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When I saw Maiwand's initial post the other day about the Mehidism... I thought history may be repeating its cycles yet again... or is it???:
Watch this video:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient...holy-land.html
I promise you will not regret it.
I try my best to read on history and conflict since it holds many lessons for those willing to listen.
So Scimitar and I have discussed the veracity of Pape's work. Pape's conclusions are that the tactics that the insurgency utilizes for asymmetric war have historically secured short term gains but not realized the long term objective.
There may be some historical validity to Pape's conclusion and some eerie similarity to Roman-Israeli conflict in the era of Hadrian.
In the early AD era, a series of anti Roman insurgencies were launched. The most famous leader of these insurgencies was Simon Bar Kochba. Bar Kochba had the following strategy:
1) Initiate a guerilla insurgency against the Romans
2) Utilize religious doctrine to validate initiating this
3) Force the portion of the population that is sitting on the sidelines to take a side and join the war against the Roman Empire/Hadrian
4) Do all of the above by attacking the center of Roman Power in Jerusalem.
5) Utilize the fact that the holiest site in Judaism was the Temple in Jerusalem and capitalize on the anti Roman sentiment that was brewing secondary to the Empire's interventionalism in the Holy Land itself.
6) Bog the Romans down in a war of attrition against an enemy that new the land
All of this sounding familiar yet?
So here was core group within religous Jews that sought to break the Roman's hold in the land of Bani Israel.
1) A larger segment of the religious Jewish population viewed Bar Kochba as unnecessarily "rocking the boat"
2) Bar Kochba was doing his best to undo the pervading sense of Jewish Defeatism after centuries of captivities, losses, and being a conquered people.
We know 1) now after centuries of mainly Jewish oral legend that depicted Bar Kochba as a Jewish Military Hero that rose up against oppression.
Now based on the discovery of Bar Kochba's own letters discovered in the caves that the insurgents hid in, a different picture emerges:
1) Bar Kochba strongly believed God was with him
2) He was a micro manager and used the written word to coordinate various commanders
3) He felt a lack of support from the general population and castigated the Jews that were not helping him.
4) His small term gains from his lightening raids that resulted in many dead on his own sides and rattled the Romans ended up securing short term gains and long term losses.
5) Bar Kochba, like Hannibal was eventually caught by the Romans and killed.
The outcome of Bar Kochba's revolt was punishing Roman Yolk that would last until Omar Bin Al Khattab would eventually seize Jerusalem and allow the Jews to return to Jerusalem.
It would be 2 millenia until Jewish Power would finally rise again in the modern era in the form of Israel.
God alone knows the outcomes of things and is the author if history and its surprises between Spartans and Persians. However, now superimposing history's lessons over the modern era... one wonders how all of this will play out.
The goal of the modern insurgency, per Michael Scheuer, is to spread the Americans thin and drain them militarily (spread thin) and economically while reenergizing a Muslim world plagued with a defeatist attitude.
The major difference though between the Romans and the Pax Americana is that the Romans, in the words of Tacitus used to:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tacitus
"Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant"
The last part of this quote indicates that to face the Romans meant utter annihilation and expectation of destruction. "They created a desolation and called it peace" ---> they destroyed anything that moved and the silence was peaceful.
Examine the fate of Hannibal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal#cite_note-51
Carthage was destroyed utterly and burned to the ground.
Even Khalid Bin Walid, when he took on the Roman War Machine, had to drag the Romans into the desert and only rose the command of the Muslim Army after many senior commanders died against the war machine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Kokhba_revolt
The outcome of this Bar Kochba revolt was that 580,000 Jews were killed by Hadrians forces and:
"The disastrous end of the revolt also occasioned major changes in Jewish religious thought. Messianism was abstracted and spiritualized, and rabbinical political thought became deeply cautious and conservative. The Talmud, for instance, refers to Bar-Kokhba as "Ben-Kusiba", a derogatory term used to indicate that he was a false Messiah."
And of course Caeser's years long fight against the Gaul tribes in an insurgency led by Vercengitorix
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallic_Wars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vercingetorix
Was a eventually a disasterous defeat for the tribes and Caeser made sure they knew it. Their leader was led in chains to Rome and eventually made an example of.
Now the Americans on the other hand have generally not won a war after World War 2... per their own military historians... not per me. In World War 2, they went Roman and made sure that the enemy knew it was defeated.
Generally, since then Americans do not decimate their enemy immediately and far more conscious of world opinion. One General said that their enemies do not understand that they have been defeated... implying that the "gloves" werent allowed to come off. This has resulted in a series of discussions about the Rules of Engagement.
So what shall come in the decades ahead will be truly historical... its like a coin has been flipped and it landed on its side, waiting to fall. Will the insurgency
1) End like Bar Kochba's as Pape's data predicts
2) Carve out new lessons in history for subsequent generations.
God knows best, not me.
Watch this video:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient...holy-land.html
I promise you will not regret it.
I try my best to read on history and conflict since it holds many lessons for those willing to listen.
So Scimitar and I have discussed the veracity of Pape's work. Pape's conclusions are that the tactics that the insurgency utilizes for asymmetric war have historically secured short term gains but not realized the long term objective.
There may be some historical validity to Pape's conclusion and some eerie similarity to Roman-Israeli conflict in the era of Hadrian.
In the early AD era, a series of anti Roman insurgencies were launched. The most famous leader of these insurgencies was Simon Bar Kochba. Bar Kochba had the following strategy:
1) Initiate a guerilla insurgency against the Romans
2) Utilize religious doctrine to validate initiating this
3) Force the portion of the population that is sitting on the sidelines to take a side and join the war against the Roman Empire/Hadrian
4) Do all of the above by attacking the center of Roman Power in Jerusalem.
5) Utilize the fact that the holiest site in Judaism was the Temple in Jerusalem and capitalize on the anti Roman sentiment that was brewing secondary to the Empire's interventionalism in the Holy Land itself.
6) Bog the Romans down in a war of attrition against an enemy that new the land
All of this sounding familiar yet?
So here was core group within religous Jews that sought to break the Roman's hold in the land of Bani Israel.
1) A larger segment of the religious Jewish population viewed Bar Kochba as unnecessarily "rocking the boat"
2) Bar Kochba was doing his best to undo the pervading sense of Jewish Defeatism after centuries of captivities, losses, and being a conquered people.
We know 1) now after centuries of mainly Jewish oral legend that depicted Bar Kochba as a Jewish Military Hero that rose up against oppression.
Now based on the discovery of Bar Kochba's own letters discovered in the caves that the insurgents hid in, a different picture emerges:
1) Bar Kochba strongly believed God was with him
2) He was a micro manager and used the written word to coordinate various commanders
3) He felt a lack of support from the general population and castigated the Jews that were not helping him.
4) His small term gains from his lightening raids that resulted in many dead on his own sides and rattled the Romans ended up securing short term gains and long term losses.
5) Bar Kochba, like Hannibal was eventually caught by the Romans and killed.
The outcome of Bar Kochba's revolt was punishing Roman Yolk that would last until Omar Bin Al Khattab would eventually seize Jerusalem and allow the Jews to return to Jerusalem.
It would be 2 millenia until Jewish Power would finally rise again in the modern era in the form of Israel.
God alone knows the outcomes of things and is the author if history and its surprises between Spartans and Persians. However, now superimposing history's lessons over the modern era... one wonders how all of this will play out.
The goal of the modern insurgency, per Michael Scheuer, is to spread the Americans thin and drain them militarily (spread thin) and economically while reenergizing a Muslim world plagued with a defeatist attitude.
The major difference though between the Romans and the Pax Americana is that the Romans, in the words of Tacitus used to:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tacitus
"Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant"
The last part of this quote indicates that to face the Romans meant utter annihilation and expectation of destruction. "They created a desolation and called it peace" ---> they destroyed anything that moved and the silence was peaceful.
Examine the fate of Hannibal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal#cite_note-51
Carthage was destroyed utterly and burned to the ground.
Even Khalid Bin Walid, when he took on the Roman War Machine, had to drag the Romans into the desert and only rose the command of the Muslim Army after many senior commanders died against the war machine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Kokhba_revolt
The outcome of this Bar Kochba revolt was that 580,000 Jews were killed by Hadrians forces and:
"The disastrous end of the revolt also occasioned major changes in Jewish religious thought. Messianism was abstracted and spiritualized, and rabbinical political thought became deeply cautious and conservative. The Talmud, for instance, refers to Bar-Kokhba as "Ben-Kusiba", a derogatory term used to indicate that he was a false Messiah."
And of course Caeser's years long fight against the Gaul tribes in an insurgency led by Vercengitorix
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallic_Wars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vercingetorix
Was a eventually a disasterous defeat for the tribes and Caeser made sure they knew it. Their leader was led in chains to Rome and eventually made an example of.
Now the Americans on the other hand have generally not won a war after World War 2... per their own military historians... not per me. In World War 2, they went Roman and made sure that the enemy knew it was defeated.
Generally, since then Americans do not decimate their enemy immediately and far more conscious of world opinion. One General said that their enemies do not understand that they have been defeated... implying that the "gloves" werent allowed to come off. This has resulted in a series of discussions about the Rules of Engagement.
So what shall come in the decades ahead will be truly historical... its like a coin has been flipped and it landed on its side, waiting to fall. Will the insurgency
1) End like Bar Kochba's as Pape's data predicts
2) Carve out new lessons in history for subsequent generations.
God knows best, not me.
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