In article
<2685c05f-c958-4e7f-b35a-4cd5d0cac386@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
=?ISO-8859-13?Q?P=E7teris_Cedri=F2=F0_=28Peteris_Cedrins=29?=
<cedrins@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On 15 Maijs, 18:10, hol...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Eugene Holman) wrote:
> > In article
> > <7eaa172c-f699-4176-80c9-6c6540dae...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> > =?ISO-8859-13?Q?P=E7teris_Cedri=F2=F0_=28Peteris_Cedrins=29?=
> >
> >
> >
> > <cedr...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > > On 13 Maijs, 22:44, Dmitry <dmitrijsfedot...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > > > On 11 May, 10:43, hol...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Eugene Holman) wrote:
> > <deletions>
> >
> > > Western and especially American intervention in Latvia in 1919 was
> > > really awful, too. I mean, British war****ps killed the people, and
the
> > > Americans brought food with all of those strings attached. Woe is
me.
> >
> > Back in those days the "bad guys" were easy to identitfy and
eliminate. It
> > should be clear after some seven years of conflict that intervening in
> > Afghanistan is a great way to help some of the people in Kabul but
purely
> > dysfunctional as a strategy for containing or destroying al-Qa'ida.
> >
> > Warfare with amorphous, supranational, rag-tag, leaderless
organizations
> > whose sup****ters have no regard for human life, not even their own, is
> > quite a different prospect than war with states that have
infrastrucures
> > to maintain, populations to feed and protect, and a technologically
> > advanced military to concretely project power.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Eugene Holman
>
> And your last paragraph doesn't describe the Bolsheviks? Ask Black
> Monk.
It does indeed. The Bolsheviks, a network of ideologically driven
political thugs, were not loyal to a state, but to an idea, the goal of
which was the erosian and demise of states. Living in a world in which
states were the dominant form of complex human organization, they had no
choice but subvert a state and usurp its resources for their own use.
From the standpoint of political theory, the Bolsheviks represented the
wave of the future when considering the development of so-called
fourth-generation or asymmetrical warfare. Being on cusp of the
transition, they could only prevail by, ironically, becomong more statist
than the statists. Al-Qa'ida has done a far better job of prevailing and
frustrating the efforts of traditional states than the Bolsheviks, whose
heirs were not above teaming up with a rigid and ultraconservative state,
Nazi Germany, ever did.
The Soviet Union, as a rigid and, in many respects, conservative state,
had extreme vulnerabilities, something that Nazi Germany tried to exploit
with its sneak attack and intended Blitzkrieg of June 22, 1941. If the
Nazis had concentrated their efforts on taking Moscow rather than trying
to add insult to injury by utilizing a resource diluting three-pronged
attack aimed at insulting the Soviets by taking their two cities at
opposite ends of the map named after im****tant leaders, Leningrad and
Stalingrad, they might well have prevailed. As it was, the sttack wound up
evlving into a traditional symmetrical military conflict of state against
state and ilitary against military.
This is quite different from the asymmetrical conflict between the United
States and its coalition with their militaries and state-of-the-art
technology, and al-Qa'ida's virtually invisible, low-tech, improvised,
leaderless, nihilistic, suicidal combatants. They have no state,
infrastructure, supply lines, or military to destroy, thus the quagmire.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
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