Quote from MohdSalleh:
2. When you engage in actual fighting, if victory
is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and
their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town,
you will exhaust your strength.
3. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources
of the State will not be equal to the strain.
4. Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped,
your strength exhausted and your treasure spent,
other chieftains will spring up to take advantage
of your extremity. Then no man, however wise,
will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.
5. Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war,
cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.
6. There is no instance of a country having benefited
from prolonged warfare.
it's like he's speaking to us
:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
Doesn't this also apply to the other side even more?
Rome fought a long, hard, expensive campaign against Hannibal & co. They were unprepared and got slaughtered on the battlefield time after time. But it was the Carthaginians who lost. The Roman system was just superior, nothing to do with military generalship (the Romans came off by far the worst at this vs Hannibal). Ditto WWII, where the Nazis had by far the best generals. But their system was run by a tiny oligarchy and was profoundly anti-rational, so had little strength in depth.
We also had a lengthy struggle against communism, and again won. Again, it was due to having the better system. The communists were definitely more determined and committed than we were, they had better strategy during the cold war and achieved many successful commie revolutions until they controlled 1/3rd of the world - didn't help them.
The same will happen with the islamofascists. Most muslims would rather be well-off, free, and safe, than to be flat broke, denied a vote, blowing themselves up and getting barbequed by Predator drones. The western system is just too dynamic, free, and prosperous to lose - if it were weak then communism would have been victorious, imperialist Japan (far more disciplined than us) would have won, Nazism would have won. Ditto with China - they are only rising because they copied some of our system. They will copy it more - and that will neutralize them as a threat, until they become about as scary as a large version of Hong Kong. They already have too much $$$ in Treasuries to want to piss off the west in a serious way.
If any system does become a serious threat, it will be crushed or out-competed just like all the others. If a superior system emerges, we will copy it.
The stupidity of illiberal strategists, like Bin Laden, communists, Nazis etc, is the same fatal conceit the socialists had. A free group of individuals interacting loosely is more dynamic, adaptive, creative, and thus possesses higher evolutionary fitness than a top-down hierarchical elite, dictator, or oligarchy. Capitalism and democracy adapt better to change, they reverse mistakes more easily, they promote more citizen participation and thus strength in depth. Their freedom results in more idea generation and quicker adaptation of successful methods. Their meritocracy ensures optimal allocation of talents. They are more robust and resilient systems.
As an example, the most aggressive and expansionist power bloc today is not the USA or China or Russia, but the maligned "weak" European Union. In a mere half century it has spread from 5 countries and 100 million people, to 25+ countries and 350 million. At the stroke of a pen it could conquer Turkey and its 60 million muslims without sending in a single tank or airstrike, and without any resistance movement forming to fight the conquest - just by offering access to the EU common market. It could do the same with Ukraine, Moldova, the entire balkans, Cyprus, Crete, Israel - and in the long run Belarus, Russia, all the CIS and former soviet states, maybe Morocco, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon. All those countries populations would jump at the chance to join. We conquered 150 million former communists without firing a shot in the last 2 decades, converted their youth to capitalism (more or less), and will take over more in future. The Islamists, and ill-informed Americans, think they are doing a stealth takeover of Europe by population migration, whilst the real takeover is happening in reverse where it real matters - in the governments and rulers of the countries. Now that's real Sun Tzu right there - no quagmires, imperial overstretch, or expensive military occupations required.
The only way we can lose is if we stupidly change the system into an inferior one, like socialism or nationalism, or a global government or something dumb like that. Or if we ignore nuclear proliferation and end up getting suitcase nuked into WWIII (in which case we'll all die). You guys are underestimating the inherent resilience and self-adjusting mechanisms in western liberal democracy/capitalism.
