[ExI] riots again

[Mirco Romanato]

Il 27/09/2012 17:54, Charlie Stross ha scritto:
>
> On 27 Sep 2012, at 16:28, Mirco Romanato <painlord2k at libero.it>
> wrote:
>>
>> My humble opinion is, if the US Army, USMC, USAF want make a desert
>> and call it "peace", they have all the tools and the power to do so
>> in few weeks
>
> No. They have the tools to do so in *half an hour*. What they don't
> have is the orders to do so. They're a tool of state policy, and the
> state policy wants to reduce jihadi recruiting and pacify a very
> remote region in the arse end of nowhere, not detonate a thousand
> H-bombs.

Make a desert is about depopulating it, not make a glassy parking lot of 
it. A and H bomb are not needed. People doesn't use hammers to dry an 
eggplant. They use salt, a wood tablet and some weight. And leave it. A 
few hours after a lot of water is out. Good for a cookbook but not for a 
novel.

>> What Charlie Stross and others are arguing is the US is evil and
>> powerful, but, like Israel, it is unable to exterminate a people
>> unarmed and under their total control. They would like to do it,
>> they try to do it, but someway they are unable to do it.

> Straw man.

> To do the job they really need to put a million pairs of boots on the
> ground -- a full-scale occupation army. But they can't do that. So
> they're essentially using terror tactics as a proxy for manpower.

To do the job they really need some hundred drones up, a few MRLS 
strategically places and the will to do a dirty job. After they just 
apply the pressure to a province/region for weeks at time and depopulate 
it from the residents (unable to feed themselves and put a foot out of 
home without risking life and limbs). It is not needed to obtain 100% 
result, just 90-95% is enough. Then move the pressure to another place, 
rinse and repeat.

I'm not arguing it is a good thing or a legal thing or should it be, 
only they could do it, have the tools to do it and would be much easier 
to do than what they are doing now. And what they are doing now is not 
to target willfully wedding parties and social gatherings. Sometimes 
they take the wrong target (shit just happen in war) or the right target 
is just mingled with the civilians (whatever they could be).

What I never read is any condemnation of the Taliban practice of 
targeting civilians willfully if they don't collaborate with them, to 
attack civilian gathering, etc.

If the Taliban have a pass for doing it, I think the US should have a 
pass for doing it. The fact the US is most powerful and efficient but 
tame than them is not reason to condemn the US military actions and not 
the Taliban actions.

> (The British Empire started this game back when Churchill was in the
> foreign office, post-WW1; "policing with bombers" is your key search
> term. Want to know where they tried it? Iraq!)

Do you straw man me?
What I was talking about is not "policing with bombers" (policing being 
reactive), but evicting people from their home(land) with bombs or 
killing when they don't leave.

>> Let me be skeptic.

> I'm accusing you of arguing in ill-faith. Straw man positions
> ascribed to your opponents, cherry-picked extracts from someone
> else's religious texts ... I've seen this before.

If I'm cherry picking from someone else religion, someone could post the 
cherry picked text in context and show how much wrong I am.
With Islam this is rarely tried. Guess why?


> If we replace "muslim" with "jew" in your previous screed, and
> replaced the surahs with talmudic extracts, you'd be a dead ringer
> for Joseph Goebbels' Reich Ministry of Propaganda, i.e. it'd be
> obvious that you were blatantly, axe-grindingly anti-semitic. But
> switch to a different religious target and folks give you a free
> pass. You're disgusting.

If I replaced "muslims" with "Aztec" and condemned their religion as 
barbarous and unacceptable for civilized people, I bet you would compare 
me to a Nazi too. Not all Aztec made human sacrifices, just some 
extremist that, by chance, got to be in charge.

Mirco