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Originally Posted by BMW X5
and yet unfortunately some yuppy jihadissts pricks seem to be blowing us up any way and you want us to follow the Geneva and UN resolutions
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Well, we have discussed this before. History shows that no war like this has ever been won regardless of whether or not we follow the Geneva convention.
The Israelis have been fighting the Palestineans for decades, the Columbians have been fighting the FARC for decade, and the Russians have been fighting the Chechnyan rebels for over a decade.
Now I'm going to make my "extreme" analogy here:
Even the Nazis were unable to crush the French and Polish resistance movements, and we know they did not follow the Geneva convention. Starting in 1943, they had a policy in France that whenever a Nazi soldier was killed by an attack, then would go into the town where the attack happened, and randomly select 10 men and execute them all. All this did was increase hatred for the Nazis and increase support among the population for the resistance movement. I'm sure the Nazis thought this would scare the population into submission and decrease their supoprt for the rebels. But that thinking was flawed.
The lesson here is that you cannot defeat a resistance movement if that movement has support among the general population. Call them "terrorists" or "insurgents" or whatever other name you like, but right now in both Iraq and Afghanistan, they have support among the population and are able to hide out in civilian areas without being exposed by the locals. That allows them to wage a gorilla war, and as we learned in Vietnam, you cannot win a war if you cannot see the enemy. If you go looking for the enemy in civilian areas, you will upset the civilians and thus increase support for the enemy. If you attempt to kill the enemy, you will kill innocent civilians in the process, and thus increase support for the enemy. And once you give up on those two ideas, there is really no other way to continue fighting the war.
Sorry to say, but the end result in both Iraq and Afghanistan will be that we will eventually have to pull out and let the two new governments fall. That is my prediction. I could be wrong. Only time will tell.