fadedsteve wrote:
Braddock wrote:
I've been reading Fadedsteve's posts in this thread...
I don't doubt that your tactics would score a resounding victory in military terms but if you did indeed pursue this course one would have to ask the question why bother invading in the first place? You will have succeeded only in liberating half the population of Iraq of life itself. You can't invade a country with the purpose of saving the people from their oppression and raze the country to the ground as part of the process; that kind of war is acceptable when you have been attacked but not when you are the attacker, acting on supposedly moral grounds.
The allied forces didn't start WWII and thus were using the requisite force to put the German aggressors back in their place, they started it so fuck them. The Iraqis did not start this battle and to simply say 'fuck all the civilian collateral damage, lets kill em all and let Allah sort them out' is ridiculous, unless of course you want to come out and admit the war has nothing to with morals and is a purely selfish and/or financial/strategic venture, in which case such a mercenary attitude would be quite fitting.
US forces didnt start the war on terror. . . . .
US forces didnt tell Saddam Hussein to snub the international community. . . .fire on coalition troops, and murder hundreds of thousands of people either! All AFTER he got his ass beat in Gulf War I. . . .
I am not saying fuck all civilians!!! I am saying in a military sense, you need to go for the jugular! We didnt go for the jugular, we tactically struck the Iraqi regime into fleeing. We attacked Iraq with not even HALF the troops we attacked Iraq with in Gulf War I btw. We thought or rather George Bush thought that the Iraqi's would welcome us with open arms cause Saddam was such a prick. That proved totally and completely wrong in every sense of the imagination. What was our response. . . . . Our response was to police rather than attack!!! The MP's are there to "police", the Marines and other front line combat forces are there TO ATTACK! We went on the defensive and look what happend!!
Fallujah is a perfect example of my plan. . . . In late 03' the entire Insugency was being run out of that city! The city was decrepit, and full of Islamic terrorists killing anyone at will. Zarqawi moved in , in 04' and the beheadings and shit all went down. Now the US "fiddle fucked around" with Fallujah for MONTHS before any action was taken. People died constantly as a result of bombings, hijackings, other terrorist shit etc etc etc. When the US finally attacked Fallujah, what did they do in Nov of 04'???? THEY DEMOLISHED the entire city! It was a resounding defeat at the hands of the insurgency, we killed almost 2 thousand Iraqi and foreign fighters. We essentially flattend the city. . . .My point being we completely destroyed the city, and guess what??? WE WON THE FUCKING BATTLE with no question! Not only that Fallujah is not the hub of the insurgency anymore.
We havent had that decisive victory against the insurgency since Zarqawi died. We got that victory by being decisive in our plan and brutal with our execution PERIOD! Until the US military conducts operations like they did in Fallujah we will continue to see the bullshit that is going on in Iraq today. . . no question about it!
My last post seems to have been ignored in its entirety, so I'll make the same point again. We're not fighting a traditional war in Iraq. Destroying their cities isn't going to help, and comparing the bombing of German and Japanese cities during world war 2 to what is currently happening borders on the retarded.
I'll explain:
During World War 2, the objective when bombing cities was to destroy the enemy's infrastructure, things like oil manufacturing centers, weapons and munitions factories, transportation hubs, etc. If you go to Japan and visit Hiroshima, you will notice that all the buildings are nice and new, because, as you said, we nuked the place and destroyed everything. If you visit Kyoto, you will notice that all the old wooden buildings are still around, because Kyoto had no strategic importance and the allies didnt bother bombing it. You don't waste your expensive bombers and bombs and risk the lives of your trained flight crews to bomb something that isn't important. Bottom line, you don't bomb cities for the sake of killing people, you bomb cities because doing so serves a higher strategic purpose like depleting your enemy's supplies and weapons.
Furthermore, bombing cities as a whole was not the optimal strategy, it was simply the best way to accomplish the goal of destroying key targets. The United States today has at it's disposal an impressive array of weaponry, and we can literally take out a single building from 30000 feet and leave the buildings on either side standing. In World War 2, when military aviation was still relatively new, it was not possible to hit targets with that kind of accuracy. In fact, hitting a single factory in the middle of a city with an unguided bomb from tens of thousands of feet in the air while hordes of homicidal Germans armed with some of the most advanced military hardware in the world are trying to kill you is pretty damn hard. The next best thing is to just drop a shitload of bombs all over the city and hope that a few of them take out the right target, or maybe take out the workers who work in the target building, or the food that the workers eat or the roads that they take to work... etc.
The bombing of Dresden was not carried out because we just wanted to kill a bunch of Germans. It was done to prevent the Germans from transferring troops between their East and West fronts using the railways in Berlin and Dresden, which were the primary targets. Again, because destroying a single target while the Luftwaffe is trying to kill you is damn hard, the Allies just bombed the roofs off buildings and set everything on fire, because, well, if you bomb enough shit you're bound to hit the right thing eventually. The primary target in Dresden was the railway hub, not the people.
The Germans tried the same thing in Stalingrad, which, if you know your history, was pretty much the most resounding german defeat in the war. If my memory serves me, female civilian volunteer forces manning anti-aircraft weaponry were the first line of defense, and, when the german tank battalions attacked, they fought until all their equipment was destroyed. The Germans, during the course of the battle for the city, destroyed something like 80% of the buildings with combined airstrikes and artillery fire, and occupied at one point 90% of the city. Stalin ordered that the civilian populace not be evacuated, so as to provide the Russian troops more incentive to fight. Now, contrary to what Fadedsteve might think would happen in this sort of situation, in which a vastly superior force in terms of training and equipment destroys and then occupies your city, the civilian populace did not just roll over and give up. The Russian counterattack, when it occurred, was carried out primarily by conscript forces with crummy equipment, and it still killed something like 850,000 German troops.
Let me emphasize that the civilians of Stalingrad were actively fighting back. Factory crews would literally build tanks, get in them, drive them out the front door and start shooting at Germans. Women and children were digging trenches for the Russian soldiers, or actively fighting back. The average life expectancy for a Russian soldier dropped to less than 24 hours at certain points, and they were still fighting.
you don't pacify a civilian population by destroying everything that was stopping them from fighting you in the first place.
Cliff notes version: It wasn't called strategic bombing because the name sounded cool. It was called strategic bombing because the objective was to bomb targets that were strategically important. If you're bombing someplace for the purpose of just killing everyone, that's called genocide.
As it pertains to Iraq, we're not fighting a cohesive military force. Bombing the cities is not going to deplete the resources of the insurgency, because, for the most part, the insurgency either already has their equipment or gets it from out of country. If, say, there were large factories supplying the insurgency in downtown baghdad, then the U.S military would be justified in bombing it. However, we already occupied the entire place so if there were such factories we could just go in on the ground and deal with it that way. Moreover, the insurgents are deeply embedded in the civilian population, and bombing the crap out of the cities would almost certainly kill many more civilians than insurgents. You don't kill a fly on your wall with a sledgehammer, because you put a hole in your wall and you would probably miss the fly anyway. You go over with a flyswatter and whack it.
Long story short, if you want to start World War 3, then, by all means, firebomb a few Iraqi cities. Any elements in the population that didn't already want to kill us would then have a pretty damn good reason to try. Think of what would happen if Iraq leveled New York or Boston or someplace. Military enrollment would skyrocket. Congress would throw money at whoever the president was to go and kill people. The country would go fucking ballistic, not just surrender. Why would you think it would work any different in reverse?
Bottom line: we're fighting a minority of the population in Iraq. If the population of Iraq as a whole were fighting back, there would be rivers of blood in the streets and it would be a massacre of the sorts not seen in over a half a century. Destroying a few cities isn't going to stop the insurgency; in all likelyhood, it would simply drive more people to join them.
