This country fought one of the longest and, ultimately, most
successful guerilla wars in history. It was fought with varying
degrees of intensity from the 1600s into the late 1800s. We tend to
mostly think about and enjoy the entertainment from the mid-to
late-1880s portion though. Of course I am discussing thge Indian Wars.
I seem to remember some collateral damage to civilian populations on
both sides. We figured out how to fight that within our own boarders,
but seem incapable of applying the lessons learned to similar
situations. Mostly because we are no longer accepting of the fact that
these are long term wars of attrition and that they can't be
completely by the Marquis of Queensbury rules.

Dave Hall

On 24 Aug 2006 08:06:51 -0700, wrote:


Dave Bugg wrote:

wrote:
Dave Bugg wrote:
wrote:

I still disagree. There is a difference between being assigned to
Iraq,
and asking to be assigned to Iraq, whether you recognize it or not.

What in the heck is your difficulty in comprehension? You join the military
knowing that you are there to accomplish its mission. Your job description
calls for deployment on demand. Soldiers that volunteer for the military
know that they are volunteering for whatever job the mission calls for,
including deployments. I suppose that you'd say a cabinet shop employee
didn't voluntarily agree to handle wood on the job.

I comprehend that there is a difference between enlisting,
knowing that one might be deployed, and volunteering for
a specific deployment.

Similarly, a cabinet shop employee, at the time he was hired,
did not volunteer for any specific task.

I'm quite sure that you comprehend the differrence as well.

Whereas also it is cowardly and stupid to ignore the effectiveness
of the tactic.
Ignoring? No one is ignoring it. That fact is demonstrated by America by the
restraint of its military power in its tactics in Iraq, and that Israel held
back the mass of its military might during Lebanon.

[1]
How is that different from the way we would act toward the civilian
population if the enemy did not hide among them?

What... are you really serious? The distinction is the application of
overwhelming and unremmiting firepower on the enemy that doesn't hide in
civilian populations. If we ignored that distinction, Bagdad or Beirut would
have been flattened piles of rubble with no doubt about the existence of the
enemy.

Huh? I asked: "How is that different from the way we would
act toward the civilian population if the enemy did not hide
among them? "

The enemy hides among the civilians and we have not flattened
Bahgdad. If the enemy did not hide among the civilians, we
still would not have flattened Bahgdad, right? You haven't
indicated that we would treat the civilians differently--you
ignored the question entirely.


Yet you called the reasons the enemy adopted those tactics
_irrelevent_.

I said the reasons were self evident.

In:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.w...3?dmode=source
You wrote:

"The reasons they use such tactics is self-evident and irrelevant. You
are
correct about the fact that it points to a fundamental difference in
morality 'tween us and them. "

We agree that they are self-evidend, though we may not agree on
why they use those tactics. We do NOT agree that their reasons
irrelevent, unless you have changed your mind since you wrote
that those reasons were irrelevent.

We still agree on the fundamental moral difference. That is also
why you and I can have a public debate, instead of shooting
at each other.


That sounds awfully inconsistent with 'not ignoring' the reasons
the enemy adopted those tactics.

To you, not to me.

After we've lost, our change in tactics will not matter.

Who says we're going to lose?

I say we lose Iraq if we stay the course. It is far from clear that
we could have imposed Democracy on Iraq, even without the
terrible mis (or mal?) management of the occupation.


Your first answer was to call the reasons 'irrelevent'. Now it would
appear you've changed your mind on the issue of relevence and
so now you say, "No, we don't ignore them." You haven't suggested
anything that has actually been done about it.

And you are talking in circles. I already stated that what has been done is
to restrain our military impact on the civilian population where the
terrorist are hiding.

I quite agree that we act with retraint. The guerillas take
advantage of that restraint to survive.


Mind you, IMHO the only way to defeat a guerilla enemy is
to withdraw while the guerillas are still too weak to take control.

These are not guerillas, these are terrorists. And these terrorists are not
"too weak to take control" because they are the forward guard to Iran's
attempting to assume control.

Some of the guerillas are sponsored by Iran, many are not.
Unlike Viet Nam, the enemy in Iraq does not have a single
central authority. That vastly complicates the situation as
there is no more an effective way to engage them diplomatically
than there is to engage them militarily. The Feyadeen Saddam,
the Sadr militia, and Al Queda in Iraq to name but three,
have different and incompatible agendas.

[1] While it is good practice to judiciously edit quoted text when
replying it is also customary to insert a placeholder such as
[snip] or an elipsis "...". I usually do, my apologies if I have
been inconsistent in this. I note that you do not, and that has
the effect, sometimes of misrepresenting (e.g. "twisting") my
words. That's why I put some of the preceding text back
in, lest it appear that you were responding to something I had
not written. This may cause problems in some newsreaders
that misinterpret plain text as formatting instructions.