12-10-2016, 11:54 PM
(12-10-2016, 07:51 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(12-09-2016, 02:21 PM)Cynic Hero Wrote: Playwrite: Most Xers and Millies opposed the Iraq war (and Afghanistan after Bin Laden was killed) because boomers refused to allow the troops to fight with the gloves OFF.
I can't speak for all Boomers, just for this one, but when Bush 43's "surge" occurred as the 2008 election cycle was gearing up, there was a shift in tactics that came with it. The early battle against the insurgency focused on killing bad guys. As in Vietnam, the Army kept score with a body count. It was presumed that if we killed more people than we lost, we must be winning.
With the surge, came a shift in tactics from killing Iraqis to protecting Iraqis. They built a lot of walls and tried to protect the people within the walls. There was no small amount of racial cleansing. If the different tribal and religious factions lived in separate neighborhoods separated by walls with various forces covering the perimeter, the civilian deaths at least became less. The phrase 'hearts and minds' was thrown around. The new thought was that if you killed people, they'd get mad and try to kill you back. If you protected people, they might start treating you as a friend. This approach was called counterinsurgency. It didn't pacify Iraq, but it did significantly better than the initial 'increase the bodycount' approach.
Protecting people, trying to end the fighting, might be less gratifying to the young boots on the ground than killing people. It might be more fun, if a hostile sniper starts shooting at US troops from a village, to call in an air strike on the village. Entertaining the troops isn't the general's job, though. If you want to entertain the troops, you call in the USO. If you want to end an insurgency, you use counterinsurgency tactics.
But even with the new tactics, if you are fighting an insurgency, you really want a certain ratio of occupying troops to boots on the ground. LBJ was told that the troop level he was intending to use in Vietnam would not be sufficient if the opposition went to insurgent warfare. LBJ went in anyway, the enemy went insurgent, and the US didn't have the will to escalate. The exact same thing happened in Iraq. If you don't have the will and the funds for a lot of boots on the ground, the tactics don't matter a lot, you are going to get a quagmire. After years of trying to make it work with inadequate force, and knowing full well that they were fielding an inadequate force, even Bush 43 recognized that it was time to start bringing the troops home.
Anyway, this Boomer at least favors counterinsurgency tactics when fighting insurgencies because expending ammunition with the goal of maximizing the bodycount just helps the insurgents recruit.
I was going to post most of the same thing - all except that protecting ordinary Iraqis was actually a goal from the beginning; it was just that the surge was needed to have enough troops to do it. Iraq would ultimately have been a success had the US followed through on ensuring democratic traditions were established, rather than corrupted.
However, I disagree that "will" would have been sufficient to do the same in Vietnam. Human nature is such that it's difficult to make people enthusiastic about fighting and sacrificing for the benefit of people who are on the other side of the world. It's far easier to make them enthusiastic about fighting and sacrificing to fight against the evil of people on the other side of the world. In that respect, Cynic Hero's view is much closer to what most people could feel emotionally, even if logically it's a mistake.