How to win our next war.

[SoCalDem]

Once the bad guy/evildoer/satanic demon, is overthrown

Arm soldiers with MONEY... Instead of crashing doors down in the dead of night, knock on the door, apologize for the inconvenience of the "activity", offer them cash, and help in rebuilding, refurbishing.

Have the convoys enter villages, pulling flatbeds filled with lumber, tools, bags of concrete, shovels, food, water, medicine, school supplies, clothing, household necessities, generators.

Offer "security" and aid to rebuild what needs rebuilding..

BEFORE the "war"..

Teach the soldiers the LANGUAGE of the country
Teach the soldiers the customs & history of the country
Provide trusted interpreters, everywhere the soldiers go.

Poor people who have jobs, money, and access to the materials to improve their lives, do not stay up nights making bombs..

They also understand that the people who are actively helping them, are likely to be worth listening to...not blowing them up..


Tell them, going IN, that you will be there only 3 months MAX, so they have to get their shit together, because they will be on their own after that..

Cash payments and supplies HAVE to be cheaper than guns, bullets, helicopters, tanks & bloody dead bodies..

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

1. Ahh but corporations make more money with guns, bullets,

helicopters, tanks, and lies. We have been conditioned to kill for profit.

[muntrv]

2. Marshall Plan? C'mon that is soooooo 1948!

:sarcasm: :sarcasm:

[readmoreoften]

3. Huh? So is this then the soft-side of neoliberal empire?

1) The majority of grunts are kids who only have high school educations. It takes a long time to learn foreign languages and it takes quite a bit of education and interaction to understand the customs of non-Western cultures. This is one of those reforms that, even if it passed, would have little application on the ground. So our grunts will take a Rosetta Stone online training course to be able to say "Where is the bathroom?" and "The man is reading a book" in Farsi they'll know that it's polite to bow with your hand over heart. And this will stop troops from kicking in doors how?

2) Tell them we will only be there for 3 months and then they have to get their shit together? If you haven't noticed, we didn't invade Iraq for the benefit of Iraqis. We invaded Iraq to topple a ruler who was tenuously holding the peace between Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis so that we could control their oil and get a toehold into the ME to build our empire.

3) And, in the first place, why on earth are we invading nations to take out terrorists who exist because they believe that the US is trying to take over the Middle East? Who are these "bad guys, evil doers, and satanic demons" of which you speak? Do you think that we're the hero of a global comic book?

Maybe someday the Chinese will be so kind as to "learn our language and customs" when they liberate us from the murderous semi-elected officials we tend to complain about. Historically we tend to topple the governments of moderate socialist reformers who get in our way: Allende in Chile, Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadeq in Iran, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The aftermath always results in a more brutal, repressive, right-wing paramilitary proto-fascist regime. In the case of Iran and Iraq, secular moderate socialist governments (democratic in the case of Mossadeq, autocratic in the case of Hussein) either are or are threatened to be replaced with Islamic fundamentalist totalitarian regimes.

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

5. China has more english speakers then any country in the world.

[readmoreoften]

6. See, their nice troops won't even need extra training if they ever decided to liberate us.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

4. That would make a helluva lot more sense and be infintely cheaper.

I remember a report during the Vietnam debacle that it cost about $120,000 to kill one VC/NVA soldier. Now, some of them were died-in-the-wool Marxists and might have refused, but I imagine a whole slew of them would have welcomed the chance to become "good" capitalists.