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EPGAH -> RE: Giving up war? (10/18/2007 2:13:59 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: philosophy
...so i take it you sympathise with those people around the world who have been messed with by US citizens? Nicaraguans who had their ports illegally mined for instance....or the few thousand innocent Iraqi citizens who had the crap bombed out of them during shock and awe. i take it you accept that they have a perfect right to consider all Americans as imperialist bastards who think military might gives them the right to do anything to protect and extend their corporate and ideological interests?
Or is it only right for US citizens to hold and act on such views?
The mining of Nicaragua's ports...you mean we were giving logistic support to our "artificial forces"?
As to Commander Carrion's (Sounds like some B-movie villain) assertion that without America's support and direction, the contras would disband, disorganize, and lose military capacity"...Well, right now in Iraq, we're fighting either our own "contras", or people trained by them, and I take it that these contras haven't "lost military capacity" yet? Maybe we trained them too well!
This "Shock&Awe" strategy doesn't seem to have worked...From the newspaper, this particular application of Shock&Awe would be to use heavy artillery to miss--on purpose! Also according to the newspaper, American troops didn't launch a Hellfire missile from a drone that watched several Al Queida bigwigs attending a funeral of one of their own. A perfect opportunity to take out some terrorist leaders with minimal or no collateral damage--and they didn't take it? So, from what I've seen, the NEW definition of Shock&Awe is a beautiful display of force that misses or holds back on purpose...I would think by now, we're well past the "warning shots" phase, right?
quote:
ORIGINAL: Wikipedia
The principal author of Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, Harlan Ullman was one of the most vocal critics of the shock and awe campaign. Ullman stated, "The current campaign does not appear to correspond to what we envisioned." In addition, "the bombing that lit up the Baghdad night skies the next day, and in the following days, did not match the force, scope and scale of the broad-based shock-and-awe plan, Ullman and U.S. officials say." In a question directed to Ullman, asking if it is "too late for shock and awe now?" Ullman responded "We have not seen it; it is not coming."
Ullman noted that plan called for "an attack into the center of Baghdad, taking it over, followed by successive takeovers expanding from the center of the city." Also the "bombing campaign did not immediately go after Iraqi military forces in the field, particularly the Republican Guard divisions and political levers of power, such as the Baath Party headquarters." Instead Ullman, states that the "shock and awe" implementation was more of a siege.
Apparently, the "Bush administration throttle[d] back on the Iraqi bombing" and the original plan was scrubbed days before its implementation as "political concerns over civilian casualties factored into the decision."
You mean America is throttling back because we're afraid of killing enemies and/or collaborators?[:-]
In previous conflicts, ALLEGEDLY, friendly forces would move civilians to temporary camps, the ones that stayed behind were enemies. This deprived them of civilians they could hide behind, and is called "draining the swamp", part of COIN (COunterINsurgency) strategy. I cannot say for sure if this is what happened or not: I wasn't there. However, it DOES seem a more efficient strategy than "patrols" in among a population where the enemy try to hide among or behind civilians and/or civilian structures, and where the civilians--assuming they're not terrorists themselves--won't give us any information about the terrorists, pointing to a sort of Stockholm Syndrome among the civilians? (The latter is based on friends who have been "rotated" back to America, physically intact, but showing signs of stress more from frustrations at the "rules" laid upon them than by, say, going into an enemy country with the knowledge that anyone/everyone they met could be an enemy, and could steal their uniforms to get closer for a better ambush?)
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