military might is least worry this time
AlbieF15 said:
Humble,
If you haven't been in the military, or haven't participated in combat...then your opinions on how we will "k!ck ass" are juvenille and pure speculation. . . . . . I won't speculate on those actions--but I think those who think this will be 1991 all over again are completely mistaken. Its not the SA-3s over Baghdad that concern me...its SA-7s, chemical weapons, and plastic explosives around the globe in the hands of Iraqi agents.
I hope I am wrong....
I'm not in the military (yet!), but as a civilian who's had the unique experience of living in a combat zone, I could not have said it better myself. To add a few things...
People have to realize this whole thing needs to be thought through VERY carefully. If you've not lived it, you'll get lulled into a very false sense of "order and ease of warfare" watching smart bomb footage on CNN taking out a bridge or command center or playing Falcon 4.0.
Few people here realize how complicated the politics of this situation are. What's black and white to us is 256 shades of gray when you hit the ground in the Middle East.
I personally think a new showdown with Saddam will make our operations in 1991 and recently, Afghanistan , seem like a cakewalk.
For one thing, last Autumn/Winter we had a signifigant local opposition force to do most of the ground pounding/land grabbing for us. While there are plenty of opposition groups in Iraq, few of them have been able to work as cohesively as say the groups forming the Afghani Northern Alliance. Things may be a little bit better in the North and South where the Kurds and Shia have borne the brunt of Saddam's tyrany, but in the Baath strongholds of Central Iraq, don't expect the populace to immediately understand why our presence is the best thing they could have ever hoped for.
Whether or not we'll be able to do what we'd like to do to Saddam this time around, depends less on military might than public perception. In those two previous campaigns it was not as difficult to garner public opinion in our favor. Iraq was the aggressor plain and simple. If have you haven't noticed, the world isn't exactly running to mount an offensive against Iraq these days. We have different priorities. Although it may seem wierd to wonder who
wouldn't want to help rid the world of rogue nations with WMDs, the onus is on us right now to convince the rest of the world to share these priorities.
Lastly, I have heard very little of what we would do once we actually get rid of Madass. To prevent the next 30 odd years from becoming a repeat of the last 30 years, we have to be committed to the single biggest attempt at nation-building since post-WWII Germany, mainly the "de-nazification" of Iraq (or in this case the de-baathification).
While all of this is going on, you can bet every assymetric extremist ass*ole and his cousin twice-removed are going to attempt to derail the process however they can, whereever they can.
These are the folks we better prepare for.
Now you don't have to understand exactly why all this is so, but you should at least understand that it
is so.
When I get the chance to serve, I will gladly do so where ever that may be. I just hope that the folks in charge are savvy enough to figure out that what worked in '91 isn't necessarily what will the this time around. To succeed, will require some serious thinking out of the box. You'll do better to crack a book on military history than simply studying the specs in Jane's All The World's Armies.