The next war thread

[russotto]

Originally posted by tw

Some gems that have me seriously bothered. Iraqis have not used radar guided anti-aircraft defense systems. Why? What are they waiting for?

Probably because every time they turn one on, it gets destroyed by radar seeking munitions.

War is that assymetrical meaning that it is a most intriguing, multi-dimensional jig saw puzzle. Not hard to understand. Every piece fits in the puzzle if you understand where it is coming from. View it from many different perspectives - which is why I have been so against this war - and why I am so concerned for how we will win this war, and why I cannot get enough news.

Your main problem here is you assume you know what the puzzle looks like, so you fit every piece you can into that notion. The other pieces get hacked to fit and/or discarded. You also assume that you're the only one to have picked up on some of these items. Don't you think the US military had some idea of what the terrain was like? And if the military really naively expected all the people to welcome them as liberators, why did they bypass Basra?

van Creveld has it right: Everything said by either side is a lie. Or at least potentially so. What politicians say is orthagonal to the truth. The military wants to boast of its own accomplishments, and it wants to send a message that resistance is futile. But at the same time it wants to conceal its operations and also get Iraqi forces to overextend themselves outside the cities. The few things you can believe aren't sufficient to put together a coherent picture. You can tell things aren't going according to a best-case scenario, but jumping from there to a worst-case scenario is an incredible leap.

(and when am I going to learn not to respond to tw? Probably when Saddam Hussein learns humility...)