but its really just a two item check list. First, totally defeat Islamic fundamentalism. Step one.
How?
Islamic fundamentalism isn’t a “thing”, it has no discrete and distinct identity, you can’t sneak up behind Islamic fundamentalism and bash its brains in. It doesn’t even have a location, its scattered throughout Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia as well as London, Hamburg, and Paris!
And such a war would not only not aid and assist the emergence of a moderate and secular Islam, it would positively undermine it, in much the same way that Pearl Harbor undermined the isolationist movement in America. Its not even the people who hate us now, its the people who are going to hate us tomorrow!
You can only kill a man with a gun, you cannot change his mind with one.
We have plenty of stomach for war, and a wide variety of other forms of nastiness; what we lack it the willingness to take casualties from people who fight back. We are a nation of bullies and thieves; we go after nations we think can’t fight back, take their lunch money and try to beat them into grovelling and praising us. When they bloody our nose we back off and sob about how brutal they are. We fantasize about being mighty warriors; what we are is thugs and torturers.
As opposed to now, when we kill civilians by the thousands to achieve higher profits for the oil companies and Haliburton. My oh my, I wonder why the Iraqis aren’t grateful.
That’s good, since we have none to give up. Other people’s civilians, that is; 9-11 is a great tragedy in our eyes; dead Iraqis, we don’t care about.
Unrealistic pipe dream, it takes very few to fail a state.
It’s called a higher birthrate than we have.
Der Trihs, for all that I’m on the same side as you, inasmuch as both of us want withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq as soon as possible, I still gotta wonder why you don’t just turn yourself in to the Hague right now. Don’t mind the rest of us; we’ll get Chimpy rustled up and come join you when we get around to it, okay?
He tried. They sent him back.
Okay, that made me laugh.
There are three major things wrong with this statement. It is very dense in terms of mistakes, if you will…
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The Republicans had full control of the federal government for the duration.
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To the extent the troops were hurt was the result of poor planning and a lack of quality equipment (body armor, armored vehicles, lack of translators, lack of a cultural understanding, outdated trucks, no education for counter insurgency, etc.) which traces back to point one.
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Magical thinking doesn’t work. If 100% of the U.S. population wished really hard for us to win the same thing would’ve happened. As an example, since the WWII analogies are coming quick and heavy in this thread, the Japanese population was fanatically supportive of the imperialistic strategy. That didn’t help much when the firebombing came.
As for the idea of ‘taking the kid gloves off’, as the euphenism goes, that doesn’t really make much sense given our stated goal. It certainly didn’t help much in Vietnam. If we bombed them into submission there wouldn’t really be anything left of the major cities. Everyone in the world would hate us even more, if you can imagine, and the amount of propaganda we’d hand to the fundamentalists would earn us their thanks.
I agree with Mr. Moto here. Hang on, that doesn’t look right. No, it is. I agree with Mr. Moto here. I just don’t think fundamentalism can be defeated militarily, as it is particularly resistant to force. In fact, I think it was designed to be. A more judicious use of military action would serve us better than running around toppling dictators with no idea what will happen afterward.
http://www.ilaam.net/Sept11/AmericanWars.html
We don’t have a stomach for war. Hell thats all we do.
There was a great line in “The Good Shepherd”.
Joe Pesci says to Matt Damon
“You people are the one’s who make the big wars.”
to which Matt Damon responds
“No we make sure the wars are little ones.”
Bullshit. Vietnam demonstrated that America has a pretty substantial stomach for war.
Before there was much of an antiwar movement, we fought a massive war there for three years, with a half-million soldiers on the ground by the end of that time. And before that, we were involved in Vietnam as a low-level conflict for nearly a decade. Yet we stayed in the war for another five years.
What Vietnam demonstrated was that the American stomach for war isn’t limitless. Should it be? ISTM that would be pretty damned stupid.
Exactly. If despite our best efforts, in a war that isn’t remotely critical to our survival, if things get worse and worse, year after year after year, then the American people will have the sense to throw in the towel. Should they not? ISTM that would be pretty damned stupid.
And there was progress towards our ultimate goal. Our participation in WWI lasted nineteen months. WWII took longer, but by September 1944, 33 months after Pearl Harbor, the end was in sight; the only question was just how much longer. Less than a year, it turned out.
After 33 months of Iraq, it was December 2005. Were we in a dominant position by then, with the end clearly in sight? Ummm, no. We were in a worse position that we had been in in December 2004, when we were in a worse position than we were in December 2003. And of course by December 2006, it wasn’t all over; rather, things were even still worse.
So the American people are ready to throw in the towel. Does this mean they don’t have the stomach for war? No. It just means that their stomach for war isn’t unlimited in the face of seemingly unlimited setbacks for a cause they were never that invested in. Should it be otherwise? Like I said, ISTM that would be pretty damned stupid.
I would suggest you respond to post 49 of the original thread, where I raise the question of against whom we should direct the massive force we can bring to bear. ‘Resolve’ is nice, but unless there’s some specific application of force that can be engaged in resolutely in support of a specific goal, it’s kinda silly to just talk about ‘resolve’ as if one could will outcomes. (If you can will outcomes, would you join me on a trip to Atlantic City? There is money to be made, for a man who can will the dice to come up in particular ways.)
And then there’s the problem, which I also address in that post, about the fact that none of us get to choose a particular means for advancing the war. Only Bush does. Our choices are (a) to buy into Bush’s conduct of Bush’s war, or (b) get out. If you think Bush’s problem has been insufficient resolve, it doesn’t matter; you can’t change his level of resolve. You can either say you support his execution of the war, or you want us to come home.
I look forward to seeing your post in that thread - no sense in debating the same issue simultaneously both here and there.
Bush does not lack resolve. This war has gone on for more than 4 years. It lacks understanding of the problems. It lacks the simple belief that people fight very hard to protect their homes. The misunderstanding is fundamental. Fight on their turf with a populace that supports them and you lose.
Like how stupid it was for the communists? What…over a million dead (not counting civilians), better part of a couple of decades of war, and all they got out of it was—victory.
Heh. I’ve been trying to boil down some pithy maxim of the thoughts in my head on this subject—not much luck. Maybe it’s too difficult, or maybe it’s just because I skipped breakfast. But what keeps coming to mind is a line from Paul Redecker in World War Z: “imagine what could be accomplished if the human race would only shed it’s humanity.” Cause, y’know, our “humanity” isn’t magic. It didn’t come from Jehovah, or Dharma. It’s a social construct, “words writ in water.” Put it aside, and using superweapons to blow cities away as ash, or sending waves of your own men to choke your enemy’s rivers with the dead doesn’t isn’t a matter of halos and pitchforks—it’s just which side’s “fit” enough to remain standing, in the end. Simple natural law.
Well. My world just got a little darker.
The thing is, Vietnam had been fighting off the yoke of oppression for centuries. They wanted independence and nothing we could do would stop them. They just saw us as a new imperial power in a long line of powers they had bled dry.
We didn’t really understand this though, to our folly. Imagine if LBJ chose to pull out instead of escalate. A shitload more people would still be alive in Vietnam, the U.S., and Cambodia (No Nixon to fuck that one up). And…what? What are the dire consequences in our world line? Nothing. It wasn’t worth fighting. They didn’t want us there.
So your logic can certainly apply when we get to a fight where the consequences of our defeat actually are serious enough to consider what some people have been saying. We’ll know it when we see it.
I like this quote from The Fog of War, a great movie about McNamara. This is him recalling a meeting from 1995: