"Winning" in Iraq

Great Debates
1

This seems like it will become a debate, even though it is an expressed opinion, therefore I have chosen Great Debates. Please move it if I’m wrong.

It’s been said by some that there is no way to “win” in Iraq. They say that victory is poorly defined, and that our goals can not be achieved the way we specify them, among other things.

Why not redefine our goals?

Goal: No more violence within the borders of Iraq, under any circumstances. (with the exception of the strategy that will follow :smiley: )

At this point, what would be so wrong with taking the extreme action of just issuing an edict that anyone seen with a weapon of any kind, excepting US Military or Iraqi Police/Military, is killed - no questions asked? We have determined that the motives of those committing the violence are inherently wrong by anyone’s standard of morality, so therefore the motivation must be removed in order for the violence to stop. Remove the people propagating the motivation, and it just peters out. If there are no followers, then those in “charge” of these little jihads will fade away. Notice that this is not the same as “Just nuke it all and let God sort it out.” You just get a few really big, strong battalions of troops, and move across the city or landside removing the threat, but leaving the “civil” civilians.

No more failed diplomacy, no more nifty strategies aimed at reduction of violence, just use more bullets, and go gung-ho on any and all opposition to a non-violent Iraq. Kinda like pre-emptive self-defense but more brutal. It’s not morally worse than who we’d be fighting against, in fact it would be a little better…because innocent civilians do not wield weapons, and therefore would not die by our hand. Eventually there wouldn’t be any weapon-wielders left.

Yes I understand that this is inherently hypocritical, and that fighting fire with fire involves some burning of one’s self. But, I personally don’t think there is any other option but to remove those causing the violence and our strategies thus far have failed.

So who now hates me for voicing an unpopular view? Gimme your opinions.

2

Other than the fact that we’d have to kill one hell of a lot of otherwise innocent Iraqi civilians who feel they desperately need their guns to protect them from a plethora of everyday threats, it’s a terrific idea.

3

That’s what the edict’s for. Let them know ahead of time. Then, when they see the approaching army, they’d either lay them down or be laid down.

4

You are basically proposing going house to house, confiscating every weapon in the country and then melting them down, right? Suffice to say that is a little impractical and would be fraught with danger and may actually hurt our cause even further (if that’s even possible). It’s not unusual for normal Iraqi families to own AK47s so they can shoot them in the air in celebration (after, say, a wedding, a birth, or when the Iraqi soccer team wins a game).

Imagine trying to that in the United States. Well, OK, that’s a little too big for this analogy – let’s say Texas. I think you would agree this would be unworkable even if most of the population would be agreeable. Now imagine a significant portion of the population views you as evil Christian imperialists and wants you to die.

This plan also wouldn’t address the weapons of the militias, fledgling army, and the police. None of them would agree to this plan and one of the problems is that the nominally “on our side” police and army are riddled with insurgents or insurgent sympathizers.

Of course, maybe it could be done and would help. If there is any way to bring Iraq from over the cliff it’ll have to be an odd one. Maybe this is it. The idea of Bush proposing such a tactic would make my irony meter explode, though.

5

US Troops Conduct Overnight raids in Iraq

Fallujah Leaders Back U.S. Deal

Disarmament Process Starts In Sadr City, Albeit Slowly

Iraqi prime minister orders rebels to turn in weapons or face attack

6

I’d bet my life savings that these weapons were back on the market within a month.

And when so much of the army and police are militias and private armies in disguise you’d have to disarm them also if you want to prevent bad guys getting arms.

7

Because that would amount to the extermination of the entire population. Knives and rocks are weapons too, you know, and quite effective ones if your targets don’t have anything better, which your strategy is designed to arrange.

Even restricting your plan to guns, and even ignoring the other points people have already made, what makes you think we could even find them ? There are a lot of hiding places in an entire country.

And it’s also wrong because we have no moral right to demand anything of them at all. We shouldn’t be there in the first place.

No we haven’t determined that their motives are "inherently wrong by anyone’s standards of morality. The ones attacking American soldiers are clearly doing their patriotic duty in attacking occupying enemy soldiers. I’m sure that plenty of people ( especially in Iraq ) would even consider attacking anyone who cooperates or associates with an American to be moral; keep in mind we are hated enough that people who work for us risk being killed by their own families.

Again,that amounts to killing the majority of the population; most Iraqis support killing us. It would also require you to order our troops to all leave immediately ( or commit mass suicide ), since they are some of “the people propagating the motivation”.

Of course innocent civilians wield weapons, for everything from self defense to killing American soldiers.

8

So if ew exterminate a population of terrorists, who do nothing but kill…and threaten our way of life, so be it. If the whole country has to die, so be it. But you know that won’t happen…there’s good people everywhere, even if you have to dig through pounds of crap to get to them.

We got all those Japanese citizens to give up after WW2. They weren’t allowed to have a military. They sure didn’t like us much. They’re doing alright now. What’s so different? I’m saying that we *escalate the retaliation * in Iraq. Really all we’re doing over there is retaliating to insurgents. There’s no declared war against a single entity. Let’s escalate it, and kill them. Not confiscate their weapons. If your are an insurgent, and you are “insurging”…you die. Eventually they’d get the picture. Not “try” to kill them. I mean, on sight, they die. Overwhelming force and all that. They’re trying to kill us, let’s beat them to it. “Throw down your weapons” doesn’t mean anything to someone prepared to die for his cause. If they volunteer them, *before * we shoot, sure we’d let them go. But if they picked them back up, then they die.

Yes we shouldn’t even be there…that’s not an issue. Crying over how you spilled the milk doesn’t do much to clean the mess. Let’s clean the mess…

Their motivations are inherently wrong. “If I kill, I go to heaven/paradise/whatever.” “My way of life is superior, and the infidels must die.” That’s wrong, because killing is wrong. I didn’t say Islam was wrong, or anything else. It’s the twisted motivation of misled people. Since they won’t listen to reason, and they won’t face facts, let’s treat them the way we have no problem treating murderers in Texas. :eek:

Really, it’s win or go home. Go home means the violence takes over…which is better?

9

And a lot of those good people in Iraq are the ones shooting at us. You fail to grasp that we are the bad guys. They are right to try to kill our soldiers.

We didn’t invade the Japanese without provocation, nor did we continue wrecking their country after they surrendered.

They are the ones retaliating to us; at least the ones attacking us are.

First, the majority of the population supports killing us, and killing the majoirty of the population would naturally make the survivors murderously angry at us. Second, do you think that “insurgents” have a big red “I” on their forehead ? How do you intend to seperate them out from everyone else ?

Killing millions is not cleaning up the mess; it would simply move our Iraq atrocity into the Hitlerian catagory of evil.

And what makes you think that religion is the motivation for the people who attack us ? We invaded, we slaughtered, we destroyed, we tortured; we have ruined their country. If an Iraqi doesn’t want to kill us I think there’s something wrong with him. American soldiers in Iraq should be killed.

The violence took over the first moment American soldiers and missles crossed the border.

10

Japan

A) …Is actually a nation, not just a state. Iraq isn’t. The Japanese had a sense of homogenous, collective nationhood that Iraq does not. There wasn’t any sectarian violence in Japan because the Japanese didn’t have any sects that were interested in killing each other. Furthermore, Japan is an isolated culture; an island nation with a culture, history and language unique in all the world; there aren’t any other Japanese peoples. Iraq is merely a small part of the Arab world, with arbitrary borders drawn around it to distinguish it from Arab neighbours.

B) … Was actually beaten, as a nation-state, in a full scale war that (from their perspective) lasted fourteen years and exhausted the nation’s capacity to exert collective effort. Iraq, on the other hand, simply had its government removed.

C) … is a culture that places an extremely high value on obedience and collective harmony, more so than almost any other country.

See above.

What, exactly, do you think the U.S. military is doing now? They’re not carrying water pistols.

You seem to think the American forces are holding back, aren’t shooting people who shoot at them. Well, of course they’re killing insurgents. If anything, they’ve been repeatedly accused of being far too indiscriminate in the use of violence. Why do you think they send over soldiers, and not Department of Labour inspectors? You can’t make anyone deader than dead; there’s no level of retaliation left except to start killing civilians en masse, which would (A) make the U.S. unquestionably the bad guys, to whatever extent they aren’t already, and (B) create more insurgents.

I have to ask this even though I’ve asked it of ten or twelve posters and never gotten a straight answer, but what if a foreign army invaded YOU?

Suppose China had secretly, without anyone noticing, created an army of 50 million men and invaded your country tomorrow and killed your neighbours. Suppose that as a result the power was cut off to your house, you lost your job along with half your neighbours, your town was in a shambles, you have no money, and gangs and criminals roam the streets; meanwhile, the Chinese army builds a fortress on the outskirts of your town, where they have power and heat 24 hours a day, play video games and eat fast food and come out only to plow down your street in armored vehicles and shoot anyone who comes within a hundred metres of them, and the glow from the lights of their fortress is the only light you have at night. Now suppose one day a Chinese fighter plane drops a bomb that “misses” its target, lands on your front lawn, and kills one of your children.

What would your reaction be? Would you say, “Gosh, what a swell bunch of guys”? Because I know how I’d react; I’d want to kill those sons of bitches and nothing would stop me.

And you want to make them ANGRIER? Nuts, dude.

Who the hell are you talking about?

That applies to al-Qaida, perhaps. But the Iraqi insurgents, for the great majority, aren’t al-Qaida. (Al-Qaida has always been overwhelmingly made up of Egyptians and Saudis.) They’re not people trying to impose their way of life on you; they’re Iraqis fighting a civil war, in part against a foreign occupier. They are frightened and angry because they live in a violence-plagued shithole and feel they need to use force to defend their place in life and get something back. The vast majority of weapons-toting Iraqis don’t give a flying fuck how you live your life, which is why you didn’t, and don’t, see any Iraqi terrorists blowing up American office towers.

You are trying to impose your way of life on THEM.

11

They venerated an Emperor, who told them to surrender.

12

To win in Iraq means do what Bush went there for: Get a stable government in power that will favor American interests in oil and provide us with yet another place to position airstrips, since we are tired of sucking up to Turkey, Saudia Arabia, etc. for that.

This is not a likely outcome.
Instead, the most we will get is an Islamic hotbed with many enemies, like Iran or Somalia.

13

Well to be fair, there were such at one time ( certain Japanese Buddhist sects were not infrequently a rather violent lot ). It’s just that they had been militarily crushed and forcefully disarmed centuries earlier :).

  • Tamerlane
14

Impossible to achieve under any circumstances, what with ‘normal’ crime and all.

It’s monstrously inhumane, and in a country of 25 million people, it’d be completely and impossible to enforce with 130,000 U.S. troops - many of whom are support personnel and not combat troops anyway - and whatever number of Iraqi troops there are.

[quoteIt’s not morally worse than who we’d be fighting against, in fact it would be a little better…because innocent civilians do not wield weapons, and therefore would not die by our hand.[/quote]

I’m not impressed by your logic, which runs something like ‘If I define group X as guilty, then kill them, it’s good because only guilty people will die.’ Let’s be honest: Iraq is in chaos and having a gun isn’t a bad idea.

Then all you’d have to do is get rid of the people who are making the bombs, which is proving really easy.

In the end, two things would happen here: mass murder and chaos as the military starts really shooting first and asking questions later, and then retaliation by Iraqis as they try to fight off an increasingly unjust and oppressive army. No dice, I say.

15

Sounds to me like a race to the bottom.

Can we kill 25 million Iraqis before they kill 130,000 US soldiers?

I don’t think I like this idea.