09-20-2006, 02:59 PM
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Member
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Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: The city that NEVER sleeps
Posts: 1,719
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Eric5273
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.
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agree however if we pull out or if we dont kill them they will kill us regardless, if we were to pull out our military from all the areas we have them in now, and were to stop interfering in any world issues then sorry to say the world would fall apart and everyone would kill themselves and we wouldnt be spared either. Not to say that we keep the world together but just like police keep order it seems that we have taken on that role whether voluntarily or not. look at Thailand, we werent there and whoops the country is taken over from a "democracy" to a current marshal rule while the prime minister is in NYC at the UN of all places. Education goes a long way and we dont go and kill civilians purposefully we go for insurgents or whatever you want to call them. the fact that they hide amongst and put in danger the lives of civilians is really no ones fault. if civilians know that they will be killed for harboring these pricks and they still do it then they clearly dont care. the anti-US sentiment will not go down regardless of what we do. sort of like the palestinians will not leave the Israelis alone no matter what they do unless they leave the country and thats an impossible and unlikely scenario and if hypothetically Israelis were to leave then they would find trouble elsewhere just like us here in the US
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