I can't believe you people.
First you jump around like Alabama cheerleaders for a war in Iraq, then you turn chickenshit once we lose a few soldiers in the occupation.
I just read the new polls. Americans are losing their war hard-ons faster than a fag in a whorehouse. At the start of May 2003, 61% said the war was going "very well." Now only 19% say that. Back in May, only 4% said the war was going "not well." Now 35% think so.
You make me sick.
What the Hell did you think was gonna happen? The Iraqis were gonna fall in love with an occupying army? "Oh thank you for blowing up our power plants and water supply! Allah be praised, now we have democracy!"
We were so sure the Iraqis would rise up once we landed. That's one feature you'll find in every bad military plan ever devised: "and then the people will rise up." That was how Bay of Pigs was supposed to go: "We'll land a few hundred men, and then the Cubans will rise up." Which they didn't, naturally. Every time a lieutenant in some African hellhole talks a half dozen of his barrack drinking buddies into staging a coup he uses the same line: "and then the people will rise up to help us." Cut to him and his friends hanging from the nearest lamppost.
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Truth is, this occupation isn't going that badly. We're losing a man a day, more or less. That's not bad. That's just the way these things go. The British used to lose a few dozen men a day when they ran the world.
Hell, when they tried to take Afghanistan they lost a whole army. But they didn't lose their nerve and start sobbing to the pollsters. They knew it takes blood to run an empire. Even when their wars went bad, like the Boer War-and that was about as bad as it can get-they stuck with it, kept pouring in men and materiel and won. Along the way they had to do some grim stuff. Like concentration camps. Hell yes-you think Hitler invented the concentration camp? Shows how much you know.
Concentration camps were invented by the British for the Boer War.
If you want to know what kind of coldblooded hardass discipline it takes to run an empire, the Boer War is a good place to start. The Boers, mostly Dutch and French, settled in South Africa way back in the 1600s. The British showed up later and took the prime coastal land from them. The Boers fought and lost a big battle in 1842, then just moved inland to get away from the British. For a while the British left them alone. Then gold was discovered on Boer land and the Limeys suddenly decided they needed to bring the blessings of empire to those poor lonely Boers. So they invaded in 1899. They thought that one was going to be a cakewalk too. The Boers were farmers, not soldiers. But the Boers were marksmen and they knew the ground. Even though they could only field about 50,000 men against 500,000 British troops, they were winning.
The Brits didn't lose their nerve. Lord Kitchener, commanding the British forces, took a coldblooded look at the situation and realized that the Brits faced the classic problem in counter-insurgency: the Boer women and kids were acting as spies and supply line for the Boer guerrillas. So the Brits rounded up all the Boer women, kids, and old folks, and put them behind barbed wire in the middle of nowhere, the first concentration camps. Of course with thousands of civilians jammed into a few tents-open latrines, no running water, no doctors-every disease in Africa hit the Boer women and kids. 40,000 of them died.
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Maybe you think that's too mean or something. Well, you shoulda thought of that before you let a half-dozen talkradio morons and a draftdodger-in-chief talk you into taking over every city in Iraq.
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What the Brits would be doing about now is arming the Kurds and sending them to police the Sunni Triangle. The Kurds have already asked us to let them do it. They're begging for the chance to get a little payback. They said, "We guarantee we'll have the place pacified in a week. We can read these people! You can't! We can tell who's a guerrilla and who isn't! All we need is a few fingernail-pulling pliers and a portable generator hooked up to a cattle prod or two!"
Of course we won't let them, because it'd be messy, like Sabra-Shattila times ten. There'd be dead Sunnis thicker than sagebrush. But the Brits'd do it, and it'd work. Then, when the Kurds had bled the Sunnis out, they'd recruit a new police force, all Sunni and all-volunteer, to go police Kurdistan, bleed the Kurds for a while so they don't get too strong.
That's the sort of thing you have to do if you want to run an empire. But you guys, you're just brave enough to get us into trouble and not brave enough to see it through. You want to kick ass, plant the flag on somebody else's land and blow stuff up, and then have everybody on the ground love you for it.
That's not an empire. That's a bedtime story for pussies.
