herfacechair
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prettyinchains: Yes the best way to win a war is to avoid a war,
Negative. In order to win a war, you have to actually fight it.
History is littered with examples of societies that tried to avoid a war - and ended up losing it altogether. The Europeans initially tried to avoid war with Germany. Then, all of a sudden, Germany got bigger. You call that a victory? I don’t. I call that asking for defeat.
Maybe we could have avoided a war with Great Britain. By avoiding a war with them, we would have won our Independence without loss of troops. Our coffers would not have gone dry two years later. Do you know how many of our patriots trudged barefooted in the winter snow on their way to Trenton to defeat the Hessians? How about those patriots that cooked and ate their own boots because they were hungry? Or those that froze to death?
Yah, that’s it! They did not have to suffer that way, we could have easily “won” the war by staying out of it. No need for anyone to go on a multi mile hump barefooted! (he he, now those guys definitely had bragging rights when it came to telling their grand kids about how hard they had it, you know, walking barefoot in the snow.)
Wait, we should also have avoided war with Mexico. We would have received a big chunk of our country without lifting a finger, because we would have won that war by avoiding it. The Civil War? Silly Northerners, they could have easily won the war and lost no troops by avoiding it altogether. The Confederates would have surrendered because General Grant would have pulled the best war winning trick out of his sleeves - avoiding war. Reconstruction would have gone easier as well as there would have been no damage.
The cold hard reality is that, as I stated earlier, in order to win a war, you have to fight it, not avoid it. Avoiding it is no way to win it in any way, shape, or form. And when the war god changes his mask and a different natured war creeps toward you, avoiding war amounts to appeasement and early surrender.
Here is an example:
Coach: Sorry folks, our team will not play, we want to avoid playing, as that is the best way to win.
Host: Your forfeiting the game, roger.
prettyinchains: Daddy Bush was interveiwed the december before W went for Bagdad and he was asked; why when we had Saddam on the ropes after Kuwait , why we did not go for the kill and take Bagdad. His reply was simple and to the point, he said that while we could take Bagdad easily enough there was, after much analysis, there was no way to extract our troops from Iraq once we had taken Bagdad. Something that W apparently never heard Daddy say.
Bush Senior did not have approximately 3000 people slaughtered on American soil during his watch by hijackers that - during his watch - would have eventually landed the aircraft and released most passengers.
When 19 hijackers commandeered four passenger airplanes with the intentions of turning them into guided missiles, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans proved to no longer be a safe defense buffer. We, as a nation, woke up to reality.
Two major reports in the 90’s, the terror 2000 report of 1994 and the Bojinka blue prints shown to Clinton in the mid 90’s, indicated the possibility that something like this would happen. Back then, we had the convenience of dismissing them as mere “speculation”. After all, out of the majority of our population, who would have thought that airplanes can become effective cruise missiles? Al-Qaeda slaughtered more people this way, than say, four of our cruise missiles were able to kill on their side (if any).
After September 11, what pre 9/11 people saw as speculation was now cold hard reality. If it was not tried, it is now a strong possibility that had to be taken seriously.
This forced our leadership to look strong and hard at our enemy, their network of direct and indirect supporters, and the environment that created their mentality.
Gone were the days when we could let Sadman walk all over the U.N. inspectors. His intentions to carry his WMD programs to fruit - and yes, he has proven that he has no compunction using them against his own people - made him a threat to our security interests. After all, Bin Laden was looking for WMD.
The realities of 1991 and 2001 stand in stark contrast to each other, like night and day. This article places our new reality into perspective:
http://medienkritik.typepad.com/blog/2004/11/europe_thy_name.html
quote:
ORIGINAL: Matthias Döpfner, Chief Executive of Axel Springer AG
For his policies, Bush risks the fall of the dollar, huge amounts of additional national debt and a massive and persistent burden on the American economy— because everything is at stake.
prettyinchains: , but essentially all they did was play capture the flag. They made a beeline for Bagdad and declared victory. After making an end run around and by countless thousands of enemy troops.
Not quite. You see, generally there is pre-invasion bombardment, then you have an invasion, then you have post invasion occupation and counter resistance operations. Reconstruction starts at this time. What happened after we captured Baghdad is that we continued the completion of the conquest. Then we moved into the post invasion occupation and counter resistance operations.
Victory may have been declared for one of the phases, but it was not declared for the entire Iraq campaign.
prettyinchains: Who once they saw that America was going to capture their flag simply removed their uniforms and melted away into the underground.
Again not quite. As soon as they lost one phase of the war, they shifted into the next phase of the war. Many removed their uniforms and melted into the insurgency. Thousands surrendered. Thousands rushed at our troops just to get slaughtered. Others deserted never to be seen again.
prettyinchains: A war has to be fought like a street fight, it has to be fought until someone stays down for the count.
DONE, what you talk about is urban warfare:
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18615/article_detail.asp
quote:
And our successes at urban combat (which, scandalously, are mostly untold stories in the U.S.) made it crystal clear to both the terrorists and the millions of moderate Iraqis that the insurgents simply cannot win against today’s U.S. Army and Marines. That’s why everyday citizens have surged into politics instead.
prettyinchains: It cannot be fought with press riding along and filming every little thing that occurs.
The press has been accompanying military troops into war for decades, even well over a century ago. Some Civil War units had imbedded reporters. During the Iraq invasion, they made extra effort to coordinate what pictures to show and what not to show with the military. That was better than what they did in Somalia. Heck, I have seen footage of World War II operations being filmed by journalists as it was in progress.
prettyinchains: Hell saddam was watching CNN and using it to save what resources he had left.
He was doing that for months! Even prior to the invasion! When congress gave their backing to the president back in the fall of 2002, Sadman had almost an eternity to move his sensitive weaponry.
prettyinchains: We are at the moment stuck, we cannot get out of Iraqi, easily or safely, to pull out now would result in loses to our troops that are unwarranted and unnecessary.
We are stuck in Iraq, but we are making progress over there. Just as we were stuck in Germany and Japan while they were recovering, wait, we are still in Germany and Japan!
prettyinchains: We need to do an about face, since we are there, and destroy verything that stands against us.
No need to.
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18615/article_detail.asp
quote:
The terrorist struggle has hardly ended. Even a very small number of vicious men operating in secret will find opportunities to blow up outdoor markets and public buildings, assassinate prominent political figures, and knock down office towers. But public opinion is not on the insurgents’ side, and the battle of Iraq is no longer one of war fighting—but of policing and politics.
Policing and political problem-solving are mostly tasks for Iraqis, not Americans. And the Iraqis are taking them up, often with gusto. I saw much evidence that responsible Iraqis are gradually isolating the small but dangerously nihilistic minority trying to strangle their new society. With each passing month, U.S. forces will more and more become a kind of SWAT team that intervenes only to multiply the force of the emerging Iraqi security forces, and otherwise stays mostly in the background.
Increasingly, the Iraqi people are taking direction of their own lives. And like all other self-ruling populations, they are more interested in improving the quality of their lives than in mindless warring. It will take some time, but Iraq has begun the process of becoming a normal country.
The terrorist groups are withering away. Terrorists are breaking off and fighting against the main terror groups. In fact, they provided security during one of the major elections, warning other terrorists to back off.
If we do exactly what you say here, this would not happen. The terrorists would be fighting us instead of each other. I prefer what we are currently doing. It is working.
prettyinchains: It may sound harsh, but the last war that anyone really one WW2 was fought this way. It is the only way to win a war you are in.
Not quite. After the Germans surrendered, we fought an insurgency group there for two to three years. They used many of the same tactics against the allies that the insurgents used against the coalition in Iraq. Iraq is further ahead in recovery now than Germany was at this point after the fall of the NAZI government.
prettyinchains: We have time after time squandered our chances to show our resolve and dedication to the Iraqi's, the Iranian's, and the rest of the world.
The late 70’s and the 1990’s come to mind.
prettyinchains: An example was early on in Falouja <sp>, here was an area that contained many enemy combatants. Along with many civilians, we had the troops and equipment to completely surround the town, to put forth an ultimatum. Simply come out, if you are a civilian, show your identification and we will take care of you, if you are not we will arrest you.
The coalition did that. They completely surrounded the town and gave people the opportunity to leave. Unfortunately, the enemy combatants prevented many of the neutrals from leaving the town. But things are not that simple. No matter how our troops surround the town, the enemy could - and did - find ways to slip out. Many of the enemy walked right up to the troops as “refugees” and slipped right on past said troops to freedom. The weapons they left behind? Well, there was a bunch of weapons buried somewhere, they could always rearm later. Unfortunately, our troops did not have the picture and identification of every single terrorist that we were fighting over there.
prettyinchains: You have 48 hours, then we will level the town, period. No discussion, no negotiation, daisy cutters for everyone. And what did we do? Stand around and let everyone we were after, again melt away.
The French tried this tactic in Germany after suffering with the insurgency. It backfired. As I mentioned earlier, in the case of Iraq, many of the terrorists were preventing many neutrals from leaving the town. Had we gone in and leveled the town, as you say we should have done, we would have given the terrorists a perfect propaganda story to rally their troops and make us look bad.
prettyinchains: We are not in a boxing match with Maquis of Queensburt rules we are, now in a dual to the death, but W has forgotten that. Iraqi served it's purpose, it got him a second term.
George Bush and those that support the Iraq War are the ones that perfectly understand that we are in a duel for death. But we have to carry out this duel in the way the ground commanders in Iraq see fit.
The Iraq war was not something to give Bush a second term. One of its purposes was to remove a threat. Now it is serving another purpose - being turned into what will be a catalyst for change in the Middle East.
prettyinchains: Take a page from Sunzi's Art of War. It applies to the middle eastern culture. You have to kill your enemy, his family, his friends, the people he owes money to and those who owe him money.
I would rather take a lesson learned by the allies during their occupation of Germany. The initial reaction that the allies had to the German insurgency was very similar to what you are advocating here. There was one slight problem with doing so. These tactics BACKFIRED! It worked in favor of the SS Werewolf. The allies quickly abandoned that technique.
Lets go to the Iraq case. The person that owes the terrorist some money may not like that terrorist. You deliberately kill that person, you give the terrorist - who is not getting his money - the perfect propaganda opportunity. We start killing people indiscriminately, as you suggest here, terrorists will be fighting our troops instead of each other. They will have an additional propaganda tool on top of that.
Given the progress that the Iraqi military and police forces have made, and given the increasing cooperation that we are getting from the Iraqi people, killing the enemy’s family, friends, people that own him money, etc would
amount to our shooting ourselves in the foot. It took a while for us to get to this level of cooperation. Doing what you suggest would put us into square one.
prettyinchains: Because if you kill the man you make enemies of the rest. W made enemies of a billion people, now we have to live with the results.
And if we killed the rest that we have allegedly made enemies with, Iraqis that are not involved would be feed propaganda after propaganda of “crusaders” murdering innocent Arabs.
I would rather we have our enemies fighting each other, as they are doing right now, than have them fight us because we killed innocent people.
For your theory to work, people would have to be giving us scanty to no cooperation. But according to the coalition, cooperation from the Iraqi population is not only getting better - the information they are giving us is getting more accurate. This is something that would not happen if we were “making enemies out of the rest”.
prettyinchains: We should have attacked Canada, they are our largest supplier of oil, then swept south and taken Mexico and worked our way down to Tierra Del Fuego and let the rest of the world rot. Hell we could have bought Russia to boot.
Don’t need to. Both Canada and Mexico are coupling their economies with ours. Our economies are integrating today. That will be followed by political integration. CAFTA has extended that to Central America and FTAA will extend that to the rest of the Hemisphere. By the end of this century, Pan America will be one giant hyper nation.
Letting the rest of the world to rot is precisely what we should not be doing, especially in cases where an environment breeds people that have no problems with slamming aircraft into buildings, or carrying out combo homicide and suicide attacks.
Stabilizing the Middle East and making it economically competitive with the rest of the world will do two things: (1) Get rid of the environment that encourages people to commit homicide and suicide at once and (2) East global economic and political integration.
prettyinchains: Just a random thought, we are all worried about suicide bombers, perhaps we need to hold auditions in the local nut houses and recruit some of our own. How would the terriorists react to being terrorized?
Global War on terrorism using, um, homicide bombers. Nope. But we don’t need to do that. The terrorists in Iraq are already fighting each other. They consistently shoot themselves in the foot when they attack innocent Iraqi bystanders. It seems that the more desperate they become, the more mistakes they make that work in our favor.
prettyinchains: Quite bitching about who is at fault or to blame, W, Clinton, Daddy Bush or even Ronnie.
I am all for doing that and concentrating on why the Iraq front of the global war on terrorism had to be opened. However, as long as people are going to lambaste President Bush, I am going to quickly point out the incompetence of his predecessor when it came to security issues.
prettyinchains: Western civilization has pissed upon the heads of the arabs for hundreds of years and we are surprised that they are a bit pissed off??????? (Statement made, 24/25 May 06)
quote:
ORIGINAL: Osama Bin Laden (Statement made, 2004)
As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:
(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.
a) You attacked us in Palestine:
(i) Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation. The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its*price, and pay for it heavily.
Osama Bin Laden risks capture whenever he pokes his head out and does things like this. Whenever he makes an audio, or video, he has to go through great pains to make detecting his whereabouts virtually impossible.
That being said, here is the real deal.
We are referred to as “crusaders” by the radicals who we are %!+c# smacking around over there, never mind that the United States did not exist during the time of the crusades.
9/11 was payback for perceived western “wrong doings” since the Medieval Period. Our stopping their advance into Europe? Seen as an insult by today’s Islamic terrorist’s and their ilk. The Reconquista where the Christians push the Moors out of Spain? Seen as our pissing on Arab head if you were to see things from the terrorist’s eyes. Our shoving our foot up the behinds of the Barbary States during the Barbary Wars during the first part of the 19th Century? 9/11 was payback for that to.
prettyinchains: If it hadn't been for 9/11 W would have been a one trick pony, like Daddy.
Negative. The conservatives rallied their base, he still would have won re-election. The 2000 election gave the conservatives plenty of warning. We were not going to have another close one, we were going for a wide margin.
Keep in mind that Iraq proved to be a thorn on Bush’s side throughout the election. Remember the barrage that he got because of the daily casualties? The criminally liberal media were aiming for the jugular. They saw Iraq as the kink in Bush’s armor, and they exploited it to the hilt.
On the other side of the coin were the improving economic numbers, with numbers that were already making Clinton’s economic recovery (which, by the way, began before he took office) look pale. Without 9/11, and with the economic recovery to run on, the Republicans would have had a better campaign environment. 2004 economic numbers were starting to look like those in 1996. (Remember, it’s the economy “stupid”, never mind that the economy started to recover long before Clinton took office) The Republicans would have played that up. Had the Democrats try to downplay the economy, the Republicans would have hung them with their own 1996 words.
Without 9/11, George Bush would still have won. He had a game plan, and it involved using the media and liberal’s hatred against them. Unlike his dad, he appealed to the conservative base better. It didn’t help that none of the Democratic hopefuls appealed to the majority.
prettyinchains: As I said I just borrowed this persona to post here, My views do not reflect pretty's views.
If you were the one that made this post using another’s persona, it goes without saying that the views that you expressed here are YOURS, and not those of your little girl.
< Message edited by herfacechair -- 5/31/2006 6:05:57 PM >
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RE: Incompetent administration, criminal war? - 
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