Re: OT What's All The Fuss?

No. There are other ways. The first three that occur to me:

- Remove their reason to fight.

- Eliminate their will to fight.

- Find ways to neutralize them, principally by eliminating their support to render them impotent and then treat them as irrelevant (but watch them, nonetheless).

All done by the use of overwhelming firepower and the will to use it. One of those we don't have.

In other words....kick the s*it out of them.

Works every time!

Well 'some' of us do.....

Evil that's stuck sitting in the corner, sucking it's thumb and sulking, isn't going to do you any harm.

We *might* have used more firepower to help solve some problems(*) but at that time, it wasn't the will to use it that was lacking, it was that the war was incompetently run. Or perhaps that it was run by people who were willing to take a chance on the outcome and let political constraints dictate how they ran the war.

One should not consider the loss of the Republican majority in Congress to be a mandate to pull the troops out. One should consider the 2006 elections as a wake-up call that something must change. The President is free to put the case to the American People that a larger commitment of troops is necessary. I'd like to see that. I'd consider supporting it. Yes, I'm against war but it is not necessarily in our national interest to let the situation erode. Yes, I have a 17 year old son.

(*) General Barry McCaffrey wrote a column for today's paper about the judicious use of more firepower, so maybe that's still to be considered an option. He also had unkind words for parts of the ISG report.

WOW! Scott the Internet hero sitting on his fat ass in Florida. How courageous!

But we made the peace permanent by treating them humanely, not by torturing them, as they had done to our people.

You certainly lead a sheltered life. In Canada, some horrific tales of what went on in POW camps to Germans and others is slowly leaking out. Now, don't get me wrong--we, the West certainly, on the whole, treated our prisoners BETTER but there were still lots of f*ck ups. People were shot. People died.

POW treatment was a tiny factor, not the large factor you mentioned. What REALLY helped the image of the Western powers was the humongous amount of aid poured into Europe..and Japan, courtesy of plans such as the Marshall one. Google is our friend.

You are most welcome.

That's probably the best post you've made in terms of content. Keep them coming.

We made peace cause we kicked the crap out of them.

Force works....

I'm also referring to the treat after the war, but as far as POWs went, several of my uncles thought it was better to be captured by the Americans rather than the Soviets, Chinese, or even British.

Many of those POWs completely changed their political and racial beliefs because of how we treated them, and I'm sure they spread the word to their fellow citizens.

I haven't thanked you, and I won't because you don't deserve to be thanked. I learned about the post war reconstruction from people who experienced it directly, including my mother and father.

Anecdotal evidence. What happened to SEVERAL people does NOT extend to many millions.

Anecdotes from people who were actually there, and the humane treatment wasn't limited to just POWs but was typical of how the U.S. treated the local population.