Badtux the Snarky Penguin

In a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin.

Religious fundamentalists are motivated by the sneaking suspicion that someone, somewhere, is having fun -- and that this must be stopped.


Saturday, June 24, 2006

How to "win" in Iraq

People keep talking about how there's a war in Iraq. There isn't. Wars are fought between the armies of opposing countries. Once the armies of the enemy are destroyed and your army is free to move around at will in the enemy's country, the war is over. You've won.

What you have, then, is an occupation. And there's only two ways to win an occupation: Genocide, or expulsion. Consider, for example, the Roman occupation of ancient Israel. Yeah, just think about the Roman occupation of Israel. The Jews rose up in rebellion time after time, killing thousands of Roman soldiers. Finally, the Romans had enough of that shit and did the only thing that will ever quell rebellions against occupying powers -- they exterminated what Jews they could exterminate, and took the rest and scattered them all over the Empire where they couldn't pester the Romans anymore.

Genocide or expulsion, them's the only two ways to "win" as an occupying power... as the Jews well-knew when they re-entered ancient Israel as a minority and made themselves the majority (mostly through expulsion, thankfully... ethnic cleansing is ugly, but at least it isn't the "Final Solution" that genocide is). The Israelis forgot that lesson when they became an occupying power in Lebanon, and had to leave with their heads tucked between their tails after getting their asses handed them. Sadly, the lesson that Dear Leader gets from that experience is "Stay the course!". Yeah. Like the captain of the Titanic. Damn the icebergs, stay the course!

So what is Dear Leader's plan to "win" in Iraq? Is he going to "kill'em all and let Allah sort'em out"? Expell them to... err, where? (There's no surrounding country with the ability to absorb 20,000,000 Iraqis). Neither one of those is going to be politically acceptable. The people of the United States aren't going to let Dear Leader do a Joseph Stalin and exterminate tens of millions of people in order to ensure control of occupied countries (yeppers, that's how Stalin solidified Soviet control over Eastern Europe in the aftermath of WWII). At least, I hope they won't. You never know, given how cowardly and cringing the typical American is nowdays. "We must be kept safe" indeed... whatever the hell happened to "Give me liberty, or give me death!" as the symbolic slogan of the American people? When did the national slogan of the United States become, "Keep me safe, Dear Leader!"?

Occupations just can't be won by "staying the course". Israel found that out the hard way. Sadly, Dear Leader can't absorb any lesson more complex than "My Pet Goat"...

-BT

Posted by: BadTux / 6/24/2006 10:23:00 AM  

Comments:

CNN has a quick poll up on whether the Miami 7 are dangerous. The results made me sad.

We definitely aren't strong, proud or free.
# posted by Debra : 24/6/06 12:43 PM  

Sometimes, I believe that the worst thing that has ever happened to the United States is that we defeated Japan in World War II. The fact that the Japanese so easily submitted to occupation has almost certainly corrupted all following occupations. I had hoped that we would have learned our lesson in Vietnam (which was basically an occupation), but it seems that we didn't. Now, it appears that we're in the same situation in Iraq, and will probably suffer the same outcome. :-(
# posted by Anonymous : 26/6/06 1:17 PM  

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