----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
> If other things were equal, technological differences might be
> decisive, but they are not. Once again, the subjective has to be
> factored in. To take one example, the US government has nuclear
> weapons and brandishes them constantly, but can it actually drop
> them? That depends on whether the publics in the USA and the rest of
> the world morally accept its doing so.
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I wasn't calling for a moncausal approach, merely pointing out that despite enormous protestations to the contrary, the Viet Nam protests rattled the hell out of the Penatgon and the WASP/Warlords. I'm the last person to leave out "the subjective." I've already given you my take on the role of Nukes in IR "games of chicken."
> The reason why the US government has been able to win many wars
> speedily since Vietnam is that it has only chosen the sort of targets
> that it can easily destroy and the kind of limited objectives that it
> can achieve: Panama, Grenada, and Haiti.
====================
And they did that partly to beat the speed of dissent. Note how quickly they put Noriega in prison in order to shut down any discussion of the role of big banks and the CIA in drug money laundering etc. etc.
>The "regime change" in
>Yugoslavia was not accomplished by the Kosovo war; it happened only
> when a large number of Serbs themselves, with the help of US funding,
> rose up to overthrow the Milosevic government, and Milosevic chose
> not to hang onto power by firing on Serbian protesters. Somalia was
> a military and public relations debacle.
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Somalia doesn't even count as a war. I don't see your point with regards to Yugoslavia as that was a NATO action and US forces were not defeated. Again, the speed of that conflict was such as to preempt the time/cost of mobilizing large scale resistance/dissent
>
> The US military has yet to directly and massively engage determined
> guerrillas with a clear goal and faith in their cause, like FARC, or
> conventional armed forces with a high level of morale who are loyal
> to popular leftist heads of state, like Castro and Chavez, mostly
> because there have not been many of them on the left, but also
> because doing so requires winning the "hearts and minds" of the
> populations, that is, winning them away from the guerrillas or
> popular leftist heads of state supported by loyal armed forces.
===================
The US has no need to directly and massively engage the FARC or any other large stand army that the Warlords might want to turn into the next boogeyman. Let's take Iraq; if there's US aggression and the Iraqi armed forces see themselves fighting for their very survival, do you think that will make more than a few weeks worth of difference to the military outcome? Do you think the US military/warlord class is even capable of winning over a single heart and mind in the ME right now?
> Winning war of this kind requires hegemony and consent, rather than
> simple domination.
> --
> Yoshie
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"To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting....The skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field....Let your rapidity be that of the wind, your compactness that of the forest." [Sun Tzu]
Ian