On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 11:02:04 EST, <Bato001 at aol.com> wrote: >> GW couldn't really use this today. Masses of men are now just targets. >This may not necessarily be accurate. We were able to defeat and take > over > Iraq in a short period of time. The problem is that it would take much > more > troops to actually hold as much land as Iraq encompasses. If you were to > study the > Old West, you would find a very similar situation to what we face in > Iraq. > Indifferent, collaborative, or fearful populace, and a small group of > violent > individuals able to escape confinement because of the sheer size of the > country > and the absence of widespread police or law enforcement. As the Western > population grew and technological advances such as the telephone, > telegraph and > railroad came into use. Russia ran into a very similiar problem in > Afganistan, > (which we are facing now also). This is a huge problem. The North could win the war against the South by having twice the resources. But if the South had decided to fight after the end of the war in a guerrilla war, they couldn't have been stopped. Occupying forces have two choices - win the hearts of the enemy or terrorize them. Neither choice is easy (neither will be possible in Iraq). We didn't need the masses to conquer Iraq, and even if we had the masses, we couldn't stop the current fighting. -- Using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/