US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4781

Initial posts by xDaunt:




I was not able to respond to this initially due to the thread being locked, but since it's the second time I see you advocating genocide as the only truly effective way of dealing with terrorists in the Middle East, your posts definitely deserve a reply. I'm not going to get into moral considerations and bother to point out how utterly despicable what you're defending is -- that wouldn't bother you since you've repeatedly argued that morality should largely be left at the door when dealing with international relations/defending the "national interest" of the United States abroad. I'll focus on addressing the merits of your argument in favor of crimes against humanity (including with respect to the historical record of the mass targeting of civilians that you're advocating, and the extent to which it is policy-relevant when it comes to the kind of conflict we're discussing) with regards to the effectiveness you ascribe to those practices.

So, what does the scientific literature on the targeting of civilians in warfare tell us about its historical effects on the outcome of conflicts? Well, it is to a considerable extent accepted among scholars that states which engage in the targeting of civilians tend to not be helped by the practice -- and that it is in fact often counter-productive. Robert Pape's famous Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1996) addresses the topic, and he argues that several factors play a role in making the indiscriminate targeting of civilians ineffective, one of which is that hurting civilians is more likely to turn them against the attacking party rather than against their own government or leaders. In The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians (New York, Random House, 2002), Caleb Carr likewise argues that attacking civilians is not effective and is instead counter-productive. His argument has been criticized when it comes to the effectiveness of the use of "terror" by terrorists, but largely validated with regards to the use of violence against civilians by state actors and empires (a point made by Michael Ignatieff in his review of the book, who cites the example of the French in Algeria to illustrate it). I'll also cite Ivan Arreguín-Toft's The [F]utility of Barbarism: Assessing the Impact of the Systematic Harm of Non-Combatants in War (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 2003). Through a statistical analysis of 387 cases between 1816 and 1999 (75 of which involved the indiscriminate targeting of civilians), as well as the analysis of two case studies, the author concludes that "in general, war crime doesn’t pay: barbarism increases the costs and risks of military operations, and poisons chances for peaceful post-war occupation and development". Indeed, "[w]hen done at anything short of a genocidal level, [...] barbarism backfires both tactically – that is, it makes military operations themselves more costly to the perpetrator – and politically – military victory by means of barbarism will result in political failure after the war". He also points out the limitations of violence against civilians at the genocidal level, and I'll come back to that point shortly. Finally, although Benjamin Valentino and his co-authors do not focus on the issue of effectiveness in their article « "Draining the Sea": Mass Killing and Guerrilla Warfare » (International Organization, vol. 58, No. 2, Spring 2004, pp. 375-407), they nevertheless write, based on their case studies: "we believe that mass killing has often failed as a military strategy for the same reasons that states seem hesitant to employ it in the first place. The costs and risks of mass killing-including its potential to provoke greater opposition, alienate supporters, and draw third parties into the conflict-often outweigh its potential as a counterinsurgency strategy".

To be fair, I have to mention that next to this body of literature, a couple of authors have published works which are more nuanced on the effectiveness of the indiscriminate targeting of civilians in warfare; they are, in particular, Alexander Downes and Patrick Johnston. Their findings, however, still do not support your argument. Looking at the historical record, Downes concludes in Targeting civilians to win? Examining the military effectiveness of civilian victimization in interstate war (draft paper, 2009) that "civilian victimization worked far better in the past than it does in the present. In fact, targeting civilians today contributes nothing to winning wars". Less wars are decided by sieges than in the past, for example. Still, analyzing guerilla warfare did lead him to conclude in « Draining the Sea by Filling the Graves: Investigating the Effectiveness of Indiscriminate Violence as a Counterinsurgency Strategy » (Civil Wars, vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 420-444) that "indiscriminate violence against civilians can be effective in defeating guerrilla insurgencies under certain – relatively restrictive – conditions". Among these, he includes "When the population from which the guerrillas draw support is relatively small, the land area in which the insurgents operate is similarly constricted, and external sanctuary and supply is not available" -- conditions which are certainly not well met in the Middle East. He mentions that other strategies can be just as, or even more, effective. Indeed, unless the aim is to engage in ethnic cleansing, the indiscriminate targeting of civilians is likely to be less effective than other strategies to "control" a population. Downes actually comments on what his findings mean for the Iraq war, and he writes that "leaving aside questions of morality, the Sunni population is probably too numerous for indiscriminate violence to do anything but backfire and produce further anger." Finally, in his PhD thesis The treatment of civilians in effective counterinsurgency operations, Patrick Johnston finds evidence supporting the idea that the targeting of civilians can be effective in counterinsurgency operations, yet this is mostly the case for (limited) targeted killings (instead of large-scale, indiscriminate violence) and for short-term objectives, not to ensure long-term stability. With regards to your argument that violence of genocidal proportions would be the most effective solution, he finds to the contrary that "killing civilians has diminishing military returns: incumbents who killed massive numbers of civilians were much less likely to defeat insurgencies than incumbents who inflicted lower levels of civilian casualties", and that the evidence directly "challenges the [...] view that annihilating an insurgency’s entire potential support base is effective".

What can we conclude from this overview? Well, most scholars disagree with the idea that indiscriminate (and even sometimes discriminate) violence against civilians tends to be effective. Among those who have a more nuanced view on the matter, it is nevertheless accepted that most of the historical cases in which violence against civilians was effective are poor indicators of what its effects can be today. They also argue that while violence against civilians can sometimes be effective, this only applies under certain specific contextual conditions, and through specific types of actions -- which, as Downes argues, makes it difficult to argue it would be useful to resort to such violence in Iraq. With regards to your claim that large-scale violence in the region is the answer, the evidence points to this kind of violence being simply not effective to defeat insurgencies in cases like this, and even being counter-productive.

Of course, you could also argue that the problem would be solved if the U.S. "simply" dropped enough nuclear bombs to cover virtually all of the Middle East, but that's a ludicrous argument considering you'd still not kill everyone, the survivors would likely want to get their revenge, and in any case it would result in the U.S. being an absolute pariah on the world stage. Its security and national interest would without a doubt be negatively impacted by such a course of action. In short, the U.S. military was right to revise its approach in Iraq in 2006 towards making the "welfare and protection of civilians a bedrock element of military strategy" -- even though this is still obviously certainly not a guarantee of success.

On June 24 2016 00:52 LegalLord wrote:

You are correct that I would have probably ignored a long kwizach post, a stance I take from experience. Between the misrepresentation of opposing positions, misrepresentation of sources, stonewalling, and general unpleasant manner of arguing, I generally don't see much value in reading his posts. They tend to annoy and irritate me even when I actually agree with his main point. If you want to summarize it or offer sources, be my guest - otherwise I'll simply have to treat this as a phantom assertion that "someone else proved you're wrong but I don't want to actually show you where."

On July 25 2016 09:44 LegalLord wrote:

He's mostly stopped posting in recent months. A few posts in other threads recently, but not here.

A few other long-winded supremely biased agenda-pushers sprung up in this thread to fill the void though.

On August 13 2016 00:45 LegalLord wrote:

He just kinda stopped posting. Most of us stopped responding to him for reasons that this post explains very well.

On August 13 2016 00:29 LegalLord wrote:

It's not all that bad, but those are the major reasons people said that Sanders would never be able to win against Trump. Kwizach specifically pushed that argument really hard to try to convince GH that Sanders is unelectable.

On June 24 2016 01:07 xDaunt wrote:


I couldn't have said it better myself. Half of the time he just throws out a wall of sources claiming that they stand for proposition X when there is no realistic possibility of verifying either the claim that the source actually stands for that proposition, or that the source cited is sound/unimpeachable. I did take the time to look at some of the stuff that he posted in his most recent wall of bullshit post, and I found it highly wanting. Points were misrepresented, sources were over-cited, and some of the sources were just ridiculous. If I had several free days, I could have posted a meaningful response if I was so inclined. And I'm not. The only result would be the complete shitting up of this thread with stuff that basically no one cares about.

On June 24 2016 01:56 xDaunt wrote:

I don't remember all of the details, but one of the most obvious problems with kwizach's post was using an article discussing the lack of efficacy of carpet bombing in Vietnam to demonstrate that total warfare does not work. Other stuff that he cited also used varying definitions of "total warfare" or "barbarism" that weren't even necessarily germane to the points that I and other posters were making (and that's without even taking into consideration the laughably crude analysis that at least one of those authors employed).

The bottom line is that a full response to all of this would ruin this thread. No one wants to go that far our into the weeds.