Political Correctness And Human Rights Have Made Wars Unwinnable (1 Viewer)

[Lahmeh]

Has not the concern to save face and look benevolent in the waging of wars by superpowers made wars Unwinnable?

When nations wage ware these days they are so concerned with minimizing collateral damage that they allow pockets of resistance to plant themselves and flourish among the masses.
It started in vietnam and the lesson seems to be a hard one to be learnt by any aggressor-state. Think about it, every major war since vietnam which has invloved an invasion,attempt at nation building and attempt at consolidating domestic support for the aggressor-state hase failed. Guerilla resistance is always left about to continue it's war against the neo-colonial aggressors. It happened in Afghanistan to the russians, it is happening right now in iraq and afghanistan.

THEN HOW DID THE TALIBAN SUCCEED?!?!?! i hear you ask.
They used a tool called religion and they were not afraid to use brutal, demoralizing force on the population and did not care to 'save face' in the world's eyes.But that is another matter.

Trying to win hearts and minds has never worked and only the behavioural manipulation using force and reward has succeeded but any regime employing the latter concept must stay in power and keep employoying the strategy.

I believe that it is this neo-colonial nation building which has lent 99% of society to perversion and crumbling morals.

Just some thoughts.
any discussion for or against will be appreciated.

 

[_dhj_]

Good contribution but I don't see how morals can "crumble". The morals held by society at large may simply have changed to the extent that they do not align with your moral outlook.

 

[transcendent]

Is it politically correct to prevent the invading country's soldiers from raping villagers then slaughtering them in a pit?

 

[loquasagacious]

You are barely coherant.

Your point such as I can deduce is that:
1)The only way to win a war is to kill everyone.
2)World/Public opinion no longer allows for the above genocide.
C)Wars are now unwinnable.

And then to add some tautology the un-winnable war is both the cause of and the result of a; 'crumbling of morals and an outbreak of perversion'.

So given the above I will sequentially demolish your two assumptions and then your conclusion.

1) You don't win a war by genocide. This only works in very small scale conflicts (eg one village kills another village and takes their land) and in computer games. To use your own example of Vietnam you would seem to suggest that the only way to win would have been for the US to anihilate the Vietnamese and colonise the country, old school style. I hope that I don't have to point out the flaws in such a strategy to you. In case I do: this is logistically impossible and furthermore would only lead to an inevitable and inexorable expansion of the conflict (eg china would not tolerate a literal US colony in Vietnam).

The underlying assumption beneath this position of genocide equals winning is that 'winning hearts and minds' does not win wars. I would like to take this oppurtunity to highlight some history for you:
-WWII: Neither Germany or Japan were annihilated rather they were occupied and the hearts and minds of the populace won. Infact these two cases are perhaps the first example of modern nation-building and have been wildly successful.
-The Malayan emergency and the Kenyan crisis. In both instances the British faced communist insurgents acting with the active or tacit support of indigenes (sp?). In both cases they were defeated through a policy of winning hearts and minds. The Malayan example was particularly successful British forces provided medical assistance and the like to villagers to isolate insurgents from their support bases and SAS hunted them in the rainforest.

2)What a shame that public/world opinion finds genocide unpalatable.... really its a sad day...

Your point seems to be that collateral damage was once allowed and now is not. Again I think you are confused, now it is reported on - it is still largely accepted as necessary (we did afterall continue sanctions against Iraq, then bomb them, then invade and occupy). The only shift has been in technology eg it is more cost-effective to hit a target than miss therefore weapons have become more accurate.

The only thing I would suggest has become a big issue which previously hasn't been is casualties. In the past casualties were an accepted by-product of war, these days of media attention and the emotive power of images western countries fight 'zero-casualty' wars. Which is not to say that we avoid killing, but rather we avoid dieing. It is politically acceptable to send young men off to war to kill people, it is not politically acceptable for them to come back in flag-drapped coffins. By the standards of old the cumulative losses in the Iraq war to date would have been considered high losses for a single day of fighting over a small island say in the pacific. This is an issue that is quite different to what you seem to be arguing though.

C) If we accept your assumptions wars are now unwinnable. However your assumptions are flat out untrue. Which makes wars winnable. Furthermore you also seem to have lost sight of what the objectives of war are in todays world. It is not achieving complete control of the Map in a game of Warcraft. In todays world nobody wages a war intent on blunt dommination of a region or the world.

War has become more subtle. To take the current Hizbollah-Israel conflict, Israel is not seeking to destroy Hizbollah, occupy and settle lebanon. Rather they are aiming to push Hizbollah back say 10miles from the border (eg out of artillery range). War is not about grabbing more it is about protecting what you have. Economics and diplomacy is where you grab more.

 

[sam04u]

Hmm... I agree with the thinking but not with your illogical conclusion.

Here is how I see the situation;
"Political correctness and human rights have made wars unnecesary".

Why fight? Isn't diplomacy the best option?

Because, I believe that Preventing a war is winning a war.

 

[banco55]

I think you'd be more correct if you made your title "Political Correctness and Human Rights have made wars more difficult for Western countries to win".

As others have mentioned your example of Vietnam is bs. Unless the US wanted to station half a million troops there indefinetly wiping out even more of the population wouldn't have helped much. The US didn't exactly fight with kid gloves either. The restrictions that most hampered the US's ability to win vietnam were to do with the fear of china entering the war.

As for Malaya and Kenya yes the UK won those wars. But a lot of the stuff the british did in malaya and kenya would be considered war crimes if the US did it in Iraq. They hanged thousands of rebels in Kenya for example after only perfunctory trials. In malaya they heavily restricted rations to villages who were accused of helping the communists. In fact one of their main weapons in malaya was collective punishment.

As for WW II the bombing raids carried out over japan and germany make israel's bombing of lebanon look like a picnic. Japan and Germany were sucessful examples of nation building because they are Japan and Germany. What I mean is that it wasn't so much the conduct of the Americans that made them sucessful. The germans and the japanese had highly competitive economies before the war so it's inevitable they'd rebuild and they didn't have any ethnic strife because they are both homogenous countries at the time. It's why when you give aid to countries like Japan and Germany they spend it well (ie marshall aid). You give it to african countries and they piss it away.

 

[Lahmeh]

Man i dunno, i was just sayin is all...

 

[loquasagacious]

This isn't a forun you come to and post in to 'just say thin's', this is a serious forum for serious debate. You say something and you have to be able to back it up.

Banco:

I would suggest that 500,000 would have been insufficient to indefinately occupy/colonise Vietnam. Perhaps four times that number would approach the required ammount. To this we can then add all the costs of building a country (or in this case largemilitary base)'s infrastructure from the ground up. And then as an aside it would be a VERY attractive target for a nuclear strike.

You do correctly identify tat Vietnam was not a PC war. It was a war in which it was virtually no holds barred indeed I would suggest that more brutal tactics were used than in WWII. The only difference is that these tactics were reported on. The war did not end because they were reported on though, the war was lost. The Viet Cong were able to successfully beat American and South Vietnamese forces on the ground.

Yes you are correct that Malaya and Kenya were not exactly examples of the perfect PC war however they are two good examples of a major power defeating an insurgency without resorting to the kind of genocide that Lahmeh seems to advocate.

The important point about Japan and Germany post-WWII was not so much the rebuilding of their economies (which was largely a given) but the winning of their hearts and minds to liberal democracy. A military junta did not rise in Japan and a new Hitler did not take control in Germany, rather both countries became our allies. My point being that it was not necessary to kill every german or japanese citizen but rather that it was possible to 'convert' them, to in more modern vernacular to win their hearts and minds.

An interesting quote (badly paraphrased because I dont want to look it up) from a journo covering the Vietnam war: 'We claim to be waging a war for the hearts and minds of the vietnamese but we are forgetting these reside in bodies which we are blowing limb from limb".

Also as far as the bombing goes I believe that the bombing of Japan and Germany in WWII pales in comparison to the bombing of Vietnam (in terms of raw tonnage).