Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I was thinking that force doesn't work so well. E.g., not for the Russians in Chechnya and Afghanistan. We put panties on the heads of prisoners in Iraq, and yet they're not backing down yet -- if that doesn't stop them, what will?
So you don't mean that they respect force. You mean that there's no point in talking, we should just get all Rambo on their ass because they're trying to kill us, so we should just kill them.
I'm not really going to argue with you about this, except to note that the brilliant foreign-policy strategist George W. Bush implicitly rejected your approach when he decided to invade Afghanistan and Iraq instead of simply bombing them back to the Stone Age. I don't usually find myself touting his views, but strange bedfellows and all that.
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I view Bush's efforts in Afghanistan as half-assed. He should have demanded that the Pakistanis let us use the provinces as a testing ground for new weapons. We should have just bombed it until it glowed a funny color, then bombed it some more. Make sure that whatever lives in it can't eat anything grown in its soil. Hell, we could have done that by giving Musharraf a few billion. He'd take it.
Iraq is a good idea gone totally wrong. Bush needed to integrate the Baathists, not take them out. They're cruels bastards, but they're secularists. If he kept their party apparatus together, he'd have a strong party to hand power to. Instead, he has a cobbled together affiliation of disparate tribes. It'll never last, but it has done one great thing - it exported the terror war to Iraq. Its much better to have Zarqawi targeting Iraq than NYC.
They don't respect anything, but horrifying force is demoralizing. You don't see Islamists in Syria anymore, do you? No, because they rose up once and Assad retaliated by leveling an entire neighborhood where they were concentrated. The Islamists still write about it as a horror of proportions they've never seen. No one got out. Lamentable? Sure, but you haven't seen any islamists demanding overthrow of the Syrian monarchy, have you? That butchering scared them silent. That, and Hussein's brutal persecution of Islamists in Iraq, were the only two times radical Islam has been effectively stopped dead. You can't handle animals with a velvet glove. Islam lives and dies by the sword. Give it what it wants and get it over with.
