The effectiveness of a nation-building exercise over there is another matter. LBJ and Nixon didn’t think about the necessary step of eradicating the NV commie government, so they certainly weren’t thinking about a) reconstructing a NV government, or b) negotiating the creation of a post-commie unified Vietnam.

I wrote about how to end the war. I didn’t speculate on the long-term success of various reconstruction plans.

Amusing that anyone would be idiotic enough to entertain an analogy to Imperial Spain – as if there were a parallel between reckless American do-goodery and Spain’s jackbooted looting of South and Central America. Spain did fight an evil empire – the human-sacrifice-happy Aztecs, who deserved to be thrown into the dustbin of history – but the similarities don’t go much further.

Maybe it’s that word “conquest” throwing you off. Many associate it with the bad guys. Conquest is what happens in both just and unjust wars. The Arabs conquered the Levant. The US conquered Germany and Japan. Germany and Russia conquered parts of each other on various occasions.

For those suggesting the continued use of the ‘crazy president’ school of diplomacy, I would argue that you take a look at Iran’s reaction to Western threats so far. Far from deterring them, it gives them something to bounce off. Standing up to the US makes these guys look strong, domestically and internationally. If you want to counter Iran, don’t look to Nixon and Kissinger, take a cue from Bush Snr. and try a little coalition building. Use international pressure, it may take longer but it does work – did I hear someone mention South Africa? – and if you are going to go to war, make sure you know how to end it. As for charging through Tehran with a couple of armoured corps, ‘just like we did with Saddam’ counting as a serious solution, consider how well that has gone so far. Just remember, Iran has a population of sixty nine million people, most whom have been taught from the cradle that the US is the ‘Great Satan’ who will one day come for them.

What is really surprising is the straight faced discussion of Nixon’s foreign policy re Vietnam as a possible diplomatic method. Anyone who has read Anthony Summers’ book ‘The Arrogance of Power’ would realise that if Nixon was not mad he was, at the very least, crippled by paranoia exacerbated by massive abuse of drugs and alcohol. If the stratigies of a ruthless political operator, notorious for his unsound and unsavoury methods, are seen as a viable option, then I think we are all in need of an asprin, a cup of tea and a good lie down.

As for #51, is there is still a serious belief that the US could have won the Vietnam War by invading the North? You really need to brush up on your history. Here’s a recap – the US got itself involved in a civil war on the side of an inefficient, corrupt and illegal regime which was deeply unpopular with the Vietnamese people. The Vietnamese had been fighting foreigners for a thousand years, hoping to establish and then defend their own nation. If you think by simply taking the North, the US and its allies would have caused the Vietnamese to lay down thier arms and cheerfully start working for the man, you are sorely mistaken. They would have kicked us out, even if it had taken another twenty years. Communist or not, and many were not, they were fighting for their homes. Does this scenario have a familiar and slightly contemporary ring to it? Military conquest does not kill the tiger, it merely changes your grip on its tail.

If we’d tried to conquer north vietnam at least we would have had a lot of vietnamese speakers for translators.

Quote Glenn Reynolds: “A corollary is that the United States probably needs to be scarier and less predictable itself”

Pretty much sounds like he is suggesting we need to adopt aspects of unpredictability as well.

Well, logically it can’t threaten to be unpredictable. If you threaten something, then it’s not really unpredictable. You can threaten to be aggressive, or passive, or even irrational, but not unpredictable.

Well, you could, but it would sound a bit weak. “I will do such things – what they are yet I know not, but they will be the terrors of the earth.”

Or you could announce the use of a dice-based foreign policy.

“I have this to say to President Ahmedinejad. The people of the United States have no desire for war with Iran. But unless Iran agrees to admit inspectors as a sign of its commitment to peace and non-proliferation, I will order the Joint Chiefs of Staff to roll 2d6 and consult the following table:

2d6 Foreign Policy Initiative

2: Dispatch Jimmy Carter to Teheran
3: Dispatch a special envoy (player’s choice)
4: Condemn Iran at NATO summit
5: Appeal to the UN Security Council
6: Enforce sanctions on Iranian assets
7: Blockade
8: Expel Iranian diplomats
9: Airstrikes
10: Sink Iranian tankers
11: Invade Iran
12: WILD CARD! Invade another random state!

‘ATRIOS FOR SECRETARY OF STATE:

Certainly an Iran-with-nukes could blow the hell out of a city or two, but an Iran that did such a thing would pretty much cease to exist. It isn’t mutually assured destruction, it’s you fuck with us a little bit and YOU NO LONGER LIVE BITCHES!

Perhaps we could put this in a demarche?’

Definition of Demarche: ‘an action or gesture by a diplomat, esp. a formal appeal, protest, or the like.’

‘Look, I just don’t get this stuff. I don’t want Iran to have nukes. I don’t think that’s a good thing for the world. I certainly didn’t want Pakistan or India to have nukes. But is a nuclear Iran really a threat to us? Certainly an Iran-with-nukes could blow the hell out of a city or two, but an Iran that did such a thing would pretty much cease to exist. It isn’t mutually assured destruction, it’s you fuck with us a little bit and YOU NO LONGER LIVE BITCHES!’

Hilarious!

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_01_29_atrios_archive.html#113911351884241633

There are terrorists trying to do national liberation, who’re so weak they can’t go after military targets but go after civilians. Like the IRA hitting civilians in england. (They may have made a real difference when they almost killed high government officials.) The point is to show the enemy that it isn’t just their soldiers against occupied civilians, everybody’s at risk.

There are terrorists who go after tourists, figuring that the tourist trade brings money to the enemy and they can try to shut that off. When it’s reducing tourists in the occupying nation (like palestinians trying to reduce tourists to israel) then it makes sense. When it’s reducing tourism in their own country, making their own supporters poorer as well as the government, then it’s a sign that they’re very very weak and probably don’t have much support.

There are terrorists who support some grand philosophy or religion. They might feel their ideals are worth killing millions of people for. But usually they have some intention of winning something, it isn’t enogh to kill millions of people and then get stamped out.

And there are terrorists who have no hope for the future, but want revenge for losses in the past.

And there are terrorists so very weak that any hope they can do something that people will notice is more hope than they can reasonably expect.

It’s only the last three that have reason to use nukes. If you’re trying to throw an enemy army out of your country, and you nuke the enemy country, what’s the chance the army will leave? Pretty slim. They can’t very well nuke your country while they occupy it, they can’t hold a whole cityful of your people responsible for what you did. But there’s no way they’re going to leave and let you run the place. They’re going to do everything they possibly can to find you. And your people will tend to understand them, and sympathise some, or at least be very, very afraid.

Unless you can nuke them decisively, so they lose their military threat, it’s a stupid thing to do. On the other hand, if you nuke some of their military forces in your own country, that’s a different story….

Persuading the public of some other country that their military actions might reflect back on them, that it’s personal and not just something their government is doing that has nothing to do with them—that can be a viable approach. Hurting the enemy public real bad is not. You want to get their attention, get them to notice that it matters, that they have a stake in it. You don’t want to make them insanely angry.

It makes far more sense for israel to nuke an american city and say the arabs did it, than for any arab or muslim group to do it—if it’s arabs who want us to leave them alone.

So it’s only those last three groups who might be willing to do it. The third group I discount. If they’re so weak they’ll do anything to get noticed, then they can’t get a nuke.

Mostly people who want their ideals to prevail aren’t going to do terrorist nukes; possibly some would. They can’t expect to do game theory. If they say “We have nukes and we might use them”, they don’t get negotiated with. They just get put first on the list to be tracked down and killed. You can’t negotiate on that basis any more than you can negotiate with the Danish.

They can’t expect to set off a nuke and then brag about it. “See what we did, give in or we’ll do worse.” The world will tend to cooperate with the attacked nation to track them down and kill them.

If they want us to do something, nuking us just isn’t the way to get what they want.

The one terrorist version that makes sense is the one where they’re in such despair at what they’ve already lost that they want to hurt us no matter how much worse it gets. I don’t know of anybody who’s approaching that except palestinians and chechnyans. I’ve read the claim that chechnyans have lost more than 10% of their population. That’s cause for a lot of grief but they still have 90% left with lots of babies, and they have that to lose. Palestinians have lost less so far, but the israelis have been pretty sophisticated at trying to make them give up all hope. There might be groups in either place that would use nukes if they could get them, intending that they’ll at least hit back before they go extinct. I don’t see anybody else.

My initial thought: If you have two populations of game-players (rather than two people playing a game once), then one population can prove to the other that most of its members are prepared to carry out threats.

It works something like this: the terrorist organization selects a dozen or so of its members at random (ideally, you need to do it in a way that can be proven random to the other side). All the selected members blow themselves up in a suicide bombing with conventional explosives. Then the nuclear weapon is given to one of the remainder.