7 ms·
> because there's only one way for a stand-up fight between a regular military and a guerrilla band to end. In a political victory for the guerrillas? This kin
by vacri 9y ago
> because there's only one way for a stand-up fight between a regular military and a guerrilla band to end.
In a political victory for the guerrillas? This kind of absolutism was killed by the Vietnam War. And the Vietnamese success against the French the previous decade kicked off the whole end-of-colonialism thing.
> A military organization, such as that described in this article, seeks to minimize civilian casualties to the utmost possible extent.
This is a PR line, not truth. There are plenty of militaries that don't particularly care about civilians, especially civilians that don't look like them.
> A terrorist organization, such as its current adversary, has no such scruples, and indeed will often seek to inflict as much atrocity on innocents as it can manage. The
Which is again a myth. The IRA would frequently phone ahead to say where and when its bombs would go off. Yes, the IRA killed people, but it didn't seek to inflict as much atrocity on innocents as it could manage. Europe has been awash with terrorists, and they don't all go after innocents - some of them very specifically go after authority figures involved in what they perceive as their oppressors.
> if admittedly at times imperfect care
Words fail me. Doubly so given that the reason we have ISIS as a military presence is because of the 'admittedly imperfect care' of the invasion conducted by the exact same military we're talking about here.
- throwanem 9y ago"Stand-up fight" means open combat. Guerrilla forces avoid that precisely because it's unwinnable for them, and instead employ tactics that play to their own strengths rather than those of their adversaries. In the case of the Vietnam War, those strengths were twofold: on the one hand, the NVA and Viet Cong knew the country in a way that we didn't and could leverage the civilian population in ways we couldn't; on the other hand, they knew it wasn't really a fight our nation had ever wanted, and by making it as ugly and interminable as possible, they could convince the US that continuing the war wasn't worth the atrocities and the casualties it would cost us to achieve anything we could call a win. The IRA is a special case. Early on in their conflict, they employed typical guerrilla schrecklichkeit tactics - it was only later, when their leadership realized that killing English civilians was hardening opposition against them rather than advancing their goals, that they switched to targeting the English economy rather than its people. They found much more success that way, too - but they couldn't have done it at all absent the coincidence of geography that put them close enough to English economic centers for the tactic to be viable. I shouldn't like to be mistaken for saying that all the moral opprobrium in conflicts like those we discuss should accrue to one side or the other. As I said in another comment here, warfare means having to choose, not between right and wrong, but what looks to be least among the wrongs which are all that that form of human interaction makes available. Even when proceeding from the best of intentions, people can't be relied upon to always make the choice which is clearly correct in retrospect - and, of course, people don't always proceed from the best of intentions. I'm not interested in defending the actions that brought us to the present state of affairs, because I regard them in the main as indefensible. But regardless of how we got here, we are here, and I fail to grasp how slandering our own military forces with the name "terrorist" in any way advances the purpose of finding a path forward that involves the minimum extent of atrocity, on all sides, that we can possibly manage to produce.