I fear that we are not being violent enough in Iraq and the Middle East generally. I'm a nice guy- really. I'm not particularly violent, certainly not sadistic or cruel. I try to play nice wherever possible.
However, I fear that we have not sufficiently gotten the message through to our enemies that the US is not to be trifled with. Sure, we pretty well walked right through the Taliban and the Baath party machinery.
Thing is, our military was so precise and controlled in getting just the most necessary military targets that a lot of these people haven't figured out that they are beaten. By any objective standard, the US beat the stuffing out of their regimes. However, some of the people are in denial. Epistemology is not a strong suite in Arab culture.
People were as wicked and more in Germany and Japan during WWII. Yet after we beat them, we didn't have guerilla warfare against our soldiers. They changed their tunes right quick like, and were acting like decent civilized countries again in a fairly short order.
Of course, we just goddam destroyed their countries. We firebombed Dresden. Then of course, there was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We devastated them past any point where anyone could trick themselves into thinking they had any choice other than repentance and capitulation.
I have no desire to nuke Baghdad, or anyplace else. However, if we dick around with these Muslim extremists long enough, eventually some of them are going to throw something really nasty at us. If we get 20 or 30 thousand people (or more) killed with poison gas in Atlanta or Kansas City, something on the order of nuclear retaliation will be inevitable.
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— go to most recent comments1 - John
The beatings will continue until morale improves, eh? That will certainly win hearts and minds.
In Germany, the country was occupied by a huge Allied army after WWII, discouraging any further organized reistance - not available to the US in Iraq. In the Russian zone, there was an even more 'robust' approach.
In Japan, the nukes pretty much broke the myth of the invincible Japanese race - in fact, the Japanese army and police were subsequently used by the Alies to manage the country. In Indonesia, Mountbatten used the Japanese Army for months after the end of the war to police the country (the same army that he had been fighting just months before). Crazy old world.
2 - Al Barger
"The beatings will continue until our enemies' morale and will to fight are utterly broken" would be more what I have in mind.
3 - Thomas
"If we get 20 or 30 thousand people (or more) killed with poison gas in Atlanta or Kansas City, something on the order of nuclear retaliation will be inevitable."
Who???
Where???
Please explain.
4 - Al Barger
What exactly is to explain? There are al Qaeda and such types busily trying to get any kind of weapons they can to attack US and/or Israel and/or any Western nation.
Nuclear weapons may be pretty difficult and far out. Chemical or biological weapons would be considerably more likely. Even some relatively simple chemical shit could easily cause a lot more than the 3K deaths of 9/11.
In case you haven't been reading the papers for the last, oh, couple of years, there are people set on trying to kill us. Our task is to dissuade them before they get better at it.
Killing people isn't generally that difficult. It mostly requires the will to do so. They have that. We have to break it.
5 - Eric Olsen
Excellent post Al, and a point that hasn't been made for a while because we are nice people and we are anxious to get "back to normal" as quickly as possible after these things.
The little by little incrementalism allows those in denial to remain so. I hadn't really thought of that in relation to the photos of the fun lovin' boys but maybe it will help get the point across.
6 - Al Barger
Yes Eric, that was exactly my point with the "Any Questions?" post, and why I would favor the harshest photos possible. If desecrating the Hussein corpses gets the message across that we mean business, I'd swing them bodies from the telephone poles and not worry about hurting feelings.
Everybody in the world is welcome to hate our collective guts and denounce us all day long, so long as they know that they don't dare try to kill us.
7 - Nim Chimsky
Now, AlBot, I know how much you hate mike's pal Noam--and let's be clear, I'm not real fond of him myself. After all, he says chimps and other animals can't talk or think and here I am typing away on mike's computer while mike watches that Brady Bunch marathon on cable. (Wow, look at all these Barry Manilow files in his kazaa folder: what kind of a nerd listens to this stuff?)
But really: you need to get a grip on yourself. When we took over Germany, we had incredible numbers of troops and probably even more civilian peacekeepers. There were those, like Morgantheu, who favored a more severe, "kill or be killed" strategy after the war, but they were overuled. The Russians followed the M approach in East Germany--and look where it got them.
The hawks are getting frustrated because the more they kill, they more they lose control, precisely the problem with their strategy.
8 - Thomas
Let me sketch out what I believe is a very plausible hypothetical scenario...
An al Qaeda operative smuggles a chemical or biological weapon into the United States and detonates it in a major population center, causing thousands of deaths.
Within minutes, every single country in the world condemns the bombing, and the usual suspects (Iran, Pakistan, Syria, North Korea etc.) vehemently deny any involvement whatsoever.
Then, what if U.S. officials are not able to determine where the bomb came from, who built it, whether it was put together from scratch or stolen or passed off, etc.?
Americans, understandably, will want to strike back in roughly the same way they were hit--in other words, by dropping a huge bomb somewhere--but how do you slake the thirst for vengeance? Who do you bomb? Where do you drop the bombs?
This is not a rhetorical question. I honestly want to know what you (or anyone else) would do if faced with this situation.
9 - Al Barger
This is an all-too-plausible scenario. If 10,000 Americans get killed- which could happen fairly easily- somebody will face Biblical recriminations. It is my point here that we need to be hard enough NOW while we are in a fairly closely controlled situation in order to dissuade those who are hostile toward us before such a situation arises.
After it comes up, a lot of people are going to be killed in retaliation- even if most of them don't deserve it. If you kill them all, you get the guilty- and the American public will demand no less than getting the guilty. Again, this doesn't even involve being vengeful, but simply preventing more attacks. Then add vengeance back into the mix...
How exactly that would play out depends on a lot of factors of the specific situation.
One scenario that absolutely would NOT happen would be for US to be badly hit, and then just forgive and pray for our attackers, and all that other happy, warm-fuzzy pacifist nonsense.
10 - Thomas
"If you kill them all, you get the guilty- and the American public will demand no less than getting the guilty."
Okay, but where do you drop the bombs? All of the intelligence agencies believe al Qaeda cells are dispersed throughout the world, and they obviously don't have the first damn clue where UBL or Ayman al Zawahiri are. It seems the only way you could be 100 percent sure you've killed them all is by destroying the entire planet.
Does the Bush Administration have a contingency plan to deal with this scenario, that you know of? I haven't heard of anything. I wish they would start thinking about it so we're not caught flat-footed like we were on 9/11.
11 - Eric Olsen
Not unlike last season's "24" is it? If something catastrophic happened, I think you would find a sudden surge in intelligence from countries who didn't want to be blamed, you wuld have a series of Godfather-like hits on the guilty and associates and a massive attack on any country found to be complicit.
12 - mike
From the wires:
"The reports of deaths are terrible. Any American death is a terrible thing," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said. "But I think the American public understand that when you're fighting a war against terrorists, when you're fighting for the security of this country, that sacrifice is something that you'd have to expect."
Here is what is so offensive about thugs like Wolfowitz: when they had the chance to fight in wars they supported at the time-Vietnam the most notable-they didn't do it. They chickened out. They didn't make the sacrifice. They showed their true colors. And now they have the fucking nerve to send working class kids off to die in a war that has nothing to do with the fight against bin laden, which is indeed a just use of police force.
Gen Anthony Zinni, former head of Central Command just before Tommy Franks, and a opponent of the war, calls them "chickenhawks." I call them scum.
Eric Margolis has a helpful guide to the Newspeak uttered by state terrorists like Wolfowitz. (Note: Margolis is a U.S. veteran who actually served his country.):
http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_jul27.html
13 - Joe
And your military service makes you qualified to render such a judgement?
14 - Al Barger
Mike- You should let Nim speak for you. I definitely find him more thoughtful, and a lot more fun.
I'll just say for the sake of argument that Wolfowitz, Bush et al are dirty, no-good sonsabitches. Calling them names, however, will not stop terrorists from attacking us.
The Pentagon has lots of contingency plans for lots of scenarios. No one could really say how we would or should respond unless we hit the specific circumstances. Any regime even strongly suspected of complicity, however, will be facing extinction.
Even far more than in the 24 show as Eric invoked, we would doubtless get co-operation in such ways as we have never seen before.
Most likely another major terror attack in the US would have one good aftermath of shutting down all kinds of dirtbags the world over. Lots of foreign governments with far less scruples than ours would kill or hand over all kinds of people that they had no clue where to find the day before.
15 - Thomas
"Any regime even strongly suspected of complicity, however, will be facing extinction."
I would like to believe that this is true, but recent history does not support this claim, in my opinion. I mean, look at Saudi Arabia. It now seems pretty clear that--regarding the 9/11 attacks--they were complicit on many levels, yet they get a free pass from the Bush Administration. Why?
16 - Eric Olsen
This is an excellent question and one that could bring Bush down if we don't get some answers. I sincerely hope it's not the oil.
17 - Al Barger
Being maybe just slightly charitable, the administration probably protects the Saudis for fear of what kind of even worse theocracy would take its place. Oil doesn't make much sense as a motivation for propping up the government in that whatever government they have would have to sell oil on the same world market as this one.
18 - mike
Al and Eric: Have we killed enough people yet? Please see attached and advise:
http://www.wanniski.com/PrintPage.asp?TextID=2855
19 - Eric Olsen
Clearly not if there are still attacks against allied military and UN targets in Iraq and as long as al Qaeda members and sympathizers plan attacks throughout the world. Enough will be dead when there is no one left to do such things.
20 - mike
Killing civilians, especially on the scale Wanniski cites, is a great way to fight terrorism. This accounts for why the Iraqi people are totally on our side, and are cheering us every day.
Also, giving al Quada a new recruiting tool and swelling its ranks, is a devilishly clever way to destroy it. As the Republican governor of the great state of Israel, Ariel Sharon, said while biting the limbs off a dead Palestinian baby, fighting terror with assasinations is a sure fire route to success. This is why Palestinian terrorists gave up years ago, and Israel is now totally at peace, secure in its borders and brimming with hope.
21 - Eric Olsen
Israel is another matter, and I agree tit-for-tat cannot continue until the end of time.
But re Iraq and al Qaeda. When I lived last in SoCal we had a pretty bad ant problem. One night, I put a bag of trash outside the front door and forgot to take it down to the dumpster until the next morning. By then it was virtually alive with ants, couldn't even see the bag. I sprayed the bag, killed every one of the vermin, and we never saw another ant.
22 - mike
That's great: when you're fighting ants. When you're fighting terrorists, more discretion is required to spare civilian life, not only for moral reasons, but also to prevent civilians from sympathyzing with terrorists.
In Afghanistan, we are fighting terrorists. In Iraq, we are fighting against a war of national liberation, explicitly modeled on the Vietcong, enjoying strong support from a plurality of the Iraqi population, and guaranteed to send us fleeing out of there with our tails between our legs.
23 - Eric Olsen
I believe your conclusion re Iraq is incorrect, and I don't believe we will leave until a new, democratic government and rule of law are in place - wouldn't be prudent.
24 - mike
Pigs will fly.
25 - Al Barger
Yeah Mike, you got it all figured out. Better not do anything to make the thugs mad, or they'll just beat us up worse. Either that, or we kill them, and anyone stupid enough to help them or hang out near them.
I vote for the latter. Eric's "ants" was an overly nice metaphor. Ants are a pain, but they are largely benign. Disease infested RATS would be a more apt metaphor. Rats need exterminating. Slowly, they're getting it.
Israel's problem is that they've been playing WAY too nice. They have restrained and restrained and restrained themselves. Goddam man, Arafat is still alive. They should have whacked him YEARS ago. Hit the bastards hard enough, and they WILL get a clue. There are some with a real death wish. Obviously they have to be killed.
Other Palestenians, hate Israel though they might, they don't actually want to DIE. Give them the understanding that even having al Aqsa types in their neighborhood is a good way of getting killed, and their motivations will change. If they don't, then they can die to.
No two ways about it, though: Terrorists killing Americans or Israelis have to be stopped, as brother Malcolm would say, by any means necessary.