Posted on 04/24/2002 1:18:49 PM PDT by JasonC
These belief beggering horrors were calculated precisely to cause extreme over reaction by the security forces and fast-forward the process of splitting and radicalizing both sides, leading to the total destruction of "the middle", and finally to the possibility of a "military solution" for the terrorists.
This is the same game Arafat has been playing for 40 years.
Incidentally, I'm currently reading AJP Taylor's The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1814. Do you know it?
I would slightly change the moral, though. It is not that terror trumps all else, as though whoever resorts to it more ruthlessly wins. The conflict between guerilla terrorists and the authorities is not a symmetric one. Terrorism tends to set off a immoral "race to the bottom" on both sides, which hurts the authorities while helping the guerillas.
That is probably what you meant. But it is important to distinguish that from "terror is trump", because it is too easy to read the latter as encouraging or requiring excesses by the authorities that play into the hands of guerillas. Not to mention the mistakes of the OAS, which believed it so literally, they thought white terrorism would save French Algeria. Which was insane, politically naive, and failed miserably.
Such wars are harder for the authorities than for the guerillas, above all *morally* harder. Which also means harder politically, to keep one's side united. On the other hand, it is often overlooked how much harder they can be for the guerillas *militarily*. The FLN lost something like half a million men in their war against the French. The NVA lost a million plus. Losses to the conventional militaries of the French and the US were 25-30 times smaller.
Properly aimed (by good intel, and with moral restraint), superior conventional military power can make a big difference. The guerillas do not always win, either. The British showed in Burma that such tactics could be militarily defeated, when a viable political end-state was the goal. If the strategy is not understood, however, and events just drift, the Algerian history shows were things end up.
But certainly, half the idea was to force military actions that would divide political support here, then play them up to the useful idiot crowd. That part you can indeed say "worked". Then again, it didn't exactly elect George McGovern. Notice also that it was hardly our domestic useful idiots who had lost their security. In Algeria, the last to give up were the Harkis, and in South Vietnam, the last to give up were the ARVN.
Moral - let's not call too loud on "inevitability" to cloak our own failings.
All of which goes to underscore the vital importance of Moral Clarity, I believe. Caps intentional.
Keep in mind that in Viet Nam by 68-69 we were wiping out the VC cadres and infrastructure in the South using the Phoenix program. This was JasonC's "well aimed" counter terrorism done very well. Between the Phoenix Program and the losses in Tet 68 the VC were on their backs: those losses had to be made up by sending vastly more NVA down the HCM Trail.
This movement of NVA was not interdicted for political not military reasons. Even after US main battle force departure and Vietnamization the war was at best a stalemate, and the North finally won with a conventional invasion only after the US Congress cut off military assistance to the RVN in 73-74, largely as a swipe at Nixon post Watergate.
In terms of Algeria, El Salvador and other cases where there is no HCM Trail and no NVA to send into the war, it is possible to wipe out the terrorist leadership and cadres with tightly focused well aimed "Phoenix Program" type operations without blowing up so many civilians that they are alienated and driven into the terrorist camp. We were doing it well in the RVN, and we did it in El Salvador, a clear victory for our side. We will have to do it on a large scale now in Afghanistan.
The unreported war will be the critical part of it, the "Phoenix" war.
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
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At the end there were two North Vietnamese thrusts, one from the NE with a very concentrated formation of communist troops, and a thrust from the north with Soviet armor. About five napalm bombs in the NE would have destroyed about 1/3 of the northern army. However, by that time Jane Fonda, Ted Kennedy, Berkeley radicals, Joan Baez, leftist journalists, and followers of George McGovern were were in control of our military policy.
Which suggests that care must be taken to insure that it stays unreported.
Personally, I don't trust the U.S. media to understand what will be happening in this sphere. It's not necessarily a "bias thing"; it's an "ignorance thing".
Got Rope?
Time to disinter this valuable thread.
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