The only rule in war is to win?

[sweetheart]

People say war has rules. The geneva accords, and the army
handbook, precedent and imperial law. All of it trash in a new
war without rules. When the only rule in war is to win, there
are no rules, civilian life is suspended, and war is disruptive.

War is ugly. Why are some nitwit terrorists with semtex and stanley
knives, forcing us to disrupt our own civilization for a WAR?

By declaring an unwinnable war, the state is bankrupted semantically
from the outset given the real nature of war.

Do you think there are other rules to war besides winning?

[eaprez]

1. #1 Rule...

...avoid!

[madrchsod]

4. opp`s forgot that

rule....

[sweetheart]

6. Then it begs the question of why we declare them.

If the real number 1 rule is to avoid them. I agree that your rule
of life is better than this thread's rule of war. :-)

[madrchsod]

2. there are no other rules

to war but to win

[salinen]

3. This wasn't a real war

It was a resource grab. And only a few 10s of thousands of innocents were killed. Chimpco likes those odds.

[Columbia]

13. How many 'few 10s of thousands' exactly?

Link please

[sweetheart]

15. Heres the link for iraq dead

http://www.iraqbodycount.net/

[Columbia]

16. Guess salinen was exaggerating

[sweetheart]

17. in special warfare salinen is a perfect agent

He or she is a propaganda repeater, exagerator, like in the game
of telephone, and it is salinen that shapes the propaganda war by
simply writing over and over what he/she believes. The more people
who do this, are the ones who win a propaganda war.

It does not matter about truth, this propaganda. It is shaping
intent using words... sort of the ideological equivalent of a kung
fu school in ancient china. DU has writers who are learning to make
political arguments, some of them are governed by no rules (no need
for truth) It is this new world of ignorance where the most
fanciful storyteller is the most fun to listen to, and becomes
the truth, no matter.

It was 10's of thousands if you include the sudan medicine factory
and if you include the embargo on iraq. It was 100's of thousands
if you include the embargo and the last iraq war, and over that if
you include that since we put saddam in power in the first place,
that we're responsible for the whole mess altogether. As well as
the iraq/iran war deaths, for althogether failed CIA policy reasons
could attribute some of its deaths our way for arming and
encouraging the iraqis in that conflict.

Altogether, we've been fucking murderous towards iraq, and simply
playing numbers games with the latest death tolls misses the
point. Salinen, is right on, to make this point. Salinen is the apriori agent of truth.

[Columbia]

18. Engaging in the same tactics as Bushco then eh?

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em? :eyes:

[sweetheart]

19. "we" are at war

The flag cult is at war, in a war with no rules.
That means we (you and me) are now at play in this war of no rules,
In a war with no rules, what is the constitution?
Now winner-take-all has subverted the rule of law as a basis for
society until the war is over. What an outstanding climate for
a global empirep power grab. I must credit them for the level
of subversion they've stooped to for this theft.

[tobius]

5. win or die. nt

[Wickerman]

7. You have to win, because you set the rules in retrospect

When was the last time a winner was brought up on war crimes? Winner declares the atrocities and writes the history. The only rule is, therefore, win.

sad but true, but also why war is so very wrong.

[RC]

8. That is why the bu$h&co must lose!

[LanternWaste]

9. I think that there are at least three...

From a Contemporary Sociology class I took back in the late 80's and was so impressed with it, I kept my notes, exams and textbooks....

Modern War has a number of rules.

Number One (which you called "To Win") is to deny the opponent the ability to wage war.

Number Two: Keep at least one third of the civilian population of your own country satisfied that yours' is the "just" cause.

Number Three: Maintain that which morally or ideologically separates you from the opponent.


You say this "new" war has no rules. I disagree. I believe it does have rules and western civ is slowly adjusting to them. The Civil War in the US was the first wholly industrialized and total war ever fought, yet it was being waaged with Napoleonic tactics, hence the brutal body count and a series of articles in the Congressional Record that "there are no rules to this battle being fought", when in fact, there were-- but the contemporaries simply did not have the objective distance to see them.

[sweetheart]

14. What might the new rules be?

Given the 3 reasons, in these ideological wars ( on terror and on drugs)

Number one would be covert media warfare to supress publicially
expressed ideology. (hate-speach laws)

With the drugs war it is repression of legalization broadcasting,
like with the marijuana advert for the super bowl. (ideological
propaganda)

Number two is villifying the terrorists, and demonizing their cause
that opposing them is profoundly "just" and people can feel riteous.

Just cause in the drugs war? Its not very just, so i'm not really
sure what that is... perhaps that is why the war is failing.

I'm not so sure about three with the war on terror or drugs.
I guess with drugs, that is simply the statement "i don't do drugs".

The terrorist warfare we've seen so far comes straight out of the
US marines handbook for disruptive guerilla warfare.

[seabeyond]

10. we were talking the other day about the revolutionary war

just yesterday. telling the boys the way they fought and how they lined up, and the americans didnt fight the way the rules said, we cheated, we hid behind trees, adn now, that we have suicide bombers adn death to civilians they are bad, they are cheating they are killing innocents.

we didnt line up to fight like britian cause we couldnt beat them that way and how foolish would that be

iraq couldnt beat us by fighting our army, so why would they

[sweetheart]

11. conventional and special

These rules of formation and "stand and fight soldier" and all that
code of ethics that has proven to prepare one for trench warfare.

The new special forces buys 40,000,000 dollars worth of assistance
and orders a coffee. A small girl may be the one with the
atomic bomb, or the original carrier of the modified SARS fast flu.

Without "form" new warfare drops all the rules. In this total war,
civilians are weapons and targets, like military vehicles, they
house a tremendous possibility to damage the army from within, so
how is an army to deal with an army of special forces citizens who
also recognize no rule of law, knowing, as the military does, that
this sort of warfare is disruptive to civilization. This weapon
of mass hysteria and brainwashing through television hypnosis, is
no defense... as it is taking on rules, endemic to its systems
and methods of communication.

I imagine the big database they're making with every person's name in
the world in it, uniquely identified. Next to your name is the
continuous longitude/latitude where you are standing right now,
and your birthdate, birthlocation, terrorism possibility index,
citizenship, last job, income... and they wage a war against people
in the database without courts or justice, simply by deleting
people and forcing them in to the nether. (Equilibrium)

[Columbia]

12. Actually...

Most of the Revolutionary War was fought using the same tactics as the British. The "guerilla" type warfare that has been much bally-hooed since then just didn't happen. These same tactics were also used during the Civil War. It wasn't until World War I that the tactics of warfare changed drastically.

[Muddleoftheroad]

23. Cheating?

The Geneva Convention made such "cheating" against the rules of war.

The comparison you make is downright silly. Having an organized military fight another organized military using different tactics is one thing. Deliberately killing civilians is another.

[MichaelUK]

20. The Rules

1) Make the people at home think you are winning
2) When it's all over, claim you won
3) Re-write the history books to make the future generations think you won
4) Make sure all the veterans are either in mental hospitals or in well-paid jobs.

No-one ever wins in war, except the arms dealers.

[sweetheart]

21. Welcome to DU MichaelUK

Aberdonian how excellent.

:-)


Good point about the veterans. It seems the bush people have the
opposite impulse to put the squeeze on vets.

It's too bad
"I sold my soul to the military industrial prison complex"
does not rhyme well, or it would make a good rap song.

[Muddleoftheroad]

22. No one ever wins?

You could have fooled me. I guess the Nazis when WWII or hell, the Confederates won the Civil War and I am still enslaved.

[bemildred]

24. Rules of war are propaganda for the suckers.

As others in this thread bring up, the old style of
conventional war is no longer feasible in the presence
of WMD, which situation first became evident in WWI,
hence the new diffused styles of warfare. The diffuse
styles of warfare go back farther than that, but it was
the prevalence of nukes that made it the dominant form.

Hence the concern that Iraq might actually have the means
to do our troops serious damage before the current war.
These theatrical exercises with tanks and such are all
predicated on an enemy unable to contest for the air and
unequipped with the best modern SAM and anti-tank technologies,
and even then it's an iffy business, as may be easily seen
from the results in Iraq.

The new styles of diffuse warfare fail to accomplish
conquest in the old style, but at least they keep the
military game alive. For those that profit from it, that
is enough. Peoples do not defend themselves with Maginot
Lines any more, they defend themselves with the assertion
that if you invade them, they will kill you until you leave
again.

Losers in warfare, as in other games, have always claimed that
the other side "cheated". "Subverted from within" in it's
various forms is always the favored excuse of incompetent
leadership.

[sweetheart]

26. Why are we building a Maginot line i space...

The missile defense nonsense is exactly one of these fixed
fortifications designed to provide a feeling of safety reclining
under the missle defense cloud. Heck, i'd be better off smearing
my body with REAL bullshit, at least i'll have the benefit of the smell. Then maybe the missiles will go towards a less stinky
target. :-)

WMD changed the rules... well considered.

[bemildred]

27. Missile defense has many reasons behind it.

But consider this, if we actually had an effective
and reliable missile defense, then all those nukes
would once again be effective terror weapons - we can
kill you and you cannot touch us - and that is probably
the only thing that would save the intellectually and
emotionally stunted fantasy spelled out in the PNAC
agenda. We sure don't have the wherewithal to bully
the World otherwise.

Of course, part of the message sent by the perpetrators
of 9/11 is that that is not correct either, there is no safe
haven, no inviolable homeland, we are all in it together now.

25. Rules

1) Don't intentionally target civillians.
Civies are often-but not always-innocents, and sometimes they are the victims of the enemy you are attempting to engage. They are NOT collateral, they are humans. Don't treat them like furniture.

2) Don't use more force than is required to gain your objective.
Don't destroy the world in order to win the war. Likewise, don't destroy the country, land, resources, etc if it isn't required to stop the enemy. On another scale, if your opponent is armed with a knife, don't nuke him just because you can. War is horrible enough when it is required, no reason to pile horror upon horror.

3) Don't make "winning" the objective.
Winning isn't everything. Meeting your objective is everything. If the objective is to retrieve hostages, get them out and leave. If the objective is to stop a dictator from committing human rights offenses, take him out and stop warring. Define the objective, and stick to that objective. You might just avoid unneccesssary death.

[joeyb]

28. I never heard of any

others