How Tech Almost Lost the War 679
An anonymous reader writes "Blame the geeks for the mess in Iraq? Wired says so. Networked troops were supposed to be so efficient, it'd take just a few of 'em to wipe out their enemies. But the Pentagon got their network theory all wrong, with too few nodes and a closed architecture. Besides, a more efficient killing machine is the last thing you want in an insurgency like Iraq."
Blame the Geeks? (Score:4, Insightful)
More like blame the generals who shot spreadsheet "simulations" back and forth instead of large scale wargames to shake-out the technology. The networked battlefield went out untested with an expectation that it would work as promised. Which is a really dumb assumption for military hardware.
'Scuse me? If you've got insurgents setting up an ambush, blasting the frak out of them sounds like a good solution to me. Fire a DU round from a tank down the road, all the IEDs go "boom" and the insurgents waiting on the side go "slwooop" as the massive air pressure changes suck them inside out.
Efficient killing machine == Good when there are bad guys trying to kill you.
One might argue that the insurgents are not terrorists and are thus not our enemy. A reasonable argument, save for one missing piece of logic. If the insurgents would wait we'd already be out of Iraq and they could be dealing with the local, underpowered government. Instead, they decide to take on the most powerful military in the world. Even on our bad days, that's not such a good idea.
Catch-22 (Score:3, Insightful)
So tech is bad because it didn't work and so the troops weren't efficient killing machines...
But tech is bad because we don't want the troops to be efficient killing machines.
Is that about the gist of it?
Tech didn't lose the war (Score:5, Insightful)
Or we could blame pre-emption (Score:5, Insightful)
Blame the geeks for the mess in Iraq
How about we blame Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the other "Hawks" for single-mindedly pushing a US foreign policy doctrine of preemption, which led to a war based on falsified "evidence" of a laughable "threat" to the US?
Networked troops were supposed to be so efficient, it'd take just a few of 'em to wipe out their enemies.
We did beat the "enemy"; only Saddam's core Republican Guard put up any sort of fight. The major fuck-up in the initial "war" was Rumsfeld repeatedly cutting supply lines and over-extending troops.
Then we failed to fill the power vacuum in a country with a history of sectarian violence even under a brutal dictator. Worse, we failed to keep the power, lights, and water going which left the door open for opportunists. Iraq fell head-first into a sectarian civil war, with both sides, most of the world, and half of the United States population agreeing on one thing: we need to get the fuck out of their country.
It's hard to "wipe out" your enemy when every day you create more just by your mere meddling presence. It's like standing in a bathtub holding a garden hose, wondering why the water's rising.
Sure, blame the geeks... (Score:4, Insightful)
When all you have is a screwdriver (Score:3, Insightful)
Diplomacy FTW. Literally.
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look! A three-headed monkey! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:5, Insightful)
#2 - "A more efficient killing machine" in modern military parlance is a machine that strikes more of the right targets and fewer of the wrong targets. We already have the military might to simply wipe Iraq off the map. That would solve the problem, real quick. But it's not the goal. Ergo, more efficient killing machine == good.
What to Blame (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't call these people we are fighting terrorists when WE are the foreign troops on their home soil occupying their country. The only justification Bush hasn't abandoned for this war (WMD was a criminal fraud, ousting Saddam already happened), the ludicrous idea that fighting the enemy "over there" makes us safer at home is so mind numbingly flawed at the most basic level that even a C student should be able to see there can be no victory the way the war is being prosecuted. The terrorists who would "follow us home" are doing so anyway, Iraq is diverting precious man power and resources away from stopping them. They are probably already here in fact. The 9/11 hijackers lived in the country for an extended amount of time before they carried out their attacks. Every dollar we spend on Bush's crusade is a dollar that could have went to pay more police officers, increase border security, inspect more cargo. The current plan we're on to get out of this hole is to keep digging until we get to the other side when the first thing you should do when you find yourself in a hole is STOP making it deeper! Violence, even when justified, against religious extremists only begets more violence. It's such an un-American concept to accept, there's no pride in it, no feeling of success but the only way to win is not to continue fighting. Every insurgent you kill insures his sons will be your next generation of enemies. There is a point, and we have long passed it, when someone strong has to stand up and say "Enough." accept the consequences to their reputation, and walk away.
This is a very trying time for the USA, and I fear that we will not long survive the ruinous path we are currently following. Our leader, and calling him that brings me an almost physical pain, will not change our path. He is too stubborn to admit defeat, even if that means dragging an entire country down with him. History will count him among the worst of our Presidents.
Re:Actually.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:2, Insightful)
Source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2007-09-26-insurgents_N.htm [usatoday.com]
Source: http://icasualties.org/oif/US_chart.aspx [icasualties.org]
As I said, even on a bad day, attacking the most powerful military in the world is a dumb idea.
Re:Or we could blame pre-emption (Score:5, Insightful)
However, in the the void of a government of Iraq, and undefended borders, you get the rise of insurgents. Military solutions don't really work there. You need diplomatic solutions to convince the local political and religious leaders to stop insurgents, fundamentalists, and terrorists. You need to convince them via ideology to lay down weapons and rebuild their homes.
It has taken 3 years to hunt down a couple thousand insurgents, and how many more are waiting in the wings, waiting to die in the name of their beliefs? We're not just talking about from the possible pool of 30 million Iraqis, but the entire Mid East. (Note, I'm not saying all Arabs are fundamentalist, but rather we're fighting insurgents from several nations right now. Fundamentalists are almost always a minority in any group, but often the most visible).
We can't fight this war forever, and that isn't the fault of the military or technology, but rather the fault of diplomats and politicians to not finish what they started, and I'm not pointing my finger at any one party. Both parties voted to go in, both parties continue to fund this, and both parties blame the other party as a means to make their party look better, while neither party are presenting solutions to actually finish the conflict. That is a travesty that no one speaks of.
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe we could stop killing them.
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Iraqi insurgents don't look so dumb when the US will have had to spend upwards of $1 Trillion to kill those 20,000. That's $50 million per dead insurgent.
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:5, Insightful)
--jeffk++
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:5, Insightful)
The basic problem is that the problem is not the insurgency-- it is the lack of law and order in Iraq. The insurgency is one manifestation of that, but the lack of law and order allowed them to grow and consolidate from a few hundred tiny groups to several larger networks (see the International Crisis Group's works on the insurgency). We are in a situation in Iraq where the US military is very good at killing people but not very good at fighting the insurgency because we can't do what we need to in terms of controlling the situation on the ground.
You don't want a smaller number of more deadly soldiers. You need a larger number of policemen. We can't do it and we don't train our army to do it. So yes, one has to blame the generals.
However, the issue from the IEEE article was that the insurgent groups are able to use methods that look an similar to those found in the open source community to adapt their tactics much faster than the US military can (the US military is at least an order of magnitude slower in this regard due to standardization, procurement practices, etc). By the time new tactics are underway, the insurgent groups quickly adapt and those tactics are less useful.
The second issue is that for every expensive weapon, there is a cheap and easily available countermeasure. Note that HARM's aren't used much since Kosovo because it is now common knowledge that there are sub-$100 countermeasures using commercial off-the-shelf parts for them (cheap microwave ovens have the same RF as the anti-aircraft radar and HARMS cannot distinguish between them). The Serbians may have lost but I wonder how much damage they caused US military R&D with that one.... Smart bombs also could be conceivably confused using inexpensive jamming devices. In the end, unless you are willing to commit the people to the ground
In short, I personally do not believe that the war in Iraq is winnable under the conditions that W has set out. We will lose that one unless we can make some very difficult choices before the patience of the American people wears out.
In short one needs lots of police on the ground relying less on military weapons technology. We need to stop using American mercenaries (like Blackwater) because they have an inherent conflict of interest. And we need to be willing to withhold our support for the Iraqi government if certain basic measures are not met. These things are not going to happen so we are not going to win.
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:4, Insightful)
Add in the fact that the politicians in DC decided they could run the war better than the generals, and a lot of the setbacks were easily avoided. When you go to war, RELEASE the dogs of war.
Patton had it right - the object of war is not to die for your country, but to make sure the other bastard dies for his.
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Tech didn't lose the war (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Or we could blame pre-emption (Score:5, Insightful)
There was another *huge* problem with the Bush Administration's single-minded push for war in Iraq-- basically it left our interests vulnerable to interference from third parties. I don't know if you saw this but shortly before the invasion (in fact, right when the AUMF was being debated in the Senate), there was a water-rights crisis between Lebannon and Israel. Lebannon calculated (rightly) that the US could not afford for Israel to attack and opened up a new large pumping station. Israel was threatening war (Sharon was stating that it was a cause for war and that it was no different from the 1967 war which he categorized as about water rights). The US sent a mediation team in really fast.... In the end an agreement was reached (largely under US pressure) which allowed Lebannon far more water rights than they had previously exercised.
Now we are in a position where we are tied up. Our troops are generally needed either at home for emergency management, in Iraq or Afghanistan, or in half a dozen places around the world defending US interests against military threats. We don't have the capacity for another war on this scale without abandoning vital allies somewhere in the world. If we were attacked by, say, Iran, would we respond even if it meant being unable to defend South Korea or Taiwan? Iran and Syria know this, which is why their interests at the moment are best served by keeping us tied up in Iraq and not attacking us in other ways (we can't do anything serious against them using conventional warfare unless we either are freed up in Afghanistan or Iraq, or we are willing to potentially abandon allies. Nuclear options are out unless we are attacked first with nuclear weapons).
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be more cost-effective to buy an apartment for every family in Iraq.
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:5, Insightful)
As for your ridiculous bravado about our military, wake up. It's being stretched so thin that we can't even take care of our own citizens in case of a natural disaster because all the National Guard units are gone. If the Iraqi insurgents were World War II Germany, then yeah, we'd be suited to fighting them. But our military is simply not geared toward urban warfare. Our troops simply don't have that kind of training. They went in without knowing dick about local customs, and we fired Arabic translators because they were gay and that's icky. We'd be better off dropping the NYPD or LAPD in there. Cops are trained to get to know neighborhoods, learn who to make friends with and whose arms to twist. Soldiers, in the classical sense, aren't.
It's amazing to me how this maladministration constantly crows about how this is a "different kind of war", but they want to fight it like it's World War II, only not, but kind of. They declare "war" on the tactic of terror (without any Congressional votes), and then they refuse to provide a list of goals that we have to achieve. (And no, "eliminating terrorism" isn't a goal; it's a pipe dream.) So we declare war on terror, and then the president says, "We're at war! I need to expand the executive branch's power and make government waaaaaaaay the fuck bigger!" So what city do we have to capture for the war on terror to be over and for the executive branch to return to its proper size and scope in the government? Who has to surrender? Funny, there are no answers to either of those questions. It's a perpetual war, meant to expand the powers of the presidency beyond any sane interpretations of the Constitution.
Meanwhile, while all this bullshit is going on, you sit there are cheerlead this insane, utterly incomprehensible state of affairs. Yeah yeah, you love the troops, whatever. Someone who supports the troops wouldn't send them to die for nothing in that fucked up sandpit. This administration is a disgrace to the military. They love to talk about how much they support them and what a great job they're doing, but at the end of the day, the army is an instrument which they use to further their own political ends. And the saddest part is that the military laps it up because they get lip-service. Servicemen and women will still vote for these assholes time and time again, and they die for nothing for their trouble. It's a god damn tragedy.
Okay, rant over.
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:3, Insightful)
What do you believe, a politicians words or the 100 billion dollar permanent bases they are building ? Bases in Iraq are about the only strategic reason for the war that makes any sense, even though it's an evil reason that in the long run probably cannot work.
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:3, Insightful)
Iraqi tribal leaders turning on Al Qaeda, assisting the coalition [nysun.com]
Maysan province [100webcustomers.com] and Karbala province [dailylobo.com] turned over to Iraq. In fact we've turned over 8 of the 18 provinces to Iraqi control. Baghdad is at a 21 month low in terms of rocket and mortar attacks [syracuse.com].
I know it doesn't fit the Left's view of "QUAGMIRE!", but guess what? The surge worked VERY well, Iraq is stabilizing, they are taking control of their own country, we are withdrawing, and in general the populace - via the tribal and local leaders - are supporting the coalition because they rat out the Al Qaeda and insurgent cells.
Maybe, just maybe, we are actually winning? No, can't be that would mean that the Bush Administration finally did something right and we all know that Bush=Hitler and can never do right...
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:3, Insightful)
You have to remember that there are anywhere from 0.5 to 1.3 million dead Iraqi civilians.
From this alone, the only rational conclusion of any humane person is that the aftermath of the invasion has been an unmitigated tragedy and disaster.
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:1, Insightful)
Why should they stop shooting at you once you've reached an arbitary point?
Sounds like children arguing 'But mum he started it'
Re:An enlisted perspective. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Iraq is that we think that we can enforce democracy on a country that simply isn't interested in it. My apologies to any civilized Muslims that read this blog, but Southeast Asia Shiite and Sunni sects that dominate Iraq are not interested in allowing people to have an influence in the government. They desire and will ensure that they have full domination over the population. The truth is the population is just fine with that. They are very dedicated to their tribes and will do whatever their respective Sheik tells them to do. I personally think that if you want to solve the problem in Iraq you should allow whatever form of government that works best develop from the ground up. Stop trying to impose democracy. I don't know of any government that has successfully imposed democracy on another country. Democracy will either develop over time from the inside out or it will not develop at all.
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:3, Insightful)
However, bragging about Baghdad violence being at a 21 month low is, well, setting the bar PRETTY GODDAMNED LOW, isn't it? I mean, it certainly wasn't all kittens and roses 21 months ago, was it?
I hope, for once, that Bush and his advisors get something right and things start getting Good over there (as opposed to "Not as bad as it could be"), but so far, they haven't done much to give me faith.
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:An enlisted perspective. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:1, Insightful)
I think they are doing a pretty good job at taking on the world's most powerful military; are you happy to help pay 100 million dollars per Iraqi death? Especially for a lost cause? Tribalism along religious lines is axiomatic to that population. Rule of Law and Democracy are completely alien concepts that they will never understand, thus once Saddam was gone, the sects started going tribal on each other.
Want to try spreading Democracy to China? The belief in the powerbase of the government, again is so axiomatic to the Chinese mindset; trying to shove Democracy down their throats won't do a bit of good.
Re:Efficient does not imply prolific... (Score:3, Insightful)
Technically, killing the enemy isn't a goal - defeating him is. Of course this reduces to killing in many cases, but by no means even nearly all. In the Desert Storm era, and the early stages of this war there was a lot of quite satisfactory victory by mass surrender, and in general, the whole area of Psy-ops is about bloodless victories.
If the military internally has a problem, it's that third tier or lower goals such as reducing events with negative propaganda potential can end up pretty far down the checklist for some commanders and very high for others. (Whatever you think of the morality of torture, allowing the prison abuses was operationally stupid in that it was a result of rating propaganda potential way too low, while giving a blanket order never to stop and search any Mullah, for example, would be putting it too high.). First tier goals such as winning battles, and second tier such as conserving material and avoiding unnecessary damage to civilians, infrastructure, and culture, usually get dealt with pretty darned well.
There are a high percentage of civilian overseers who don't get the idea that efficiency is a measure of overall success by at least a dozen criteria and often more, and think it's reducible to a simple measure of bodycounts. I rate the percentages of congresscritters and DOD staffers who are totally clueless here much higher than the percentage of incompetent field commanders, based on face to face meetings with some substantial numbers of all sorts during both the Bush 1 and Clinton administrations, and judging by public remarks I have seen for Rumsfeld, Rice, and others since I got out, it's gotten worse.
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:4, Insightful)
Total cost: $500,000,000,000 dollars and counting. Half a trillion dollars.
> As I said, even on a bad day, attacking the most powerful military in the world is a dumb idea.
If the most powerful military in the world is paying twenty-five million dollars a kill, and you have a million footsoldiers (assuming 99.9% the planet's billion-odd muslims are OK, and we're only after the 0.1% that are batshit crazy), it's not a dumb idea -- it's a tactic that's been proven successful on the battlefield, because it's the same way they beat the Soviets.
The fucking dumb idea is that we didn't learn the Soviets' lesson, even though we helped them invent asymmetrical warfare.
Netcentric warfare is a great way to break things and kill people on the cheap. It's a crappy way to win hearts and minds. When we started this little adventure, it was the right tactic, because we believed in good faith that their hearts and minds didn't need changing. We were wrong; they're not a bunch of repressed people looking for freedom, they're a bunch of fucking tribal shitheels. Half a trillion dollars later, it's time for us to either shit or get off the pot. Either abandon the place and let 'em go back to butchering each other (and we'll buy the oil from whichever side wins the civil war), or we just dust off an nuke the site from orbit, because it's the only way to be sure.
Re:When all you have is a screwdriver (Score:2, Insightful)
Diplomacy works most of times, but it's failures are louder.
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:4, Insightful)
We invaded their country. Be glad they can't genuinely "reciprocate."
"They were shooting at us. We shot back"
Yeah, it's funny how people shoot at you when you violently occupy their nation. You'd think they'd be all hugs and kisses.
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of it is, sure, but a lot of it relates to centuries of real injustice. I don't even remember the details (there's too damn many), but the book "Battle For God" by Karen Armstrong details how these groups have, through many massacres and assassinations, gone far beyond the point where either would back down. That kind of retributive behavior is common human nature. In that regard the Iraqis are no more ridiculous than us.
Figuring out how to end a centuries old blood feud is left as an exercise to the reader.
Cheers.
Re:An enlisted perspective. (Score:5, Insightful)
The US/Allies imposed democracy on the Axis powers of Japan, Italy and Germany after WWII. While it can be argued that Italy and Germany had some democratic traditions (however the Weimar Republic was really broken), it was foreign to Japan.
That said, it is pretty hard to come up with many more successful examples...
Don't forget the facts! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Or we could blame pre-emption (Score:3, Insightful)
This does not refute the parent's assertion about the evidence of a threat to the US not being there. Saddam used WMDs in the Iran / Iraq war, and domestically on Kurds, and in both cases, the WMD technology and its delivery systems were little better than those used in the trenches of WW1. As was the case in 1916, these sorts of weapons are localised threats, not international ones, and certainly not intercontinental ones, and as the Sarin attack on the Tokyo metro amply demonstrated, organised terrorist groups who wanted to use such things could easily obtain the equipment, knowledge, and people to make them without Saddam's help.
Re:Or we could blame pre-emption (Score:3, Insightful)
However, in the the void of a government of Iraq, and undefended borders, [...]
Something weird happened between those two sentences. What was it?
Minimizing your own casualties frustrates the aim (Score:3, Insightful)
Their only shortcoming is that they aren't very discriminating about exactly whom they kill. Just as long as US casualties stay low - grotesquely low in terms of the history of armed conflict, although of course any casualties on your own side seem too many. That's a political necessity, when the commander in chief is also the elected president of a democratic state.
Traditionally, war has been "the continuation of diplomacy by other means" (as Carl von Clausewitz neatly observed). That meant exerting pressure on specific people whom you wanted to influence, and - if necessary - killing them and their supporters.
The USA has always been adept at the form of diplomacy that involves choosing partners iin foreign nations who are likely to further US interests, and supporting them by all manner of means. Unfortunately the subtlety of this approach breaks down when "continued" by the modern American way of war, which is basically to break into a territory and kill everyone in sight very quickly. That tends to be counterproductive, because it eventually pisses everyone off. As soon as "Shock and Awe" was mentioned, it was immediately obvious that it was essentially just 21st century Blitzkrieg. And despite all the rubbish about "precision targetting", it is about as selective as Blitzkrieg - in other words, not at all. Everyone within the blast radius dies. And the blast is not necessarily centred on the chosen target, and the chosen target is not necessarily what it is thought to be. Remember the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, or the 30-40 publicly announced bombings of "safe houses" where Saddam Hussein was allegedly hiding in 2003? All those bombs hit and destroyed their targets - although we later learned that Saddam was not in any of them. Want to guess who was?
Minimizing your own casualties, desirable as it is in terms of domestic politics, turns out to be disastrous in terms of foreign politics. War cannot be a continuation of diplomacy if it lacks subtlety and discrimination. Moreover, in the long run it will be disastrous domestically too - when even the US media can no longer suppress the truth about the real damage done to Iraq and its people.
Shifting the blame (Score:1, Insightful)
This war was started and is fueled by American politics. Don't try to shift the blame to the geeks. I and many of my friends are geeks, and none of us are residents of the USA.
Place the blame where it's due: The administration of the USA.
{citation needed} (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:3, Insightful)
That is actually a factually incorrect statement. The correct statement is, "...people shoot at you when you violently invade/overthrow their corrupt government, which they themselves hate, and peacefully occupy their nation." The difference being, had we "violently occupied their nation", as you state, it's very unlikely things where be anywhere near as bad as they are today. This is a point which everyone notes was a huge mistake (among many) and you seem to have forgotten. In fact, it's regarded as the largest mistake of the war.
The second largest mistake was completely disbanding the Iraqi military, which would could have then used to smoothly transition power while they prevented the growth of the cancers which exist there today.
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:5, Insightful)
If all you have is a hammer.... (Score:3, Insightful)
After that, however, and despite the fact that the military is a conveniently well-organized and broadly capable group of trained men and women that can be ordered to do just about anything, we didn't need a massively efficient and effective killing machine. We haven't for years now. IF we insist on the paradigm that it is our responsibility to rebuild any country we knock over, we NEEDED a wise, foresightful, thoughtful, and empathetic administrative POST-confilct authority. We didn't have it. What we got - charitably speaking - was a collection of hastily thrown-together policies based on really nothing but optimism, a lack of any strategic direction cognizant of the political, religious, and tribal realities, as well as ex-pat Iraqi opportunists who saw their chance to nab some power and wealth.
Think of the Army as a supremely well-balanced and perfectly crafted chainsaw - perfect for treecutting. Once you've cut down the forest, and want to try to build a city, is it any wonder if the chainsaw - no matter how wonderful - turns out to be nearly useless for digging wells, building homes, paving streets?
What they have accomplished is more a testament to the versatility, dedication, and skill of the individuals in our armed services who are willing to try to accomplish whatever they are ordered to do.
Re:Actually.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Actually.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, as an Engineer using it now, let me throw a recommendation for GNU Octave. It's basically an open source equivalent to Matlab. (scripts are ~95% compatible between the two, well documented where they aren't) Gotta start getting away from closed source math, especially where science and technology needing peer review are concerned. Windows version is a Cygwin implementation, but they have a standalone installer that makes it transparent to the user. http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ [gnu.org]
I have used Matlab at work for years, recently switched to Octave, and haven't had any problems. That, and there's the free, open source thing. Save the taxpayers a few grand on another Matlab license.
Re:Almost lost the war? (Score:5, Insightful)
America has not lost the war. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Actually.... (Score:4, Insightful)
here's another crazy plan. i'm gonna come to your house with 7 crips. we're going to kill your wife and rape your daughter before shooting her too. then we'll burn down your house and drag you off to prison, where you will remain until we feel like releasing you, hell maybe we'll rape you too. afterwards we'll give you a laptop with msn so some idiot can tell you how wonderful the war is for you and how you should just stop being so angry and see that it was in your best interests. and here's the REALLY crazy part. we'll be fucking *astounded* when it doesn't work and will declare you a muslim fundamentalist for fighting an invading army waging an illegal war.
at the risk of invoking godwin's law (in my defense this is a statement of fact) the very idea of trying to re-educate your victims even as you slaughter them is literally the same attitude nazi germany demonstrated in russia. again, they were SHOCKED that the russians didn't either give up or join them. after all, they didn't have a chance against the mightiest army the world had ever seen, right?
i'm not new here, i've been reading slashdot since 1999 (the first story i read was about the columbine massacre). yet i'm still amazed at how braindead some of the comments are. god help us, some of these people probably work for the department of defence. you just don't get it. you *cannot* win in iraq. maybe you could have, in a five minute window, but not now. you can kill every last iraqi and you'll still lose. i know there are plenty of people who read that last sentence and are thinking 'killing them all isn't losing!' which just reinforces my point that slashdotters just don't get it. war is not a deathmatch. after your inevitable defeat iraqis will have lost lives but gained a national soul, forged by a great victory against terrible odds. your country on the other hand will have lost good men and the last vestige of what made it great. i hope it's worth it.
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:2, Insightful)
(hell I know I'm feeding the troll but this is too good to be true and its been modded Insightful !!!)
When we started this little adventure, it was the right tactic, because we believed in good faith that their hearts and minds didn't need changing. We were wrong; they're not a bunch of repressed people looking for freedom, they're a bunch of fucking tribal shitheels.
Except, it wasn't the right tactics YOU IDIOTS! (that is not to say americans, but those who actually believed in good faith).
The whole world was shouting this truth in your face but you rather believed false intelligence.
Before you study geography and history THEN you go around the world starting wars. NOT the other way around.
Hell I'll repeat that: WE TOLD YOU 5 years ago you would have needed to change hearts and minds to install a true democratic republic THERE. You CAN'T do that with the military alone. Actually you needed the military to get in BUT it's harder harder to do that job after the military gets there.... You didn't want to hear that. You just wanted a little revenge and some flag waving, who cares about the details. We will win the war in 3 months... Mission accomplished... (shame...)
Ok I'll say it one last time. You don't speak with god. Its a damnned delusion. Next time you "believe in good faith" get back to the church in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere and shut up.
Where I live we have a saying: "Roads to hell are paved with good faith".
You know what the sad part is ? I actually agree with most of your analysis. You really are a bunch of chauvinist fanatics so full of shit that even after this mess and a good analysis of what went wrong you still cant's believe you are NOT on a mission for god to win the World to America.....
It simple: you screwed up big time because you had crooks waiting for the big military contracts and a wave of ignorant people that were excited to kick some arab ass. Bin laden has been winning all over the place. Not in iraq. America has a damaged image in the world and is now percieved as an enemy by MILLIONS of people in the arab world. You have weakened your allies in those countries. You are now percieved weak as a military who has been effectively slowed down ALOT on a very small budget. Guess cina feels itself quite free to enlarge its sphere of influence while you are stuck there. And russia is again speaking of projecting power abroad thanks to high gas and oil prices. Europe is actually more threatend now than it was 15 years ago. India went nuclear and you are so desperate to contain china that you bent/violated international treaties just to help them. Nobody in those countries would have ever believd to achieve that in 1998. Great job!
Ok go ahead and set Iraq strait. I hope the surge is the start of this positive trend etc. etc.
How long will it take to clean all that other mess??
I'll repeat that
You really are a bunch of chauvinist fanatics so full of shit that even after this mess and a good analysis of what went wrong you still can't believe you are NOT on a mission for god to win the World to America.....
You LOST this battle! and can only hope to change strategy and win the war.
It was simply your fault.
BindO
Cross posted from WIRED: not a war - invasion (Score:3, Insightful)
Afghanistan is a failure because, contrary to America's deeply held belief, it did not attack us on 9-11-01. The Taliban did not blow up the towers. Al Qaida did, and they booked from Afghanistan in the 30+ days it took for Bush to set up the annihilation of that country. We bombed brown people who kinda looked like Al Qaida and who were living in the same country that the outfit formerly camped in. We killed tens of thousands of people, occupied the place, and not coincidentally made our new puppet government sign the gas pipeline deal the Taliban government refused.
Iraq, well, well. A pack of lies to invade a helpless, non-hostile nation. We killed 100,000 outright and another 900,000 died from the effects of the occupation. Two million are homeless and at least a million of those have fled their own country. Girls are selling themselves in Syria to feed their families bak home. We are being opposed because we are bastards, not because we haven't "social networked" properly. We murdered their country. What would YOU do if someone wiped out three percent of all living Americans and then stole everything not nailed down, then dictated a constitution and installed a puppet government? Would social networking make you feel better after your wife and kids were incinerated?
Re:Blame the Geeks? (Score:3, Insightful)
With surveyed reports, if you asked the ~85 people on my street if they knew anyone who died in the last 6 months, you'd get 85 positive results. ONE of our neighbors passed away about 4 months ago, and everyone knows it. With a survey, you would extrapolate that to 85 deaths, when in fact morgue and hospital/emergency reports would confirm one death.
And regardless of the source of casualties, all are reporting a drastic drop in violence within Iraq. Fundamentally, the surge worked, 45% of Iraq is under direct Iraqi control, terror attacks and suicide bombing (by far the largest source of all deaths) are down dramatically.
Re:Acting Like Democrats (Score:3, Insightful)
I would dispute that libertarians are pro-freedom, but then you have to start mincing over definitions. To bring it back into the nerdy scope that this site specializes in, I would submit that it's analogous to the difference between the GPL and BSD-style licenses. Which is more free? You'll hear lots of heated arguments on both sides, and it boils down to one philosophical difference:
If your system allows an individual the freedom to subjugate the freedoms of another individual, is your system more free or less free?
Libertarianism/objectivism allows just that; an individual or group with enough political or economic power is free to use their power to impugn upon the freedom of others. For instance, WalMart is free to use their economic force to de-facto forbid their employees from bargaining collectively as a union. You, as a libertarian might find that WalMart's freedom to hire and fire as they see fit without limitation is what is required for a free society; others would argue that the right of the workers to freely associate and to bargain collectively is of greater value, i.e. leads to greater overall freedom.
Re:Actually.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Your ignorance is palpable (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:if the only president you have is a tool... (Score:3, Insightful)
The issues aren't that simple when we go from taking cheese from the trap to getting backed into the corner. There is a lot of stuff we simply won't bring to the table. Some of this is Carpet bombing, chemical and biological agents, Nuclear agents and so on. when things start unraveling, and people start backing the rat into the corner, don't be surprised when it come straight for you biting and clawing all the way.
So while I see what your saying, and please forgive my Rat analogies, I think your missing the point that the western world hasn't really gotten fed up with it yet. When it becomes more then swatting at mosquitoes, then they will take heavier actions which should put the fear back into place.