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Send a few advisors, then more.
Then troops, then more troops duke to being totally dogged down and losing .
Then many many more troops so earlier debacle will not seem so stupid to have sent.

Then enormous numbers of troops bogged down and slaughtered. Have to not lose face because original plan was so wrong.

Then withdraw in disgrace and let original Arab civil war go on as before. Hope the Chicoms fall for the Viet effect. They deserve it.

[Send a few advisors, then more.
Then troops, then more troops duke to being totally dogged down and losing .
Then many many more troops so earlier debacle will not seem so stupid to have sent.

Then enormous numbers of troops bogged down and slaughtered. Have to not lose face because original plan was so wrong.

Then withdraw in disgrace and let original Arab civil war go on as before. Hope the Chicoms fall for the Viet effect. They deserve it.]

If they get involved, I don’t think they’ll lose. But their rules of engagement will be pretty draconian. During their month-long incursion into Vietnam, they are estimated to have killed 100K civilians. For some perspective, during entire Holocaust, the Germans killed 12m civilians. That’s a run rate of about 250K people per month. The Chinese weren’t far behind. Now, the difference is the Chinese weren’t actually looking to exterminate Vietnamese civilians as some kind of ideological imperative. But their view of guerrilla warfare is the medieval view. Ambushes by men in civilian clothing means open season on the entire civilian population. Think Lidice, where over a thousand Czech civilians were slaughtered in reprisal for the death of Reinhard Heydrich. Killing civilians is easy. Genghis Khan slaughtered millions with armies typically numbering in the tens of thousands. Medieval rules are why guerrilla warfare was uncommon in antiquity - the consequences to civilians were severe, widespread and final.
http://www.historynet.com/war-of-the-dragons-the-sino-vietnamese-war-1979.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre

The question might be how they will control the information flow over these large-scale killings. I expect the same way they did over the Vietnam incursion, by killing journalists on sight.

There’s this idea that communists did not have to deal with counter-revolution after their victories because they were pure of heart or some such. In reality, they conducted large-scale mass killings of opponents and potential opponents in order to scare the rest of the population into submission. 4.5m civilians were summarily executed in the course of the Communist purge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_of_landlords_under_Mao_Zedong