People are under the misapprehension that governments can force someone into a specific course of action. The fact of the matter is, short of attaching actual marionette strings to your limbs, governments cannot make you do anything. ANYTHING. Governments can only punish. They can only punish. Whenever a new law, tax, or regulation is passed, it is only a decree designating a specific group of people for punishment, to be kidnapped and locked in cages. Take the War on Drugs. Laws against drug possession do not erect some magical force field preventing people from having drugs, they only lock up and brutalize those do. Now what does this have to do with foreign policy, more specifically war? The wars we are currently fighting cannot be won. CANNOT BE WON. Why? Look at the equipment that we bring to these events. We prepare with bullets and bombs and missiles and tanks. These are machines designed to KILL. They aren't mind control devices. You can't point them at the head of an insurgent and magically have them turn into a flag-waving entrepreneur. What happens when you point them at their heads is that their brains splatter all over the ground. Not only is that what we have the tools to, it is not possible for us to have the tools for anything else. There is nothing we can do that will make the Afghanis run an "effective" government, we can only punish them for not doing so. So what kind of wars can be won? Wars that we have the tools to win: pure punishment. Not nation-building, but genocide. Do you want to end terrorism? Then kill EVERYBODY. Corpses can't rebel against you. Niccolo Machiavelli once said, "Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.". This why I supported Barry Goldwater when he suggested dropping nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Paradoxically, indiscriminate destruction saves money and saves lives. The only logical plan of action for us in the Middle East total commitment, the deployment of strategic nuclear weapons.
Your OP here actually goes to support Glenn Beck's opinion that when we are attacked, we should bomb the guilty party back into the stone age and not rebuild them. This was GWB's biggest blindness. The perogative of the state is to protect itself, not to make friends. The only "hearts and minds" campaign that truly works is two to the heart, one to the mind:
Social conditioning through negative reinforcement may be effective. It depends on the strength and will of the target subjected to this process. So while I disagree with your statement, I do agree in regards to Islam and the tribes of the Middle East you are right. Similarly a revival of using body count to convince a US audience of our military success is less than worthless as it only solidifies their hate and resolve against us. I believe the same in regards to social conditioning through positive reinforcement regarding the Middle East. Instead of killing everyone, why don't we just leave them alone and bring our troops home?
But the Vietnamese people did not take vengeance upon you, after what you had done to them. And I reckon the fear that they might do, no longer haunts the empty-headedness of Barry Goldwater and his followers.
Do you understand the crap we'd go through if we launched a nuke now? It would be chaos on a scale never seen before.
The only upside I see to this approach is that it might actually ignite a war big enough to end our species.
Perhaps... and it also depends on the distribution of nukes. A few humans living further away from population centers would be more likely to survive. It would be kind of like the Fallout series without the monsters.
I strongly advocate the Frigidaire campaign. We fill large cargo plains with our landfill waste, emptying from high altitudes over enemy nation's land. At 1st they laugh, over the course of a few months, they beg for negotiations to begin again. We make the waste of American consumerism our enemies problem, killing two birds with one stone.
