Fox News:
“Do you think if those people had guns there would be anything but more chaos, more violence and more death?” Williams asked. “Let me ask you, New York City, you think if you have a gun you could stand up to the New York City Police Department, much less the state National Guard or the U.S. military?
“I think if the American people are armed to the teeth,” Watters responded.
“Get them more guns!” Wiliams said in disbelief.
I don’t watch television, so when something like this little debate happens I have to read about it or I don’t know it existed.
This is instructive, yes? Juan is arguing that the citizens should be willing to accept the chaos and death that is occurring now in Venezuela – from APCs running over people, to starvation, to death and disease from overcrowded medical facilities, to heat stroke because of no electricity, to extreme poverty because of the corruption of socialism – just in order to prevent even more problems.
Or in other words, there is never any justification for stopping governmental abuse, governmental corruption, or death by government (which in the twentieth century alone totaled 170 million souls). This is a remarkable defense, but you should always remember that this is the way progressives think. They never have your best interest at heart – it’s always some perceived betterment of a social engineering construct as determined by the central planners, even if the central planners are murderers.
Now, one more time, let’s dispense with this mythos that an insurgency cannot tangle with a uniformed army. Juan (as most people who offer up this objection) has an overblown view of what a uniformed army can accomplish.
There simply aren’t that many infantry battalions in the armed forces. A full 80% of enlisted and commissioned people are logistics, intel, transport, maintenance, engineering, and administration. Furthermore, we’ve seen what an insurgency can do to a uniformed armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Although we’ve been through this before many times, let’s do it again. The MultiNational Force reported years ago at the very height of the insurgency in Iraq that the total number of foreign fighters (the main ones doing the nefarious work) never exceeded approximately 20,000. Ponder: 20,000 poorly trained and poorly equipped and supplied insurgents fought the entire U.S. military to a virtual standstill in Iraq.
Ultimately, areas of Iraq were pacified, but it came at a tremendous cost, with saturation of Marines in Fallujah in 2007, and other tactics employed that aren’t long term, serving only for temporary pacification because we decided not to stay and work the politics for the purposes of U.S. interests. Similar results were achieved in the Malayan emergency by the British forces, but it involved brutal tactics and saturation of troops, and was only temporary.
A counterinsurgency is extremely difficult even with a very small insurgency. An insurgency isn’t about great armies lining up in fields of battle and walking towards each other while shooting. Insurgent and government live in the same neighborhoods, beside each other, wear the same uniforms, go to the same schools, work the same jobs, and walk the same streets. In such conditions, it’s impossible to tell insurgent from government. Juan has watched too many movies about old style warfare.
Talking heads and pundits still don’t understand what 4GW would involve, nor how difficult it would be to stop. The U.S. armed forces now focuses on 5GW (F35, Milstar uplinks to do everything, etc.) because they never figured out how to win 4GW and believe they’ll never be in one again.
Finally, isn’t it ironic that the very pundits who purvey this crap are the ones who wouldn’t propose allowing citizens to have fully automatic weapons (what do you think Juan would say about repealing the Hughes amendment?), but do want the police and military to have such weapons? That shows they haven’t come to terms with their own arguments. They don’t really even believe what’s coming out of their own mouths.
