Sandy Harris wrote:
>
>
> I was in Iran during their revolution. Troops did fire on
> marchers, but they never used their full power. I've
> never been able to figure out if this was incompetence,
> the Shah or various officers exercising some restraint,
> or officers afraid to give orders their troops would not
> be likely to obey.
The accounts I hCW read said that the Shah's generals told him that the troops could not be depended on to fire on the marchers, and that was what at the end triggered his flight. Tiananmen Square exemplifies the opposite, when the troops would use maximum force. DeGaulle, before he be gan dealing with the 1968 near-insurrection in France travelled to NATO Headquarters in Belgium to consult his generals there on the dependabiltiy of the Frecn Army, and was assured of it. I undeerstand the reason there were no federal troops in Chicago at the DP 1968 Convention was that the main available Battalion was heavily Black and could not be depended on if Blacks joined the riots. One marine I knew who was in the First Gulf War said his platoon, mostly Blacks and Latinos from Chicago, tacitly agreed that they would carry out orders in that w ar, but if they were ever called upon to fight in a Latin American country, they would refuse.
In other words, there are various degrees variations in the dependability of troops. My point is that whatever codnitions affect that dependability in a givencase, it is the refusal of the troops to fight (shoot at the rioters, reebvels, whatever) that determines the outcome. No one who thinks would argue that cvilian forces could militarily defeat the Army in a modern stte, nor has it ever been tried.
Hungary 1956 was a successful uprising because the army either would not act to repress it or actively joined it. (Ooutside intervention is another matter. Would ther have been outside intervention had the France 68 turned into a successful uprising, with the French Army passive or joinging the upris8ing?) And the overthrw of the Soviet Union proved that an uprising _can_ be more successful than anyone could dream of in advance.
Carrol