Certainly. But say "we can ignore restriction n because m", and you'll quickly realize that you can find an m for essentially every n.

~J

You do realize that institutionalizing that attitude makes it impossible to win a war of public opinion on the ground, right? Once you tell the code of conduct to go fuck itself, regardless of what your reasoning, convincing the natives that you are anything other than a group of foreign barbarians with no code of conduct is an uphill battle you are not going to win.

In short, the very instant you start to fight like that, the war is already lost and you should cut your losses and go home.

-Frank

i'm not a history buff, so maybe i'm completely off about this--but has any country ever made friends with a continuingly hostile enemy country by invading it? pacifying it by grinding its resistance down under the weight of your occupation doesn't count, because that's not we're doing in Iraq. the US is limiting itself by a lot more than the Geneva Conventions, and it's those extra limitations--which basically boil down to catering to a squeamish public--that are killing any chance of 'winning' the 'war' in Iraq. the Geneva Conventions, honestly, do not add or detract from those chances.

Germany invading France.
The United States invading France.
The United States invading Italy.
Vietnam invading Cambodia.
India invading East Pakistan.
The United States invading Panama.

It can be done. It just can't be done if you write up a set of rules for your soldiers to follow and then for whatever reason tell your soldiers that the rules are not going to be followed.

-Frank

I believe it was the battle of Gettysburg which had around 51,000 casualties, but only one civilian died. Basically they just want to reduce unnecessary damage and suffering. It becomes a problem though when the enemy combatants pretend to be civilians, so you can't kill them without looking like you just killed an unarmed person.

i don't believe that any of those fit my criteria, and i can list reasons, but i feel that might sidetrack this discussion even further.

maaaybe. however you instruct your soldiers to act, this sort of operation is always going to be a maybe--much moreso than more straightforward operations. regardless, breaking the rules you've set for your soldiers is generally a bad thing, i agree. but in this case, many of the rules that have been set are bad to begin with. it's just as important to set good rules for your soldiers to follow as it is to make sure they follow them. in this case, i think the US is doing a fairly good job of following the rules it's set, but the rules (or operating parameters, more accurately) are stupid and wrong. they're getting our guys killed, and allowing the bad guys to infiltrate the guys we're trying to help.

I wouldn't call the relationship between conquered France and Germany "friendly" during WW2.

That was when armies would march out into fields, line up and shoot at each other. It was also when advances in rifling made weapons much more accurate and deadly, which goes back to my theory that times change faster than people. (Had smoothbore weapons been the only weapons in use in the Civil War, casualties would have been a lot lower or the armies would have had to have lined up a lot closer together. At the same time, no one was going around trying to ban rifled barrels-- or if they were they weren't getting a lot of ink on it.

Joseph Conrad made some interesting points about how the nature of war changed as the technology improved during WWI in his essay Poland Revisited, which I read in a collection called Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile.

Still, one can appreciate the irony of War, where we come together to kill one another in a civilized manner.

Exactly.

Most people in France (Vichy as well as Nazi-ruled) during WW2 weren't "friendly" with the Nazis. They may have accepted the conquering of their land, while some activly opposed the Nazis, but by no means did the Nazis "befriend" the french people when they conquered them.

I thought we were comparing this to when the United States allied itself with the Shia and Kurdish resistance in Iraq and liberated them from their cruel and oppressive dictator. If we're counting that as an invasion (and we should), then the invasion of Pakistan by India to detach its Eastern holdings and install a friendly puppet government certainly counts as well.

I was talking about the first time.

They made SS divisions to fight on the Eastern Front. They turned over their Jews quite enthusiastically. The Chief of Police in Paris was allowed to keep his job and the entire system of dossiers that the French kept on every one of their citizens was turned over to the Nazis without question or omission. I'm not super sure what a government has to do to count as "friendly" in your mind.

Certainly the Vietnamese played their hands in the invasion of the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea with style. The US-backed Kampuchean government was extremely unpopular at home and abroad what with the fact that under the direction of its cruel tyrant Pol Pot it had managed to murder over an 1/8th of its own citizenry and had so damaged the ability of its own people to do basic labor through corporal punishment and starvation that they had been forced to go on slave raids outside their borders into Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. The invasion was short and the PR campaign masterful. The Vietnamese hand-picked a transitional government that was very friendly to them and left - mission accomplished.

Similarly the Indians waited until the primarily Punjabi junta in charge of Pakistan was in the middle of a ghastly purge of the primarily Bengali people in its Eastern Provinces that would ultimately claim the lives of over 3 million civilians before they invaded. They carefully chose resistance leaders whose policies they approved of to back as the new transitional leaders of the Bengali Resistance and after defeating the Pakistani military they turned over the entire region to a new nation of "Bangladesh". And with a masterful PR campaign and solid rule-based military drive tthey got the people of the region to march in step behind these people and established an allied nation from the ashes of half of the overtly hostile partition.

And you know what? The United States tried to play it the same way in Iraq. And they did pull it off previously in France (De Gaulle was not the biggest man in French resistance movements until the United States and the United Kingdom made him the biggest man in French resistance). But it isn't working this time. It isn't working because you can't get a nation of people to believe a national creation myth if you keep changing your story. It isn't working because you can't make people believe you're doing things for humanitarian reasons if you keep fudging the nominally humanitarian rules of international conduct.

A lie told a thousand times is the truth. But if you keep changing your lies every fifteen minutes it's just a bunch of lies.

-Frank

Do we talk about the administration/ government or the ordinary citizens?

As for making up SS divisions, turning Jews to the Nazis and similar stuff: you'll find your share of assholes in every country.

...as the characters in my RiS campaign recently (and nearly fatally) discovered.

...and they were warned before crossing into Croatia by the Weapon Specialist's MET2000 contact to take no one at face value, Croat resistance or Serb occupation force.

Exactly. That's why conquest works. Heck, here in Prague, the Soviets invaded and set themselves up a friendly government that lasted until the entire empire collapsed.

All you have to do is stick to a story, find some assholes who are willing to go along with your program, and march in with big enough guns to put those asholes in charge. The rest is relaxation and underage prostitutes as far as the invading army is concerned.

It's when you keep changing the program and finding new assholes every few weeks that it doesn't work. Eventually the folks on the ground realize that attempting to be your puppet is just a death sentence and that you won't even back them long enough for them to get any relaxation or underage prostitutes. Then the whole invasion goes to hell.

Of course, we probably hit critical threshold on that in Iraq back when Bush Rex I asked the anti-Saddam resistance to rise up and free the country - and then had the entire US army walk away while Saddam gunned down said resistance. Really didn't leave us with a lot of people on the ground who were willing to follow us just for the program.

-Frank

Yeah, but the 100 Hour War was going to sound soooo cool.

Iraq isn't doing a particularly good job of policing itself, but its military is working hand-in-hand with US forces. It'd be a bit more compelling if units were being deployed into Afghanistan or something, but there's no real "Russian Front" to use as a basis for comparison for shipping soldiers out. I'd say by these conditions there's meaningful ambiguity.

~J

well, whatever else they were, the German army was pretty effective. they got much of France to act subservient despite the fact that most of the population hated the Germans' guts. Germany didn't defeat, occupy, and make use of France by gassing Jews, they did it by kicking ass. ignoring the the moment the policies of the Nazi regime, the practices of their army is certainly something any effective military should be taking notes on.

problem being that the US isn't trying to get Iraq to act subservient (well, that's not the overt goal), we're trying to get them to be happy and to like us. the entire rationalizationjustification for going into Iraq hinges on being able to achieve that result. so we can't just go in and stomp face, because then we wouldn't be making the Iraqis happy.

indeed. one of my original criteria is that the invading force doesn't stomp down hard on resistance.

QFT!

ahh yes. the Reason the .45 was invented.

the thing is, the Japanese in late 1930s-40s had this habit of out-oppressing everyone else.
getting to the point where most of the Filipinos began thinking "hey, remember the Americans? yeah, those were the good 'ol days."

Also, the Government gets vastly overcharged for everything they do. Think about twice what things would be if they were on the common market.

I have a buddy that works out at Ft. Hood as a contractor. Not going into his job, thats complicated, but suffice it to say that one of his functions is to improve economic efficiency within the fighting force.

Hmmm.... all that firepower and nobody to shoot. Used to be you could make even a group like the Soviet Union back down with it. Now, the old rules don't apply. It almost seems as if the only way to deal with the new enemy is the way Genghis Khan did... if there's nobody left alive, then for sure there are no terrorists left alive. You could always import a few people to run the oil rigs.

If one is not willing to go that route, then what's the point any more of having all that military power?

Possibly although that might be a bit overkill for your average pirate. I suppose you could just pass it off as pour encourager les autres though, as in enrourage the others to bugger off as fast as they possibly can.

I know they up and disappeared on January 1, 1999 while in the middle of being investigated by the UN. But didn't quite a few (read: essentially all of EO) end up working for the British firm, Sandline?

Also, there is a British (I think) firm doing personal security in Iraq called Erinys. I actually heard something about them on the news last week, but I can't recall exactly what it was.