Concerning the recent murder and mutilation of Americans in Fallujah,
Iraq, Erik Reuter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
A spur of the moment crime of rage and hate, but not premeditated,
or at least not carefully considered and planned?
Why do you even consider this question? My questions are twofold:
* How many people were involved? My understanding is that the
population of the city is in the order of 250,000, so that if 2500
took part in the mutilations, that is 1 percent of the population.
* How many people planned and carried out the ambush and the follow
up actions? My guess is that no more than 100 people were
involved that way, and probably fewer. 100 out of 250,000 is 0.04
percent, which is not reflective of a population as a whole.
It would be easy for 100 people or fewer to preplan an operation. If
their PR/propaganda reflects the feelings of a portion of the
immediate population, then they can get 1% of the over all population.
(That number implies a higher percentage of people who are nearby, but
then again, in this case it presumes that as many as 2500 people were
involved in total. I have no idea what the total numbers are. But I
doubt that a majority of the city -- that is to say, more than 125,000
people -- were involved either in planning or in the mutilations.)
As far as I can see, everything you imply concerning large numbers of
people --- say 50,000 or more -- is irrelevant.
What war, specifically? What goal do they hope to achieve in their
war? And what considerations make a war just or unjust to them?
Let's think of who may have planned and organized this. There are two
possible groups: one is the military of the former government. They
want to defeat both the US and the majority of Iraqis, the Shi'ites.
>From their point of view, the US will retaliate, not the Shi'ites.
They may prefer that, since the Shi'ite organizations that are gaining
military power are composed of people who do not mind destroying a
city to gain revenge. Personally, I don't think this group had much
to do with this ambush.
The other group consists of people who want to recreate a caliphate.
Many of these people are foreign to Iraq, but not all. Militarily,
they have to want to prevent Iraq from becoming less corrupt or less
of an autarchy, since the government they propose is both corrupt and
dictatorial (it is a religious dictatorship). While they claim to be
against corruption, it is well known both to them and to the rest of
us that that kind of government becomes corrupt soon, if it is not
already.
So, as a practical matter, their military goal must be to encourage
more war in Iraq. The war would be both against the Americans and
their allies, such as the Poles. More importantly, it would be among
the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shi'ites. With such a war going on, not even
the most vigorous and expensive US action could make Iraq more
attractive than the imagined alternative.
After all, people have a strong sequence of what they want:
* first, Order, so they and their loved ones do not get killed
unexpectedly frequently.
* second, Law, so they and their loved ones can predict what is safe.
* third, Justice.
* fourth, A Role, even if very limited, in governance -- what is
called `democracy'. If nothing else, people want some rights for
their union, company, ethnic group, or clan, which most often they
support not as a leader, but as a follower.
Most dictatorships offer one and two. A few well established
dictatorships offer a bit of three, enough to keep things going.
(That is how they last.)
If you think militarily, then the killing of lots of Shi'ites last
month is a way to attack one.
The killing and mutilation of Americans, if the American soldiers
reply hotly as some on this list have suggested, is a way to invoke
massive retaliatory killings of Sunnis. This would be viewed as
justified by Americans and as a horror by Sunnis. Consequently, it
would likely lead to some as yet unrecruited, surviving young Sunni
men vowing to gain revenge, either against the Americans, which might
be hard, or against the local Shi'ite, which is likely to be easier.
So again we come back to religion apparently playing little role
in what they did.
Again, I have to ask you, when you say `they', what portion of the
population do you mean? How many standard deviations away from the
mean are you discussing?
They did not think about allah beforehand, ...
Are you suggesting that smart military men do not think of the
cultural belief systems of the various people they are trying to
influence by their actions? Clearly soldiers have often failed to
understand their enemies; but I have never heard of any who said
`don't think about your enemy'.
In this case, I would think that the planners of the ambush figured
they would get at least a small crowd to help them after they
conducted a classic `L' shaped ambush on the convoy, and killed the
people in the lead car. (I understand that the others -- those
driving the trucks carrying the food -- got away. Only the guards in
the first vehicle, an SUV, were killed. An `L' shaped ambush means
that some shot from the front and some shot from one side. None of
their bullets would go on to kill people in their side accidently,
because both shooting directions were away from their own soldiers.)
> Very probably. Many Arabs think Americans are cowards. No
> doubt they had in mind the fact that mutalating American dead
> was instrumental in getting Americans to leave Somolia.
Really? That is a rather complex line of thought to go through
before taking action.
Not at all. Think like one of the few people who planned this
operation: would you, as the equivalent of a captain or major in the
US army, or maybe even higher, not know what happened in Somalia?
Would you not think of US/Arab fighting over the past 20 years?
On the other hand, how likely is it that you would have read Walter
Russell Mead's essay, "The Jacksonian Tradition" in which he says that
historically, American voters have not been bothered much if
foreigners die, and have been willing to bear large US casualties when
they think the cause is worth while?
http://www.nationalinterest.org/issues/58/Mead.html
As Mead says in his first sentence,
In the last five months of World War II, American bombing raids
claimed the lives of more than 900,000 Japanese civilians--not
counting the casualties from the atomic strikes against Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
I doubt the planners of this ambush read Mead. But I do think they
paid attention to what happened in the Lebanon under Reagan and in
Somalia under Clinton. In both situations, the US pulled out after
what most military men consider `light casualties'.
--
Robert J. Chassell Rattlesnake Enterprises
http://www.rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
http://www.teak.cc [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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