Re:Airmen who surveil the Islamic State never get to look away
by throwanem on Friday July 07, 2017 @08:47AM
(#14717901)
"Stand-up fight" means open combat. Guerrilla forces avoid that precisely because it's unwinnable for them, and instead employ tactics that play to their own strengths rather than those of their adversaries. In the case of the Vietnam War, those strengths were twofold: on the one hand, the NVA and Viet Cong knew the country in a way that we didn't and could leverage the civilian population in ways we couldn't; on the other hand, they knew it wasn't really a fight our nation had ever wanted, and by making it as ugly and interminable as possible, they could convince the US that continuing the war wasn't worth the atrocities and the casualties it would cost us to achieve anything we could call a win.
The IRA is a special case. Early on in their conflict, they employed typical guerrilla schrecklichkeit tactics - it was only later, when their leadership realized that killing English civilians was hardening opposition against them rather than advancing their goals, that they switched to targeting the English economy rather than its people. They found much more success that way, too - but they couldn't have done it at all absent the coincidence of geography that put them close enough to English economic centers for the tactic to be viable.
I shouldn't like to be mistaken for saying that all the moral opprobrium in conflicts like those we discuss should accrue to one side or the other. As I said in another comment here, warfare means having to choose, not between right and wrong, but what looks to be least among the wrongs which are all that that form of human interaction makes available. Even when proceeding from the best of intentions, people can't be relied upon to always make the choice which is clearly correct in retrospect - and, of course, people don't always proceed from the best of intentions. I'm not interested in defending the actions that brought us to the present state of affairs, because I regard them in the main as indefensible. But regardless of how we got here, we are here, and I fail to grasp how slandering our own military forces with the name "terrorist" in any way advances the purpose of finding a path forward that involves the minimum extent of atrocity, on all sides, that we can possibly manage to produce.
The IRA is a special case. Early on in their conflict, they employed typical guerrilla schrecklichkeit tactics - it was only later, when their leadership realized that killing English civilians was hardening opposition against them rather than advancing their goals, that they switched to targeting the English economy rather than its people. They found much more success that way, too - but they couldn't have done it at all absent the coincidence of geography that put them close enough to English economic centers for the tactic to be viable.
I shouldn't like to be mistaken for saying that all the moral opprobrium in conflicts like those we discuss should accrue to one side or the other. As I said in another comment here, warfare means having to choose, not between right and wrong, but what looks to be least among the wrongs which are all that that form of human interaction makes available. Even when proceeding from the best of intentions, people can't be relied upon to always make the choice which is clearly correct in retrospect - and, of course, people don't always proceed from the best of intentions. I'm not interested in defending the actions that brought us to the present state of affairs, because I regard them in the main as indefensible. But regardless of how we got here, we are here, and I fail to grasp how slandering our own military forces with the name "terrorist" in any way advances the purpose of finding a path forward that involves the minimum extent of atrocity, on all sides, that we can possibly manage to produce.