First, let me start by apologizing for this thread in advance. I don’t necessarily hold these views but was just something I was pondering. (sure I’m gonna be pretty wrong here anyways.)
But would it be possible to completely dominate some of the middle east countries (Iraq, afghanistan) that are causing us so much trouble. In my slightly uneducated viewpoint, we are far stronger than these other countries. We should be able to bomb, capture and basically take over their country and all it’s resources.
Now I think the biggest reason opposing this would be fear of retaliation. Middle east countries could potentially bomb us (not sure how likely) and that would obviously be a very bad thing. Human compassion would come second because I think a significant portion would get behind the idea.
But what’s stopping us? If we pull it off, we get all their oil and don’t have to deal with crazy Muslims anymore. (assuming we kill off enough of them.) we write the history books and say they started it. It all works out in our favor.
Again, I don’t really support this idea it’s just a thought.
Are you totally sure you can get every last one of them (including all the ones that may live on our own soil and any of their allies) in one try. You only get one chance, you’d better do it right.
First, I think the way you’ve phrased things is the proper way to think about this issue–i.e., by reference to practicalities, not by reference to what’s “moral” or not.
Second, in thinking only about the practicalities of the narrow question, I think it would be extremely difficult to dominate these countries while also (i) not hurting the ability to extract the oil located there, (ii) not risking too many casualties on our end, and (iii) not leaving too many of the former citizens of these countries alive in a diaspora.
Third, in thinking about the practicalities on a larger scale, doing anything like this would make the US an international pariah on par with North Korea. No one would trade with us. Other developed countries would likely increase their military capabilities drastically, leading to a long-term cold war between the US and the rest of the world. It would be hard to get the oil back to the US under these circumstances. Our quality of life would suffer dramatically (no more foreign products or foreign talent working in the US).
If by “we” you mean all developed countries and not just the US, then I think the problems discussed first above still apply (and are compounded by attempting to coordinate different militaries). The whole-world cold war scenario still seems likely to me.
For Iraq, we’d probably have to put a Saddam-type dictator in place, with the necessary army of secret police and heavy handed security tactics. That means massive arrests of political prisoners, at the very least. Then again, we could’ve just left SH in place as is and avoided all the expense and trouble.
In Afghanistan, with it’s lack of infrastructure and civil institutions, we’d be putting military units in every remote village in the vast, mountainous country. Way too expensive for what we’d get. Remember, no oil in Afghanistan.
Well, for one thing, some of your assumptions are a bit off.
No, actually, it wouldn’t be possible. Are you[sup]*[/sup] under the impression that Iraq is pacified? Should we be able to bomb, capture and take over Afghanistan? Ask the Soviets. Ask the British Raj. Iraq, Afghanistan . . . What else? Are we going to take over Jordan, Lebanon, Kurdistan, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia (who are our allies now, but probably won’t be by the time this plan is underway).
You are essentially talking a third world war with up to 6.8 billion enemies in a worst case scenario, far more than the number of Axis troops in WWII. Many of those enemies would be within our own borders. Get ready for Internment Camp Redux.
The loss of life would be beyond anything we could imagine. Billions would die in a war that would last decades. The war itself would be unjust. Even as a conservative, I consider Dubya’s decision to invade Iraq to be morally indefensible, but this offense would be mild compared to what you are describing. This is a war that we would–and should–lose.
But let’s say we win after 50 years. Then what? Well, congratulations. You are now the proud owner of a colonial empire. Ask the French and the British–and the Soviets–how well that worked out. You haven’t solved anything. You’ve merely traded one morally ambiguous dilemma for another. At an incalculable cost to human life, our economic and political structure, not to mention the fact that our moral stance as a superpower is now totally invalidated. We’d be worse off than we are now, and there would be no real way to make things right. In sci-fi terms, we’re House Atreides at the present. That’s not exactly a wonderful position to be in, but it beats House Harkonnen by a mile.
[sup]*[/sup]By “you,” I mean “as seen from your viewpoint,” not “you personally.” I know you’re not actually advocating this.
The OP seems to be arguing (if hypothetically) in favor of a rather naked and pure form of fascism. I doubt some kind of novel argument is going to emerge that this is a desirable means of conducting a country’s affairs, but go ahead if you must.
Next, I fail to see any basis for the OP’s assumption, as he seems to be effectively saying, that the lives and property of people in Iraq and Afghanistan are his for the taking. Other than “we are stronger and therefore can take what we want”, which is not a very interesting argument to discuss. If the argument is that we will somehow protect ourselves against terrorism by slaughtering huge numbers of innocents, my response is that terrorist acts, even on the scale of a 9/11 attack, cannot and never will bring about the destruction of the US, that the chances of any given indvidual dying in a terrorist attack are not far above zero, and that I therefore see no reason for such draconian tactics to eliminate a few hundreds, or even thousands, of supposed terrorists.
Lastly, I’ll dispute the assertions below:
Who’s “we”? The US government is not to any great degree in the oil business. Apparently you want to forcibly take resources that already can be purchased on the open market, effectively to line the pockets of huge companies that are already highly profitable and that don’t give a rat’s ass about your interests. Why would you want to do that, exactly?
And what makes a particular muslim ‘crazy’, in your view? Is your viewpoint that it is ‘crazy’ for a given muslim in the middle east to think that the United States might not have his or her best interests at heart? If so, how do you reconcile that with your wanting to kill off as many people as necessary, innocent or not, as long as you get all the ‘crazy’ ones?
So far, in this country whoever wants to write a history book can do so and can say whatever they want in it. So apparently to achieve your desired end you’re going to have to abolish the constitution and repress the domestic population (violently, if need be) as well. I’m not seeing the reward for all that rigamarole, myself.
I think we probably could destroy all the population centers in Afghanistan. We have nukes after all. We could ramp up production of cruise missiles and fuel air bomb any gathering we find and reduce the country to subsistence living in caves or very small villages.
But what would the rest of the world think if we started targeting civilians? Doesn’t the deliberate targeting of civilians seem like the thing the bad guys do? What happens when China, the UK and India realize that we’re willing to murder millions for our political ends? Does this create a more stable or less stable world?
Even Hitler didn’t attempt to depopulate an entire country. How would Americans respond to a government that did this? We can turn Afghanistan into a green glass hellhole, but what do we gain? There would be a billion Muslims horrified at what we had done. Would there be less or more people willing to bomb us?
Shit, millions of Christians would be willing to fight against us after doing that.
Sure it is possible if not something you’d want to do. The Nazi’s have already been brought up, but if they hadn’t continued to wage a war on two fronts, what possible opposition would they really have in the occupied countries that they couldn’t readily crush? Look at how many countries in the world currently have dictators and totalitarian governments running them. Brutality seems to work quite nicely for them.
As for what would happen in the OP’s scenario; a new Cold War, with America aligned against the rest of the world. The entire world supply of nuclear weapons outside our borders being retargeted at us; nations all over the world rushing to build nukes to point at us, or rushing to ally with an nation that already has them. Canadian nukes on the border. An America strangling under massive trade sanctions. Probably even if the governments don’t impose them formally; I doubt that the crews of American ships would have long life expectancies if they docked in non-American ports.
Thanks everybody for the response. Educating and informative as I had hoped.
But to put it more specifically, I’m not talking about dragging out a war for years but instead just simply nuking the crap out of them? There’s a lot of varying viewpoints here but the most common would have to be that the rest of the world would turn on us. But why? Just because we have conflict with one country why must others be involved? (I understand there must be alliances in this world but not much about them.). And some would perceive it as a message simply to not mess with us.
Because they . . . don’t want to die before they’re 40 with their teeth falling out after giving birth to babies with three heads? And what’s the point of taking over a country’s resources if you have to wait 10,000 years or so before the resources in question are safe to use?
Also, as a general rule, any military strategy that happens to be mentioned in The Turner Diaries is probably a bad idea. That little piece of advice has saved me from soooo much trouble.
How do you tell a crazy (by your definition) muslim from a sane muslim? It’s not like they have big signs on their heads. The way you tell if they want to kill you is when they attack you, they tend to keep it secret before then. So if you’re an American soldier in Iraq you can’t just shoot every Iraqi you see, because most of them don’t attack American soldiers and their religion doesn’t tell them to kill us.
So unless your plan is simply to drop nuclear bombs on every majority-muslim city in the world…wait, I guess that was your plan. So yeah.
What makes you think that’s the only reason they want to kill us? We’ve worked hard to demonstrate to the people of the Middle East (and elsewhere) that we are their enemy, for reasons that have nothing to do with religion. Hatred of America is a rational position for much of the world.
And if we start nuking people because they are Muslim, the number of “crazy” Muslims will expand to be pretty much all of them. So will the number of “crazy” Hindus, Christians, atheists, you name it.
The crazy one is the one trying to kill you because you are wearing a t-shirt with Mohammed The Bear on it. Luckily, they’re pretty easy to goad into showing themselves.