Canadawide

Rumsfeld was right to believe that 90,000 troops were more than enough to tactically defeat an outdated, demoralized, and corrupt Iraqi army. However, defeating an army and occupying a hostile power are totally different things. In the case of the former it is sufficient to beat them on the battle field. In the latter case, though, you can not just leave hundreds of thousands of "dead-enders" rooming about the country with, ahem, their leader. These people need to be dealt with and it is infinitely easier in today's day and age and especially for a country like the US to deal with the baddies on the battle field than afterwards when they running the country. In other words, a major failing for the Iraq war plan, and this can be said of Afghanistan too, was that killing or capturing great swaths of baddies was not made a key military objective.

A larger point is that the awful fact of the matter is that one can not occupy a country on the cheap and that includes avoiding political costs associated with high civilian and enemy combatant casualties. Indeed, a recent study supports the notion that the level of resistance tends to be proportional to the level of damage done. The more damage the less resistance there was.

More than anything else, the unwillingness of the US to inflict heavy causalities is the Achilles heel of the US military machine. It is not, as Saddam once thought, an unwillingness to accept causalities. The Christmas bombings (Linebacker 2) of 1972 bring this into focus. From October 1968 until April 1972 (Linebacker 1), the US held off bombing the North for a whole host of reasons. Some feared that doing so might bring China into the war and the US might have another Korea on its hands. Still others worried about the Soviets and the potential that if Soviet SAM operators were killed that this would anger the Soviet Bear. However, the main reason was that by 1968 the political optics of targeting the North where all wrong. North Vietnamese civilians would die and while, the killing of citizens in bombing raids on Laos and Cambodia more or less escaped media attention, the North would be all to happy to bring out civilian corpses for the Western media to see. It was thus with a certain reluctance that Kissinger and company decided to go ahead and bomb the North. Kissinger believed that if the North was forced back to the peace table that America could escape with “Peace with Honor”. That said, there were strict measures taken to insure the civilian deaths were kept at a minimum. Most notably, during the bombing runs pilots were not permitted to take evasive action before having dropped their payload. The fear was that if they did so they might drop their bomb load on civilian areas.

The restrictions proved disastrous. The strict flight path that the B-52s had to take made them inviting targets for SAM operators. The pilots staged a revolt and the Air Force eventually allowed the pilots to take evasive action. Whether planned or not, the concession did not amount to much. By the time the concession was made the North had basically ran out of SAMs and thus there was no longer any need for the pilots to take evasive action. Their sacrifice was for not. Much to the delight of the North, an uninformed world press, wrongly, accused Washington of carpet bombing Hanoi and inflicting massive civilian causalities. In reality casualties were remarkably light. According to North Vietnamese sources, only 1308 were killed in nearly two weeks of heavy bombing and it is not clear just how many of those were killed by the hail of AA fire coming back to earth. Eventually, many News organizations retracted their intial reports. However, by then much of the damage was already done and myth of the North's cities were carpet bombed still persists in many quarters.

As for the Administration, some have argued that Christmas bombings (the only sustained bombing of Northern cities in the entire war) allowed the administration to achieve something resembling Peace with Honor. This is disputable. What is certain is that, judging from the severe damage done to the North’s industrial capacity in just two weeks, the US had the power to cripple the North’s industrial capacity and failed to do so. As mentioned above, no raids were carried out from October 1968 until April 1972. As for the pre 1969 bombing campaign (Rolling Thunder), the restrictions placed on the bombings of cities (restricted areas of 30 and 10 nautical miles (nm) were established around Hanoi and Haiphong, respectively) meant that the important port Haiphong was strictly off limits. This promoted one Air Force officer to quip that, "instead of destroying the war-supporting pillow at the port, efforts were expended chasing the feathers all over Southeast Asia." President Johnson acknowledged that the effectiveness of Rolling Thunder was "zero . . . indeed . . . less than zero."

IOC should stop trying to ban every conceivable substance that might enhance an athlete's performance. There is simply no way of ever achieving a mythical level playing field. Indeed, the fact of the matter is that access to good trainers and good training facilities are far more of an advantage than downing a few cans of Coke before a race. (Recently there has been talk of banning oxygen cambers. The reason being there is that although they are not in anyway dangerous, there is some evidence that by speeding up the healing process -- god forbid! -- it “artificially” improved performance.) Instead, what the IOC should seek to do is to ban substances that both improve performance and that have not been proven to be safe. In other words, the IOC should seek only to ban substances whose use would threaten workplace safety.

This should go for other sports as well. As it stands, the emphasis on potentially banning any substance that may improve performance regardless of the health costs associated with it has driven a wedge between various parities in the sporting world in part by obscuring just how some performance enhancers can reduce workplace safety. No where is this more apparent than in major league baseball. Fearing what testing might mean for a few individual players, the major league players union has lost sight of the following. Most major leaguers who use steroids feel that the lax testing in baseball, do in large part to the players union, has created an environment where they are forced to take them in order to keep up with other players that use. Asked if they would then welcome more stringent testing, the vast majority said yes.

If you feel that a group should abstain from a particular activity for the simple reason that they lack the ability to fully appreciate the consequences of carrying out such an activity, then what sense does if make to try to convince them of that? Indeed, either such an enterprise would undermine the very basis for having them abstain from the activity in the first place (by helping see the possible consequences of a given course of action), or it would be a complete waste of time (i.e., they would not grasp the link between a given course of action and a possible outcome). However, such seems to be the case for many school programs. Teachers regularly delineate possible outcomes of certain activities (e.g., choosing to become sexually active). They then test them to see whether they understand these links. At the end of the day, however, no teacher that I know tells students that have mastered the subject matter that they should now feel free to become, say, sexually active.

At best, what can be said in the case of alcohol is this: "Yes, there are plenty of teenagers that know how to drink responsibly and you might be one of them. However there is a critical mass of teenagers that do not. With this in mind, the courts have set the drinking limit at 19. Now, in order for the law to be workable, the law must target all of those under the age of 19 and not just those who drink irresponsibly.

Continuing on in rant mode, it is clear that the just say no drugs and alcohol model simple does not work. Now, let me add to the speculation as to why. Somehow it is not dawned on the just say no crowd that some teenagers will continue to drink and do drugs no matter what and that by tailoring their message only to those kids who are having drugs pushed on them they are, among other things, failing to reach one of the most influential segments of teenager culture, viz., those that push drugs onto other kids. One needs to acknowledge this group and teach them to respect those who refuse their overtures.