Text 14616, 199 rader
Skriven 2007-05-16 06:45:11 av Vorlonagent (1028.babylon5)
Kommentar till en text av rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Ärende: Re: unions
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"lizardgirl" <gabiks@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:1179247251.946643.148050@p77g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
> On May 15, 12:09 am, "Vorlonagent" <nojts...@otfresno.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> This conflict is completely winnable with a combination of will and
>> proper
>> presentation. Unfortunatey the US media and Democratic Party are doing a
>> great job of undermining both and Bush is doing a terrible job of
>> compensating.
>>
>
> ok, lets kick that around a bit.
>
> your commander and chief. i'm the highest ranking iraqi official in
> the country.
>
> how do we win this war, john?
I. Fight The Media War
It would be great to get some genuine balance out of the mainstream media.
Having the media cease its emphasis on the negative and de-emphasis of the
positive would help tremendously. However much the press could stomach
moving toward the sort of coverage it gave WWII would help huge amounts.
Unfortunately, no Republican, and especially not Bush, has a prayer of that
so you go to Plan B
Mount my own permanent, agressive PR campaign. Foir the last 20 years
Republicans dustanced themselves from the hostility of the meanstream press.
As Reagan showed, you can get a lot done speaking straight to the people,
thought the press willt ry to punish you for trying it. Guilani is a
presidential frontrunner because he was in front of the cameras after 9/11.
I forget now when Rumsfeld was holding practically every-day press
conferences. I forget whether it was 9/11 or the early days of the Iraq
invasion but people loved him for it. Then he stopped and now he has
resigned in disgrace. The Bush Admin has bought into the isolation mindset
and it has given his opponents and the press the ability to set the
political agenda in this country and that has been a serious determent to
the war.
Hold more press conferences, Go out of my way to challenge and balance out
the negativity in the mainstream press. Once a week like clockwork take
time out to tell the stories of the war, relay the victories that our troops
had that week. Make sure that everything is bulletproof-factual and nobody
in the media can come back in a week and tell the people "what really
happened" without themselves lying or twisting the truth. It's one thing
for Tony Snow to slug it out with the Press but quite another for the
President to. It nice to say you suppport the troops but one has to fight
for them when it's important.
The Media War is every bit as important as the shooting war on the ground.
The islamics that make up the bulk of the ranks of terrorists are often
under-educated. Appearance is everything over there. The appearance of
being tough and badass means you are. Right after the war, some iraqis
thought US night vision goggles gave us X-ray vision. Iraqi TV used to run
a TV program (and may still) of video of terroists talking tough on video
tape but whining and crying when captured. It was very popular. It should
be run in the US. That's what I meant about the mideast recoiling whenever
a major terrorist badass got killed by americans. If we put up the facade
of being united and resolute, then no matter what we think privately, we ARE
united and resolute to the bad guys and they're much more likley to quit the
field sooner. If we put up the appearance of being divided and squabbling
amongst ourselves and losing the courage of our convictions we look weak and
like someone who can be bullied.
See, that's the mindset we're dealing with: bullies. The proper answer to a
bully is to punch him in the nose, not give him your lunch money with great
deference to his religious or ethnic history. Its important that you punch
the bully in the nose as soon as you've identified him as one because the
longer he's at it, the more addicted his is to winning and the harder it is
to break him of the habit. We are trying to break the whole mideast of the
bully habit and they've been at it since the Carter Admin and the Iranian
Hostage crisis. It's gonna take a while.
II Quietly put the screws to the iranian economy
Iran is THE big thorns in the US side when it comes to Iraq. Iran uses its
oil revenue to fund all kinds of problems in the mideast. Iranian money is
the lifes blood of hezbollah, iraninan munitions have been captured in
transit to Palentinian groups as well. Iran smuggled rockets to hezbollah
through syria so you can bet that Iranina bombs and weaponry are coming in
over the syrian and iranian borders. Iran took in some displaced Al Queda
people when we kicked the Taliban out of Afghanistan. It would not be a
stretch to find Iranina money supporting Al queda despite the harsh
religious differences between hardline-sunni Al Queda and hardline shiite
iran.
Give US friends reasons not to trade with iran. Make credit harder for them
with western lending insitutions.
Iran is having some major economic probelms in part because Bush is doing
exactly thi and in part because they've been putting their money everywhere
except equipment update and mainetenance.
We don't want to take military action against iran if we can avoid it
because it should collapse from the inside if we can help make the mullahs
look weak enough to topple.
III troop deployments in Iraq
I don't know what the hades most US troops are doing but I suspect it's not
aggressive enough. We have a lot of forces tied up in patrolling cities and
that's important, but we need enough spare troops to go after the bad guys
as aggressively as the iraqi government will let us. Bush's "surge" is a
step in the right direction.
It's likley that many bad guys have gone to ground to wait the surge out.
There's two thinsg we can do about that. 1) Find them and take them down.
2) keep up aggressive action indefinitely.
Punishing the bad guys is the big thing because the more that lose heart,
the harder it gets to recruit more.
We go take more casualties doing this, but it's what our soldiers are
trained to do and do with ummatched expertise.
This will also take appropriations to fix a huge amount of equipment that
has come back and hasn't ben reprocessed and returned to working order.
Maintenance appropriations ahve remained at peacetime levels despite there
being a war on and the stuff needing fixing is piling up.
IV Employ Iraqis to rebuild Iraq. The US military put up a lot of schools,
roads etc when they should have been out patrolling or fighting bad guys.
The more honest jobs we have for them and the more job skills we can teach
them, the lesser the hold that terroist money has.
V Rebuild the way Iraqi footsoldiers and police officers are trained. The
US mistakenly just tried to train the Iraqi officer corps and left the
enlisted ranks alone. the failure of this decision is obvious. Even
forgetting those who get training then desert to the ranks of the bad guys,
Mideast armies are generally poorly trained, corrupt and prone to desertion
because they're very top-down structures. A US seargent has about as much
leeway in his orders as a colonel in, say the saudi army. Vital skills are
hoarded in order to inflate individual importance or influence weheas the US
extensively cross-trains. This is why israel held on against such long
odds in its wars. they trained like a western army. It's also why the US
cut through the iraqi army like a bullet through wet tissue paper in either
Gulf War. Look to the Jodanian model for useful hints on how to convert a
mideast style army into a western army and train the grunts that way too.
This includes inoducing conepts like honor and the rule of law. A reason
why US troops are still in Kosovo is because the Kosovars don't want us to
leave. We've shown we can be evenhanded, fair and hard to bribe. That
skill needs to be taught. We need 20,000-50,000 troops for this. the rest
patrol, guard and fight, or rest from the above duties.
VI Make munitions trafficking across the iraqi border harder. This may
mean patrolling the entire border ourselves, which sucks Iran and syria
are prime conduits but I'd be surprised if the Saudis weren't kicking some
encouragement in the direction of Iraqi baathinsts and other Sunnis. This
has to be stopped or at least made more annoying to do.
It will still be a tough slog for an indeterminant amount of time, but this
plan will succeed. Probably not in time for the 2008 election, maybe not in
time for the 2010 election but the end will come fast when it comes. Taking
Afghanistan as an example, it will look like a tough slog for the next 3
years when suddenly huge amounts of loyalists to various anti-US factions
will say "screw this stuipd war" and toss down their guns and switch their
support to the winning side (i.e ours). They're bullies, remember.
Then all you'll have left are the hardcore buys but wit the majority of the
country against them, they'll have to get out of dodge, go to ground or die.
There's some evidence of this happening. Even before the surge, individual
little opposition groups were disbanding and Al Queda was soaking up the
hard core militants. That's momentum in the right direction.
Remember the whole reason to be in Iraq is to re-envision the mideast in
terms too concrete to ignore. A world that's less driven by favors, bribes
and relision and more by law and the voice of the people. We see little
hints that the message is getting out. Lebanon threw off Syrian control, at
least party. The palestinians held halfway genine elections (it would have
been nicer if there were some non-terrorists running, but in a country like
that, it simply isn't practical the first few timnes around) And we see
some movement in iran away from the Ayatllahs that run the country and
toward Iraq's Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani who has a much more peaceful,
quietist philosophy.
If all we wanted to do is stomp on Saddam's little anthill, we could have
been out in 2004.
--
John Trauger,
Vorlonagent
"Methane martini.
Shaken, not stirred."
"Spirituality without science has no mind.
Science without spirituality has no heart."
-Methuselah Jones
--- SBBSecho 2.12-Win32
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