The Neocon Staussian logic falters on this one assumption. They believe that war is inevitable and superior military strength should be utilized. They forget that superior military strength can only be utilized if the will of the country can be manifested to crush the enemy.

Think through how any of the above mentioned leaders would approach Iraq and the words genocide and slavery come to mind.

The concept of “the will to wage war” is a an important dynamic because it’s a one that is ill-considered in the Necon philosophy. When the conservatives analyze their military superiority they ponder smart missiles and stealth bombers and assume that these advantages translate to utopian military outcomes.

If we could bring Sun Tzu in as an independent consultant on the middle east his review would points
“There are three ways by which the army is put into difficulty by the ruler,

He does not know that [his army] should not advance but instructs them to advance, or does not know [his army] should not withdraw and orders a retreat. This is termed ‘entangling the army.’

He does not understand [his army’s] military affairs but [directs them] in the same way as his [civil] administration. Then the officers will become confused.

He does not understand [his army’s] tactical balance of power (ch’ûan) but undertakes responsibility for command. Then the officers will be doubtful. (Powell, Zinni etc etc)

. “When employing [the army] in battle, a victory that is long in coming will blunt their weapons and dampen their ardor. If you attack cities, [the army’s] strength will be exhausted.

If you expose the army to a prolonged campaign, the state’s resources will be inadequate. [Think of the growing deficit and war spending, and then of the rebuilding effort.]

“One who excels in employing the military does not conscript the people twice or transport provisions a third time.” And, “The state is impoverished by the army when it transports provisions far off.

When provisions are transported far off, the hundred surnames [taxpayers] are impoverished.”
“Thus what [motivates men] to slay the enemy is anger; what [stimulates them] to seize profits from the enemy is material goods.

Thus in chariot encounters, when ten or more chariots are captured, reward the first to get one. Change their flags and pennants to ours; intermix and employ them with our own chariots.”
“Treat the captured soldiers well in order to nurture them [for our use]. This is referred to as ‘conquering the enemy and growing stronger.’”
“There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.”

The number of US soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen deployed around the world is imposing.
Fully one-third of the 1.4 million men and women in the armed forces are posted outside the country, either ashore or afloat, in 136 countries.

Their operations range from several sergeants on training missions in Latin America or Africa to 169,000 troops in Iraq and 19,000 in Afghanistan. Some are in Central Asia, which is literally halfway around the world. Moreover, this military empire dates back six decades to the end of World War II.

Today, 69,000 troops are in Germany, 35,000 in Japan, 12,000 in Italy and 11,000 in Britain. In South Korea are 33,000 troops still there 53 years after the Korean War.

The cost in blood has been intense. In South Korea, Vietnam and the smaller skirmishes such as that in Panama since 1945, more than 82,000 US warriors have suffered battle death. More than three times that number have been wounded. The number killed in Iraq has passed 2,050 and continues to climb.

Added to this is the cost in treasure. US taxpayers have been asked for US$450 billion for next year’s defense budget, which is more than the combined military spending of China, Japan, France and 10 other nations, according to the CIA.

Bin Laden’s proposes that he will provoke the US into bankruptcy . Everyone of his communications reflects the tactic of provoking the US to spend money. He invested 100k in 9/11 and provoked a $2 trillion dollar response
Back to Sun Tzu

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
I would say the US falls into a category worse than the “know neither” category – the “I don’t want to know either” category. We are blind to what is going on over there, and to our own disastrous energy trajectory.

Bin Laden tells us exactly what he will do, and what he wants us to do in response – then we do it and claim victory. We think we are winning the war against Al Qaeda when his greatest victory (9-11) was to drag us into the middle east (like the Soviets in Afghanistan, and us before in Vietnam). His dream is a United States that gets more dependent on Arabian oil every day, and bankrupts its government with military spending that only inflames his base. The day of reckoning he wants wasn’t 9/11, it will be the collapse of the United States economy and retreat from the middle east.

Its not game theory . You folk are losing a war because of poor commanders, tactics and strategy.

Using the seizure as a starting point, as others were doing publicly, Gadhafi laid out what the United States and Britain secretly knew, for the most part, about his nuclear program. In November, some of the particulars of his disarmament protocol were decided. By December, the United States and Britain would be touring Libyan facilities, along with representatives from the International Atomic Energy Agency. They looked at centrifuge parts and components, many of them still crated. In exchange, Gadhafi got what he wanted: The sanctions were lifted. Among the country’s ruling elite, the whole matter was viewed as being artfully handled, with no discernible loss of face by the leader of the revolution.

As for George W. Bush, he wound up getting to say, countless times, the thing he desperately wanted to say to help offset the crumbling Iraq experiment, a measurable face-saving aria: that Gadhafi had given up his weapons because of how the U.S. invasion of Iraq had changed the landscape.

Of course, neither Bush nor Gadhafi was really telling the truth. The key to the agreement between the two sides—all but written into the fine print—was that each would get to “save face.”

If you concede that abstract signalling games are a reasonable way to model intl relations, and also accept that they are a reasonable way to model the individual selection events that culminate in the development of ‘secondary sexual’ traits, then you’re stuck with indirect but empirical support for dsquared’s interpretation.

The point being that when country A successfully deters country B by doing something that’s transparently stupid, it’s a low-probability event. When you put the outcomes of real-life observations into those little NxN boxes you can see very clearly that it’s a bad strategy (which, concidentally, is what’s predicted by the theory).

Truth isn’t your strongpoint, is it?

Well, given my past experience with Crooked Timberites, I daren’t actually respond, much though I’d like to. (I suppose I should be grateful that you’ve only banned me from continuing a single discussion, rather than from ever commenting on your posts again.)

I’ll trust readers to spot your logical and historical errors themselves. But I really don’t understand the need for injecting personal insults into this kind of discussion. Then again, they—like the bannings—seem to be endemic around here…

First, in early October 2003, the United States allegedly intercepted an illegal shipment of thousands of parts of uranium-enrichment equipment bound for Libya.

You just keep lying.

@51: Indeed, and peace reigns in the Levant…oh, you meant this reality.

Yeah. This is a fantasy, it’s not the way things work in real life.

1. You are badly confused about the Viet Cong (a term used by the Americans and RVN which just means “Vietnamese Communists”). They were a powerful and popular revolutionary movement and remained one throughout the war. Post 1968, however, they were not a movement which the Politburo believed that they could reliably control, for lack of trained and trusted cadre. Cadre cannot be produced overnight, because it is a process of education which takes time. Nor could they be shipped in from the North as Northerners would stand out like a sore thumb and in any case this went counter to Vietnamese doctrine of the time. For this reason, the Southern Vietnamese party was restricted to low-level terrorist operations, although these were of course significant enough that the USA felt the need to carry out programmes like Phoenix.

2. Your belief that nothing counts except personal assassination of opposing commanders is a silly theory of international relations (note that it would have the implication that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had no effect as it did not touch Hirohito or his commanders). In fact, the Hanoi Politburo suffered several casualties from the bombing, but even if it had not, this would still be a completely daft theory, better suited to the chessboard than anything else. The proof that I am right here and your James-Bond-villain theory of the Politburo’s indifference to all around them is wrong, is that the North Vietnamese did, in fact, regularly open up negotiations with Kissinger in Paris out of a fear of civilian casualties. They had popular support, as I think I have mentioned.

Precisely. Back in 1973, it was widely assumed that the VC were a large, powerful local rebel faction, rather than a tattered remnant of an NVA adjunct force. Now, of course, we know better—or at least most of us do…

The VC retained substantial support (at least partly because of US brutality), but didn’t regroup as a military organisation because of a shortage of cadre to maintain its political reliability.

I’m missing something here. Despite “substantial support”, they didn’t have enough politically reliable cadre to rebuild?

Nonsense. Hanoi was bombed over and over again.

And you’re saying this bothered the North Vietnamese Politburo? They themselves were well protected, and as for the local casualties—well, why would they care more about the population of Hanoi than about the hordes of their own citizens they were using as cannon fodder in their war against the South?

When I talk about “directly targeting the decision-makers”, I really mean the decision-makers themselves, not just the city they live in. Baghdad was quite heavily bombed in 1991, but when Saddam Hussein emerged unscathed after his army’s ejection from Kuwait, he made it very plain to all that he wasn’t the least bit chastened by the US’ having “sent a signal” by defeating him. He simply went on building palaces, restarting his WMD programs (the one that was spotted and dismantled in 1998, for instance), and looking for ways to evade the various sanctions, resolutions and restrictions imposed on him.

It held on for two years because the North Vietnamese had been bombed to pieces and needed time to regroup.

….Before invading and conquering the South. As I said, had the North never invaded, the South would likely still exist today.

Actually, from Korea – which came in at a draw – to the Hungarian Revolution to Cuba at the end of the fifties, the U.S. seemed to say we would fight, and then backed down, or retreated. Wise of the U.S. to do so. In 49 China went communist, in around 56 India went neutralist, in 57-60 Nasser leaned communist, as did Sukarno in Indonesia. In Guatamala, the U.S. did intervene, kicking off 30 years of insurgency. Rollback doctrine never actually rolled back anything, as the U.S. was much too wise to follow through on its rhetoric, or its parachuted in paramilitaries – usually fascist leaning paramilitaries at that. Finally, the decade ended with the shooting down of a U-2 plane.

If the benefits are non-existent, then what you are saying makes sense. I think, though, that the benefits of credibility are huge and long-lasting. It seems to me that the US was almost 100% credible in 1950; everyone in the world believed that 1) if we said we would fight, we would fight and also believed 2) if you fight us, you will lose. In my opinion, we are still benefitting from that historical credibility, although we’ve let it decline over time.