[rescue] God bless America

[Rebecca Ore]

On Sun, 16 Sep 2001, Mike Meredith wrote:

> Right at the beginning of the 1970's, a British military intelligence 
> assessment of the situation in the 6 counties/Northern Ireland was 
> captured. One of the things it said was that the IRA could never be 
> defeated using the military --- at a time when IRA activity was mostly 
> stone throwing and the occasional use of petrol bombs.
> 
> And I'm sure that whoever wrote that assesment considered many 
> possibilities in defeating the IRA, and even at that time the British 
> Army was familiar with terrorism.

What's making me crazy is seeing everyone use the model of Vietnam with
trim -- "if we just dry up their cash flow the way we didn't get the
supply line to Vietnam."  Protests and "the lack of committment to
really fight the war and win it" get blamed, but the Russians did an
amazing parallel campaign in Afganistan, including betraying the
socialist leaders who'd asked them for help, and presumeably had more
control over their home grown peace movement than we did.  So they spent
ten years in their desert mess and withdrew -- and the Kabul government
held Kabul *longer* than our South Vietnamese allies held Saigon.


-- 
Rebecca Ore
http://www.ogoense.net