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Why the Concern
I hear there are areas in and around Baghdad that are anti US and Britian. I don't understand why we don't carpet bomb these cities and villages. They are filled with people who hate us and who would kill us given the chance. These are the enemy and this is war! We will never win a war of public opinion with the Arab world or those patsy Europeans so lets just go for it and get it over now.
That's a suggestion, I guess. But it's based on emotion, rather than a sense of what we're trying to accomplish. The problem is that there are lots of people in Baghdad and even in Fallujah who aren't anti-US and Britain. Sure, we could carpet bomb everything in sight "making a desolation and calling it peace" is the phrase I occasionally use. I stole it from Livy. And in some cases we'll end up doing that, eventually.
But we're at war with an ideological movement, not with Islam itself, despite how closely the adherents of the ideology identify it with the religion. I'm not fond of Islam as a religion, and the fact that the Bad Guys chock their mosques full of weaponry emphasizes how closely the ideology and the religion are intertwined. But not all Muslims are nutbags, and probably most of them aren't. So we've somehow got to kill and/or capture the adherents of the ideology while leaving the non-nutbags alone as much as we can.
Islam's made up of a large number of sects and cults: not only Sunnis, but also Shias, Sufis, Ismailis, Brelvis, Ahmadis and even, if you stretch the point, Ba'hais. Only two of those are actively engaged in conducting terror operations: Sunnis and Shias. Within the Sunni branch, only the Wahhabis have really gone gonzo; the occasional adherent of a different Sunni strain will usually have some political cause, like the PFLP and DFLP in Paleostine. Within Shiism, the Qom school in Iran is the driver behind "international Islamic revolution." The Najaf school's not politically aggressive, which is why the Medes and the Persians were pushing their proxies to take it over. Some of the sects, or portions of them, are allied with us people like the Kurds, who're mostly Sufis, and portions of Pakland who haven't swilled the Koolade and/or who can guess which side's going to win eventually.
I'd also add that there shouldn't be a death penalty associated with merely disliking, or even hating, us. We actually are occupying Iraq, and there will naturally be a fairly large segment of the population who'll be happy to see us go. We'd feel much the same if the U.S. had lived under a bloody-handed dictatorship for the past 35 years and it had been removed by foreigners. We'd be glad to see the bloody-handed dictator gone, but we'd be wanting to run our own affairs, even before we were remotely ready to do so. That's human nature. Add in the traditional Arab difficulty with the concept of "gratitude," and the problem's aggravated further.
What we're actually trying to do is to make those distinctions in the war we're carrying out. The Bad Guys are quick enough to point to the dead babies when we take out a snake pit that's been set up in a residential neighborhood, and they howl even louder when we actually do make a mistake. That means force when applied has to be proportional and well-aimed. When we're not using military force, we're using diplomatic tactics to try and talk the fence-sitters onto our side and to further isolate the Bad Guys. The while, we're using the guys with the green eyeshades to try and track the money flow to cut off the funding that buys all those arms and ammunition. The intel guys are trying to build the order of battle, so we know who to chase down and who's a front man and who's mere cannon fodder. We didn't have to kill any Libyans for Muammar to change sides. According to today's posts, both Egypt and Syria are kinda-sorta thinking about making plans to get ready to loosen up their societies.
So don't take an over-simplified view of what's going on. If we're not shooting someone, we're talking to someone, and sometimes talk works. Or we're picking his pocket. Or we're looking at his friends. If all that doesn't work, we can always shoot them later. |
Posted by: mike0050 2004-09-22 |
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