Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report

[Steve Thompson]

 --- "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote: 
>     --
> James A. Donald:
> > > Seems to me that permanent civil war in Iraq provides
> > > Americans with the same benefits as democracy in Iraq,
> > > though considerably more reliably.
> 
> Steve Thompson
> > You might be more accurate to say that a permanent [civil]
> > war in Iraq benefits miltiary leaders and civilian
> > contractors with a variety of benefits.

[pardon the redundancy]
 
> Permanent holy war in Iraq would keep them busy and out of
> mischief WITHOUT permanent large involvement from American
> military.

True, but there's a question of the waste of resources and man-years that
would come from such a circumstance.  And then there's the ethical[1] side
of the coin: do the (largely financial benefits) that might come from a
civil war in Iraq really justify the consequent standard-of-living for the
residents of Iraq?  People like Tim May might say that the towel-headed
barbarians deserve to be killed in a bloody civil conflict, but other
people might argue that there are stable states that do not actually
require heavy foreign civilian losses.

As to who is correct, I cannot say.  As a relatively new student of
history I am still researching the topic.

> Plus, of course, they would be pumping oil like mad in order to
> fund it.

Aren't we all about to run out of oil soon anyways?
 
> Finding Al Quaeda is hard.  Nation building is even harder.
> Military training covers nation smashing, not nation building.

Of course.  It's much easier to smash things than it is to create; and
smashing requires much less wisdom.  On average; depending on how one goes
about `smashing' a nation-state.  I imagine that nation-building, or
nation-`shaping', would be quite hard -- and what if such efforts were to
go awry?  The consequences might be terrible.
 
> But arranging matters so that Al Quaeda is busily killing those 
> muslims it deems insufficiently Muslim, and muslims are killing
> Al Quaeda right back, seems astonishingly easy.

If you've been practising pitting groups of barbarians against each other,
as is apparently the case for those involved with the military
intelligence community, then yes, I suppose it might be considered
`astonishingly easy'.  I would also be inclined to suggest that those
sorts of arrangements are quite expensive, regardless of their degree of
ease.

>                                                 It is like
> throwing a match into a big petrol spill.  Why are American
> soldiers getting shot putting out the fire?   Why are Americans
> dying to stop arabs from killing arabs? We *want* arabs to kill
> arabs.  When arabs kill arabs, we fear that the wrong side
> might win - but whichever side wins, it usually turns out to be 
> the wrong side.   If no one wins, no problem.

I suppose that Americans are getting shot and dying because they are being
paid to engage in high-risk operations.  The risk-taking probably makes
them feel more like manly-men -- until they bleed out all over the desert
sand, of course.  Is there a psychologist in the house who might shed more
light on this kind of risk-taking behavior?

> > > Nothing like a long holy war with no clear winner to teach 
> > > people the virtues of religious tolerance.  That is, after
> > > all, how Europeans learnt that lesson.
> 
> > You're dreaming.  People simply do not learn from history.
> 
> But we learnt from history.  Europe, and Europeans, did learn
> from the European holy wars.

Well, my opinion is such that the major lesson that [a few] people end up
learning from history is how to make conflict seem more legitimate to
increasingly better educated populations.  But there is evidently a long
way to go before the enterprise of warfare is perfected.   As to other
lessons learned from history, it is evident that we as a species have
learnt that war remains profitable under all conditions.  This is now a
matter of the most sacred orthodoxy to high-culture.  Do not worry.  I
will not presume to challenge such a strongly-held belief.
 
> > Many things would be nice if [group A] were busy killing
> > [enemy B] instead of [group C].  Sadly, this is not a perfect
> > world and the people who need the most killing do not,
> > generally speaking, get it.
> >
> > Perhaps it is a bit of a shame that the kind of broken person
> > who ends up becoming a suicide bomber, a Ted Kaczynski, a
> > Timothy McVeigh, or even a Jim Sikorski,
> 
> First:  Three cheers for Timothy McViegh.

How about, "Where is Ted Kaczynski now that we really need him?"
 
> Secondly, the people who organize large scale terror can be 
> identified, particularly by locals and coreligionists, which is
> why they have been dying in large numbers in Afghanistan.

Um, what planet are you on?

The people who, as you say, organize large scale terror tend to be
protected by virtue of large bureaucratic firewalls, legislated secrecy,
misdirection (smoke and mirrors), and even taboos.  But perhaps you are
not referring to Western terrorists, but are expecting your reader to
assume that terrorists always wear turbans, and who generally will live
and operate in the Middle-Eastern theatre.  Perhaps you have forgotten
about the people who planned and executed the operations that helped
South-American tyrants form up and train their death- and terror-squads?

Who was it, by the way, who coined the name "Death and Horror, Inc."  My
memory is a little hazy, but I don't believe it was Bin Laden.


Regards,

Steve



[1] I'm so sorry to use that word, but I'm one of those unfortunate
retrograde types who would like to see archaic words retain their currency
rather than to see the language impoverished through unplanned lexical
obsolescence and random mutation.

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