US tries 'non-aggression' tactics

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4110430.stm

There is more to winning a war than just showing a vulgar display of power.

Hopefully incidents like the following will not happen again:

 

Cesard -- You're dreaming if you think that's the case. Accidents happen all the time. It IS a sad thing this man was killed -- perhaps the troops should have an interpreter on hand every time they go on a raid?

Sorry if I'm being patronizing -- but it IS a war for god's sake. I don't think the mission is to purposely kill civilians.

 

Or perhaps the troops should be taught a few basic commands in the proper language? Even Finns during the winter war were taught to say things such as "hands up", "stay calm" etc. in Russian to prevent them from panicing. Oh never mind I almost forgot it's a lot cheaper and easier just to shoot them instead.

Of course it might be that the Americans are doing exactly that and these are rare cases. I really don't know how they work. Cultural education is essential for occupying troops imho though.

[ June 28, 2005, 20:15: Message edited by: Morgoroth ]

 

Hell, even the Swedes who voulenteered to aid the Finnish learned it in both Finnish and Russian.

 

Perhaps they did know some of the language and perhaps the guy was a bit deaf. We can what-if forever....my point is it happens, for pete's sake. Should it?? NO. But it does....and the previous comment "Hopefully things like this will never happen again" was LUDICROUS. I'm a pragmatist.....accidents of various natures happen every day, whether in war or NOT....we do our best to avoid them, but no one honestly thinks they'll never happen again -- it's simply not realistic. And on the war-front -- too bad we don't have a nice little roadmap or layout...where we can say.. "ok...you stand there and we'll stand here....Ready, Set, Go!"...and shoot until there isn't a person standing.

 

The Soldiers are taught a few basic commands such as halt, down, move etc... But you have no idea what the conditions were at the time of the incident all you know is what the press wants you to hear. Maybe it was a low light situation maybe the guy had a weapon, you don't know. Let me tell you something about a firefight the lights the noise is like nothing you've ever experienced, a sort of controlled chaos. I dare say most of you have never been in combat. What you see on your television in the comfort of your home is not even close. you pass judgements based on lack of knowledge because thats what the media wants. And another thing the B52 is not the most terrifying bomber in the arsenal, theres the SR71 and the A10 just to name a couple.

 

I agree, these things happen when troops from Mars are beamed into Iraq - into a culture they know nothing about, with a language, society and history they don't understand and play the game as they play it on Mars: Win!

The U.S. win every fight where the enemy exposes himself to the awesome U.S. firepower. The point is that on the receiving end this is the most manifest demonstration of U.S. presence in Iraq.

No American seems truly willing to spend half his life in Iraq or the Arab world to learn the language and culture and try to truly build up a relation to the country or the people there. That's why the US will not be able to defeat the resistance on their own. Only the Iraqis can defeat the resistance.

The Brits ran the Raj iirc with some 1500 officers permanently stationed in India. I see nothing of that sort with the U.S. in Iraq - Special Forces being the exception, and all in all they are nothing but the drop of water on the hor plate, not enough to make a difference.

The stormtroopers from Mars will continue to schoot up civilian cars because the Iraqis mistunderstand them or because of "Ugh, looks sucpicious, better safe than sorry!" In guerrilla war the stronger side looses when they use their superior strength against weaklings.

"A sword, plunged into salt water, will rust" – Lao Tsu.

The U.S. are double screwed.

Basically it's always a question of the relationship of forces. If you are strong, and you are fighting the weak for any period of time, you are going to become weak yourself. If you behave like a coward then you are going to become cowardly--it's only a question of time.

The same happened to the British when they were here... the same happened to the French in Algeria... the same happened to the Americans in Vietnam... the same happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan... the same happened to so many people that I can't even count them

The problem is that you cannot prove yourself against someone who is much weaker than yourself. They are in a lose/lose situation. If you are strong and fighting the weak, then if you kill your opponent then you are a scoundrel... if you let him kill you, then you are an idiot. So here is a dilemma which others have suffered before us, and for which as far as I can see there is simply no escape.

Sometimes, as the brits have shown in Northern Ireland, you can only win by losing. Take casualties, avoid reprisals, and put yourself at the disadvantage - the IRA for example has killed many more british soldiers than the british army has killed IRA goons.
Had they resorted to Fallujah style reprisals and flattened Belfast they'd have lost badly already.

Excellent article by Martin van Creveld.

 

My point Spellbound was that I was pleased to see US troops show respect to the country they are occuping and earning their respect and trust, and I would prefer to see this in the news instead of the usual crap. Why see the short negative part in my post? Anyway I don't see how a soldier could see an unarmed elderly man as a threat, only a coward shoots first in this situation.

Well my father had a good knowledge of Arabic when he was stationed abroad, so why cannot US troops learn some phrases? When I was stationed in Germany, when I was in the army I learnt the langauage (though I am far from fluent).

 

Who said "never invade a country where you don't speak the language?" I thought it was the British in Iraq in the 20's, but I'm not really sure. Anyway, I find it applicable.

 

Cesard --

I saw the point of your thread -- but if you don't want people responding to your points, you shouldn't write them. :shrugs: Nothing against you personally....but if I see something that makes no sense to me, I'm gonna comment. Given that....

Coward? Hardly. And I suppose you wouldn't see a small child coming up to you to give you candy a threat? Defenseless, harmless, cute...and all that, right? Well, many didn't in the Vietnam war and they're now 6 feet under.

 

That old man would have been alive today if the soldier that shot him had bothered to learn a few simple phrases.

And as I had served my time in the army stationed in Belfast and Londonderry I know that a threat can come from anywhere and anyone, but that does not give one the right to 'shoot first and ask questions later'. Violence only brings violence - I learned this from soldiers that had served at the peak of the so-called 'troubles'.

 

Cesard,
you know what a neocon warmonger would reply: "Darn appeasers ... we don't negotiate with evil!"

 

Maybe, maybe not. What do we know about the situation? What do you know about the man? Perhaps he made threatening moves that transcend verbal language. The point is, we have NO IDEA what went on there. All we know is that he is dead (regrettably) and the soldier is alive. Lots of other soldiers would be alive today too, if we weren't in this WAR.

 

Ah well, only yesterday Bush gave a speech to the nation in front of troops at Fort Bragg.

I guess, is that while Bush was using the troops as a visual backdrop, politically speaking he was trying to hide behind them, and unsurprising it worked.

Don't criticise the war because then you criticise the troops.

Don't criticise the toops, ever, or you have a disgruntled Spelly at your throat

My point is that unfortunately it's hard to make a good case a aginst a moronic war planned by incompetent politicians and it's murderous consequences when leaving out the soldiers carrying it out.
I don't doubt the generally good intentions of U.S. troops -- they sure are dedicated and hard working people, those I met were, and really nice kids too -- but what Cesard was aiming on were the rules of engagement given to them by their superiors and eventually politicians.

The individual troops bear little responsibility for the mess they were sent in, and the orders they were given.

The Brits have very tight rules in Northern Ireland -- even calling them to take the first blood iirc -- in vast contrast to that the U.S. commanders can employ 'fire at will on signs of potential danger' -- and employ massive retaliatory fire using artillery and airstrikes -- incomprehensible to the Brits, who have never forgotten the mess the 'bloody sunday' got themselves into.

When you're on a pacification mission the emphasis on 'force protection' over the actual mission of 'pacification' cannot work: When 'force protection' unavoidably causes civilian casualties and excessive damage to their property, the alienation of these people is unavoidable and natural. Force protection of that sort becomes counterproductive, a mission killer.

But then, except for the intention to win, the U.S. don't have a real war aim in this war anymore, now that Saddam is gone. Their political leaders will continue to blunder on without a clear aim.

Cesard,
I do work with Brits and Americans on a daily basis, and we get along quite well. Germans generally like Brits, and somehow Brits, despite the WW-II, towel and football puns, seem to basically respect the Germans.

As for languages, British troops don't really hide in an alternative 'Baseworld' as much as U.S. troops tend to - if GIs want, they can completely avoid contact with Germans - so why ought they learn german? Most Germans speak english anyway ....

However, I fail to see that sort of mutual respect between the U.S. and Iraqis in particular and Arabs in general, especially after 9/11. Not really a thing that may incline them to learn Arab.

[ June 29, 2005, 18:58: Message edited by: Ragusa ]

 

Bah -- I don't have a problem with criticizing troops -- but what I see here is the expectance of all hearts and flowers -- not very realistic. From family members to friends in both old wars and current (students in my classes this last spring who have recently come back), their words say it's anything BUT. It's war -- so let's try to be a little realistic here...that's all I'm saying....and I've seen very little of it in some of the comments.

Ragusa -- Whether intentionally a snide remark or not -- doesn't much matter -- most of us are used to it by now. Nevertheless -- the objective of the war from the beginning (pre-Saddam) was to get Bin Laden and his cronies, as you full well know. That objective hasn't gone away -- imo, it was simply sidetracked.

 

jeder Tritt ein Brit

 

I've said it before and I'll say it again: You put a guy in a life-threatening situation, you'd better believe that he's going to do whatever it takes to stay alive, armchair criticism be damned.

As for the purpose of the war, I don't think Bin Laden will be caught, and I don't think the US cares much anymore. They've simply shown these vicious buggers that if you poke the giant too often, he will eventually swat you. I think George is simply making a grand political statement -- don't f**k with us! Such statements cost lives, yes, and that's horrible, but it's also reality.

 

I do think that the U.S. goal in Iraq is, sidetracked or not, utterly unrealistic. The U.S. cannot and will not be able to pacify the country completely. They can't turn it into a merry pro-western free market economy either. Period. A peaceful and pro-western democratic Iraq is a mirage for the next 10 - 20 years, thanks to the U.S. destroying the fabric of the state of Iraq that once existed within Iraq's borders.
Democratisation, freedom that's just US talk, first of all for the more gullible home front (Arabs don't buy that nonsense anyway), disconnected from reality, the Iraqis want to get on with their lives their way, Allah be praised! And they want to be left alone. And they want the U.S. to go.

The U.S. might, perhaps, be able to generate in Iraq at least the fraction of the stability the Brits have, unter great sacrifice and with almost superhuman patience, achieved in Northern Ireland -- but it may yet well been just too late for the U.S. to change course in Iraq. And why? Changing course would imply to have been wrong, admitting mistakes ... ask Rummy or Bush and they will tell you they made no mistakes whatsoever - Iraq is a continuous success story

From the thousand bombs detonating in Northern Ireland in 1972 (some three bombings a day) the British brought the number down to almost zero today. In 'the troubles' in Northern Ireland some 3.000 people died, 1300 of them civilians, 1.000 British servicemen and some 300 terrorists.

In Vietnam, America's last counterinsurgency war, the U.S. killed 50 Vietnamese for every U.S. soldier killed. The Americans in Vietnam really fought hard. All in all they killed between two-and-a-half and three million Vietnamese. I don’t see that it helped them much. They lost.

Today they are killing much more insurgents than insurgents kill U.S. troops and win any given fight – but that makes no difference to the violence. It's raging on.

There are IMO two proven ways to win Iraq:

• Strategy #1
  That's the the British way. The U.S. can win in Iraq if they employ the degree of restraint the Brits exercise in Northern Ireland, and gain deep local knowledge and truly loyal local allies. The Brits refused to be provoked and in the essence won through principles like non-violent means if possible and strict adherence to the rule of law.
  
  You can from the Irish example roughly extrapolate that the U.S. would first need much more troops for Iraq, and then, must consider to lose some 40.000 to 75.000 men of them to the resistance to eventually win. A grim paradox.
  
  The Irish example gives you a hint about a timeframe, too. How about 30 years?
  
  Even for the U.S. victory isn't for free. But as Bush assures the war is worth it - what are you waiting for? The Iraqis will be grateful, right?
  .
• Strategy #2
  Of course, there is another way, best examplified with the example Assad made of the city of Hama.
  
  That’s the hard and brutal way: You make a surprise strike and kill in a swift blow as many enemies as possible – old people, men, weman and children –and show no mercy and the determination to do it again. The objective is to get it over with so fast that the effect desired locally is achieved before anyone else has time to react or, ideally, even to notice what is going on.
  
  When brutally gassing Halabja Saddam crushed the Kurdish rebellion there, just like the British crushed the Kurdish and Shia uprisings of the 1920s by bombing tribal villages remorselessly. True shock and awe.
  The flattening of Fallujah, after some few months of talking about it and bragging about killing all the bad guys – forget about surprise – was halfhearted and didn’t bring the desired deterrent, thus pacifying effect. They bungled it before they even started. As a statement, Fallujah was ambivalent, and became a display of U.S. weakness.
  
  Assad’s massacre, where he killed some 10.000 to 25.000 people in Hama in about three days, probably spared Syria a civil war – an end with horror rather than a horror without end.
  .

The U.S. probably are incapable of trying Strategy #1 and – luckily – don’t have the stomach to seriously consider Strategy #2*.

Atm the U.S. wan't it both ways, with a grain of salt they are trying de-escalation while continuing the carpet-bombing.

These are strategic blunders ordered and directed by the big shots in D.C. and in no way can be blamed on the individual troops down there.

Martin van Creveld compares a state military that, with its vast superiority in lethality, continually turns its firepower on poorly-equipped opponents to an adult who administers a prolonged, violent beating to a child in a public place.
Regardless of how bad the child has been, every observer sympathizes with the child. Soon, outsiders intervene, and the adult is arrested. The mismatch is so great that the adult's action is judged a crime.

This is what happens to state armed forces that attempt to split the difference between the Hama and de-escalation models. The seemingly endless spectacle of weak opponents and, inevitably, local civilians being killed by the U.S. military’s overwhelming power (or Israels, for that instance) defeats the state at the moral level.
That is why the rule for the Hama model is that the violence must be over fast. Any attempt at a compromise between the two models results in prolonged violence by the state's armed forces, and it is the duration of the mismatch that is fatal. To the degree the state armed forces are also foreign invaders, the state's defeat occurs all the sooner. It occurs both locally and on a world scale.

In the 3,000 years that the story of David and Goliath has been told, how many listeners have identified with Goliath?

And I doubt the U.S. find a Strategy #3 that works. They will probably plunge Iraq into a messy sectarian civil war that will likely manage to breed out a new generation of U.S. hating terrorists against whom Al Quaeda are bloody dilettans without true urban combat experience. Recent CIA assessments suggest as much. Happy 9/11 v 2.0 - and don't you think I like that outlook.

EDIT: The U.S. face an additional disadvantage - basically Syria and the U.K. were conducting their wars on home soil - a significant advantage in local knowledge the U.S. lack in Iraq.

[ June 30, 2005, 08:04: Message edited by: Ragusa ]

 

But if the US left right now, today, the Iraqis would be complaining about that too! The US aren't the only ones who can't have it both ways.

I agree that getting a loving little buddy out of Iraq is not feasible, but at least getting someone less repulsive than Saddam would be nice. If the casualties the US inflicts on the Iraqis doesn't deter terrorist activity, then the next country the US invades will just suffer MORE casualties.

 

It depends on which Iraqi you ask, I presume. Ahmed Chalabi types will most certainly cry and mourn and book a flight back to Washington, for instance.

I can imagine a good number of them to cheer and chant on the streets.