Posted on 06/07/2003 8:53:51 AM PDT by Seti 1
BTW, the Brits tried restructering Iraq from 1918 to the 1940's. They even fought a mini war as late as 1941. It didn't seem to do much good then either.
BTW, the Brits and the French tried restructering Germany from 1918 to 1935 when Hitler renounced the Versailles Treaty. It didn't seem to do much good then.
Maybe, in 1945, the U.S. should have learned from the failed British attempt, simply accepted that German retructering and denazification was impossible and simply made plans to have a German war in 1966, 1987, 2008 and every other 21 years after that.
BTW, how many American lives would you be willing to lose for Iraqi "nation building"? Be honest and give a straight answer.
So, the way to handle a few hundred or a few thousand Baathist holdouts is to "nuke" 2,242,000 Iraqis in Baghdad?
The last time I looked, the Russians and the Chinese were on the Iraqi side. After you uncork the "nuke" genie, how are you going to deal with the Nuclear Club friends of America's enemies, Red China and Russia, after they get together and "nuke", say, Israel or Taiwan or South Korea just to show the world that the U.S. is not the only power that can go around the Globe "nuking" a defacto ally of another Nuclear Club member?
BTW, how many American lives would you be willing to lose for Iraqi "nation building"? Be honest and give a straight answer.
That question is along the lines of "How many Americans are you willing to lose for the sake of a jungle island named Gudalcanal, an atoll in the middle of nowhere named Tarawa or a hedgerow in some decrepid French farm in Normandy?"
Such questions completely ignore the strategic importance of eliminating the regimes that support the anti-American terrorism that killed over 3,000 Americans on 11 September.
If your only solutions to eliminating such regimes are wholesale genocide of an entire country, uncorking the genie of nuclear warfare when countries such as Russia and China can devastate our own country with nuclear weapons or pursuing the Clinton policy of doing nothing, then, you have absolutely no solutions at all.
How many American lives would you be willing to lose to terrorism and their sponsor states by adopting the policy of making empty threats about "nuking" combined with the Clinton policy of doing absolutely nothing of any strategic consequence?
Some fights are necessary and some are not. You just don't jump into every and any fight. Our troops should not be used for nation building. That is not their mission. Let somebody else handle that.
Neither do you threaten everyone. Far better to act decisively but judiciously. I favor quick surgical strikes followed by a quick withdrawal. Occupying as much as possible is stupid since you can't defend everything. I also favor covert action teams taking out as many as the terrorists as possible but any policy which angers peasants is simply counterproductive.
We can occupy the whole world but would that guarantee victory over terrorism?. I doubt it and the more you occupy, you increase the number of potential targets. In fact that is what Osama and his thugs hope for. That is the conundrum.
The Wahhabis are the real problem in regard to world terrorism. Occupying the beasts in Iraq is another, and nobody has even been able to hold all those factions down and quiet without using brute force. The "quagmire" is the occupation of Iraq, and our poor soldiers have to put up with those idiots.
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