No.1675313[View All]
Not trying to be an enlightened centrist here, but it has always seemed odd to me how people on the right and left fetishize the concept of a militia taking down a conventional army, when reality has shown the opposite result every time, I come from a shitty third world nation that is barely held together most of the time, and my country has experienced numerous rebellions by Islamists, ethnic nationalists, and communists, and every time they have failed. This is because a "well-armed and well-funded militia" is no match for a well-armed, better-trained army with superior logistics and structure. Of course, in the event of a total collapse, a militia could potentially become the only proper authority for a region or if faced with an entirely incompetent and corrupt army. However, in most cases, a real army always prevails over militias. I don't know how people fell for this meme really, Eve Marx bought into this up and advocated for workers' militias, which ultimately proved to be a massive waste of time and loss of life for everyone involved, the Spanish Republicans insisted on using them in the Spanish civil war and they were a massive hinderance that lost way too many battles, and thoughts of forming an actual army was "Stalinism" and a betrayal of the revolution.
306 posts and 78 image replies omitted. Click reply to view. No.1814757
>>1814753>>1814753>im an irl glorified walking pop upfixed
>>1814753>youre a chinlet nerd who fantasizes about committing acts of terrorismno, the next socialist revolution begin via the 3rd sexual revolution
No.1814758
>>1814757>>im an irl glorified walking pop up>t. never leaves his house and is unaware of what political activism entails>via the 3rd sexual revolutionthankfully we have your sister for that
No.1814760
>>1814758sorry coomer your midget hand isnt a human being no matter how much u pray to it
No.1814779
>>1814760i dont even know what youre talking about now
you are a terminally online troll. i suggest redirecting your efforts to something more substantial and fulfilling beyond acting like a provocative retard on internet forums
No.1814781
What are you two talking about
No.1814783
>>1814779i dont even know what youre talking about now
you are a terminally online mole. i suggest redirecting your efforts to something more substantial and fulfilling beyond acting like a provocative red liberal on internet forums
No.1814974
>>1814783>molesays the glowie who wants to send radicalized workers to their deaths by organizing a urban guerrilla (already tried, already failed btw)
>red liberalyou lack reading comprehension. im not a pacifist
No.1826902
>>1755298Nice orientalist slop.
The Ba'athist Iraqi army mogs the PMF at every level. Even the early insurgency that BTFO'd mutts was superior to the PMF to due its ex army members.
In the ISIS war, ISOF did the heavy lifting, not the PMF.
No.1826931
a lot of anons ITT are really missing the entire fucking point of how guerrilla warfare works
yes, if you try to confront a conventional army on its own terms as a militia or guerrilla unit, you will probably lose. a guerrilla has to play to its strengths in order to win of being lightweight, fast, difficult to suppress – a multitude of snakes versus a dragon. as communications technologies have gotten more accessible and advanced, guerrilla warfare has only become a more viable strategy because it makes it significantly easier to avoid having any centralized chains of command and being able to quickly respond to changes at the periphery. John Robb wrote a whole book about this called Brave New War where he talks about how Islamic insurgents have effectively been able to optimize for their own tactics stochastically by having a diverse set of different groups all communicating with each other and adapting their strategies based on which actions work and which don't.
a conventional army is comparatively more expensive to maintain, has centralized command structures, and has less of an ability to quickly adapt to changes in the periphery. guerrillas make the strengths of the conventional army – its ability to marshal a lot of firepower at very distinct targets – into its weaknesses: they attack supply lines, assassinate officers, destroy infrastructure, cause confusion, and then they retreat back into the crowd or into the hinterlands before the enemy can even do anything about it. a guerrilla unit is never going to win against a conventional army in a head-on fight, so what the guerrillas do instead is bleed the enemy dry.
this is also where the concept of "asymmetrical warfare" comes from. there is an asymmetry in the cost to maintain a conventional army, and in the value of what the conventional army has to defend, versus what the guerrilla can get away with attacking using improvised explosives or even just bullets. there are examples of this throughout the various conflicts in the Middle East over the past 20 years of Islamic insurgents blowing up oil pipelines, which results in literal orders of magnitude in terms of asymmetry. the guerilla wins over the long term by taking advantage of these asymmetries.
"analogically, the guerrilla fights the war of the flea, and his military enemy suffers the dog's disadvantages: too much to defend, too small, ubiquitous, and agile an enemy to come to grips with. If the war continues long enough, the dog succumbs to exhaustion and anaemia without ever having found anything on which to close its jaws or to rake with its claws."
No.1826939
>>1826931see the Algerian war, early revolutionary violence almost ended their movement because they kept being arrested, interrogated and more members were subsequently arrested. Leaving the cities was the smartest decision the FLN made. After that they became more cautious and organized, and would lead the French Military on wild goose chases. It was not about "winning" the war but Ben Bella understood the political situation in France, he knew the war was unpopular and costly and thus it became a slog of retreating to rural regions or neighboring Libya or Tunisia until they built up their strength and then ambush and retreat, also it's best leaders were men who had previously served in the French Army and knew enough about military discipline and how the French Army functioned.
No.1827021
>>1758613>>1765448>>1755298>During the Iran-Iraq War, Sunni, Shi’a, and Kurd fought alongside each other throughout the war in direct support of unabashedly nationalist objectives. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis from every community voluntarily joined the armed forces and served alongside fellow Iraqis who hailed from places they had never seen, or perhaps never even heard of. Nationalism rose above ethno-sectarianism as the identity most relevant to Iraqi Army will to fight. Arguably, it also constituted a motivating ideology. National mobilization and national service during the Iran-Iraq War bonded Iraqis together and provided the basis for later resurgence of nationalist sentiment in the 2000s and 2010s. The fact that tens of thousands of Kurdish Iraqis served honorably in the Iraqi Army during the war, even as their fellow Kurds were actively rebelling against the state, speaks volumes to the weakness of primordial arguments. We will never know if the will to fight of individual Kurdish soldiers suffered due to identity issues; some Kurds almost certainly had second thoughts, and some deserted. Wholesale enthusiasm for the war going into 1988 mattered more for combat effectiveness than idiosyncratic desertions.
>There is an interesting dynamic that emerges when discussing ethno-sectarianism with Iraqis, and particularly with Sunni and Shi’a Arabs. Most Iraqis of all ages will aggressively downplay ethno-sectarian divisions within the Iraqi state, even as those divisions rise to the surface and cause internecine violence. It is difficult to overestimate the adamant nature of the continuous rejection of primordialism in interviews with Iraqis. Whether or not the perceptions are, or were true, they are truly felt. This is a representative quote from an Iraqi general officer, in response to the question, “What role did ethno-sectarianism play in the Iraqi Army before 2003?” "Believe me there was no role. No way, it was not allowed, even if you were Sunni. If a Sunni said something about a Shi’a, he would be sent to court. Sectarianism was not allowed."
>Individuals identify with different groups, often simultaneously. Ideology and identity are closely intertwined but sufficiently different to warrant separate assessment. Even as the Kurds sought independence in the north, ethno-sectarianism was effectively a null issue for the army in 1980. In this case, the lack of expected identity issues actually reinforced Iraqi will to fight. The partly organic, partly contrived rise of Iraqi nationalism helped to feed Iraqi fighting spirit.
>Iraqi leaders had several built-in advantages as they sought to improve Iraqi combat effectiveness, and particularly the will to fight of the Iraqi Army. The very fact of Iranian presence on Iraqi soil was enough to trigger sentiments of both desperation and revenge across Iraqi society, and particularly within the military. In general, Iraqis were ready, willing, and able to serve. The Iraqi Army expanded over the six years from 1982 to 1988, from 150,000 to nearly half a million soldiers, and the overall armed forces including militias grew to perhaps 1,000,000 people in uniform. At the same time as Saddam and the Ba’ath Party leadership were successfully rallying the Iraqi state and the army, the Iranians struggled to maintain the zealous enthusiasm that had empowered their early battlefield victories. They managed to press through economic collapse and battlefield stalemate in the mid-1980s, but by 1988 the Iranians were reaching their culminating point. Support for the war ebbed and recruiting started to dry up, even as the ranks of the Iraqi military swelled. The Iraqi Army’s mass use of chemical weapons had eroded Iranian will to fight and struck terror into front-line soldiers and recruits alike. Just as the Iraqis lost enthusiasm in 1980 when the Arab Iranians failed to rally behind their cause, the Iranians received a cold welcome from the Shi’a Arab Iraqis in the occupied territories; they were not welcomed as liberators. >After the initial fallback from Iran, leadership at all levels of the Iraqi Army improved unevenly, and in fits and starts, throughout the course of the war.>Two factors helped affect this general, though inconsistent, trend of improvement. First, war is an unforgiving crucible. Combat almost always weeds out paper tigers. Between 1980 and 1988, natural selection and combat promotion generated a new caste of handpicked, combat-tested leaders in most of the units throughout the Iraqi Army. Second, Saddam’s direct intervention changed the nature of the entire officer corps. Even those tribal flunkies and political appointees who survived combat failure were shifted to positions where they could do little harm. Soldiers saw this shift firsthand. It significantly improved their will to fight over time. "By this point in the war [1987], Saddam was supporting military professionalism over political, tribal, and regional loyalties when choosing his senior commanders. The resulting changes in the high command coupled with hard earned experience finally began to influence Iraq’s fielded capabilities" His intensive efforts to promote competent leaders generated significant improvement in the quality of the army’s leadership and in the effect their leadership had on the army’s collective will to fight: Top-level competence generated increasing confidence in the organization over time. As early as 1983, senior Iraqi military leaders could be found at the front trying to rally units to hold out or drive forward.
>If one believes that Iraqi nationalism did not exist prior to 1921, that it did not spontaneously materialize in 1921, and if one ignores all the structured efforts to generate nationalism from the 1920s through the late 1970s, it is hard to avoid the evidence that nationalism had certainly emerged and was functioning by 1988. Saddam leveraged religion, secularism, populism, militarism, socialism, capitalism, democracy, diplomacy, terror, paternal love, and outright payoffs to unite Iraqis behind the state and behind the war with Iran. By 1988, Iraq was probably more united than it had ever been or has been since. National unity was a significant factor in Iraqi Army will to fight. Saddam and his top generals reshaped the Iraqi Army. The Army gradually got rid of some incompetent officers through execution or transfer and (with some exceptions) installed more competent and proven professionals in their place. The Republican Guard Corps was established, and guard units quickly gained a reputation for competence and dependability. Military control was firmly established through an intricate system of punishment and rewards, enforced by thousands of Ba’ath Party commissars planted at every level of the military. Army leaders implemented a lessons-learned program to help improve military training and education. Many top army leaders understood the critical value of human factors in training.
>Most experts on Iraq argue for a rejection of primordial simplification. Nationalist identity can and does coexist with other identities in Iraq, as it does in Russia, a country with one of the world’s most powerful armies. And, as in the Soviet and modern Russian armies, the Israeli Army, and in the U.S. Army, complex identities can be a source of both strength and prospective weakness.
<"Iraqi Army Will to Fight" by Ben Connable No.1827069
>>1826931the bourgeois armies are well aware of what asymmetrical warfare is
>>1826939most western bourgeois states are politically crystallized and reach the full extent of their territories. just as an example of what happened here (a 3rd world btw), communist guerrillas tried to set up base in the jungles and got liquidated in the blink of an eye because the place they thought the bourgeois couldnt reach was actually very accessible to them (and the bourgeois armies have been training against counterinsurgency and in rough terrain aswell)
No.1827225
>>1827069The first translations of Mao's guerrilla warfare came from the US army, like there wasn't some law that wouldn't keep them from reading leftist guerrilla manuals, they literally used guevara's entire base plan to catch him on Bolivia.
No.1827230
>>1827021>Ben ConnableDo I even gotta look into this guy's background?
No.1827257
>>1827254The war actually made Iran realise that it couldn't win battles let alone wars with the power of Islamic zeal alone. When tens of thousands men and boys had been massacred, so they released the old Shahist officers (after ideological Islamic training) to train and lead the new army, they next generation of officers were further sent to Russian after the war.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/iransource/how-the-iranian-air-force-turned-the-tide-of-the-iran-iraq-war-in-1980/ No.1827277
>>1827254>Do I even gotta look into this guy's background?>retired glowieEvery. Time. That's why his analysis left out any mention of Western influence propelling Iraq to war, and on Saddam. It makes the entire pasta worthless.
No.1827282
>>1827277>the government we spent six trillions overthrowing to replace with IRGC Islamists was cool actually Okay IRGCuck
>Western influence propelling Iraq Yeah like this one 5 (five) years prior to the war
>>1827254 No.1827289
>>1827257You are mixing things up a little bit. The conflict the anon before you put in his picrel involved pro-western and pro-zionist Pahlavi's Iran - as Burgerland and Zion central supporting them shows - against Ba'athist Iraq - usually flip-flopping between the blocs, but in this situation definitively backed by the Good Guys. And that was the mid 1970s. You are clearly referring to the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s. An extremely gruesome war that brought to nothing except millions of dead and further destabilisation. In that situation, Burgerland had the stated objective of letting both countries bleed each other out while having officially good relations with Iraq and a hostile attitude towards Khomeini's Iran.
No.1827310
>>1827282>replace with IRGC Islamists was cool actually objectively cooler if you insist on being a simplistic retard about it
>5 (five) years prior to the war and what the fuck changed in those 5 (five) years that you are deliberately omitting? Almost exactly the same thing that the retired glowie's account omitted.
No.1827320
>>1827310>what changed Iran went from receiving western weapons directly to receiving them through Israel and other loopholes as you can see in this graph from Pierre Razoux's book on the topic
>>1827282It's crazy I look at the tank and air battles during the war and it's almost always Soviet weapons used by Iraq vs Western weapons used by Iran, very curious.
No.1827350
>>1827320>very curious.and very irrelevant. Both countries were using legacy weapons from previous alliances. It's not complicated. Venezuela operating US weapons as long as possible after Chavez ascended is a also not le very curious. Significantly, you follow the retired glowie in omitting that the west propelled Iraq to war with Iran after the revolution.
>very curious. No.1827363
>>1827350Yes, and the US famously being one of Venezuela's main weapons suppliers today.
>you follow the retired glowie in omitting that the west propelled Iraq to war with Iran after the revolution. So true xixter. Ignore the breaking of treaties, hundreds of border violations, sending terrorists to bomb schools and hospitals, "death to kuffar", "theocracy now!" and "exporting the revolution" suff.
No.1827368
Most importantly, remember in 1979 when Saddam send his diplomats to congratulate the new Iranian government, being one of the first states to do so? How did the Ayatollah respond? Why by calling Saddam an infidel and inciting a revolution in his Shia majority country.
Imagine if it was the other way around, we wouldn't hear the end of it.
What my fellow "materialists" fail to grasp beyond these silly reductive narratives, is that Ba'athists were third world national bourgeoisie. They couldn't give less of a fuck about what either the US or Soviets wanted. They were looking out for their own interests, and they acted rationally against an irrational threat. If Ba'athists were stooges, Kissinger wouldn't be on the record calling for their overthrow few years prior to the war, arming Iran with one of the biggest and most modern western arsenals in process.
>Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called on Iraqis to overthrow the Ba'ath government, which was received with considerable anger in Baghdad. On 17 July 1979, despite Khomeini's call, Saddam gave a speech praising the Iranian Revolution and called for an Iraqi-Iranian friendship based on non-interference in each other's internal affairs. When Khomeini rejected Saddam's overture by calling for Islamic revolution in Iraq, Saddam was alarmed.
No.1827418
>>1827363>the US famously being one of Venezuela's main weapons suppliers today.The same US that grounded Venezuelan air assets by refusing to supply parts and support. Almost as if fluid geopolitics don't effect the use of legacy systems from previous alliances. The recent developments with Venezuela and Guyana make it seem unlikely that the US is famously anything with Venezuela rn. Extremely sus how quick on the draw you were with that vid btw, anon.
>>1827363>>1827368>West causes chaos on Brzezinski's World-Island>It's actions ensure that only an extremist formation can overthrow it's dictator. >West criticizes formation for being extremist and immediately sides with Iraq, playing every side all the time>Resulting in Iraq being propelled into war with Iran>Leftists suffer, as always.The details are downstream of this. Xixters.
No.1827928
>>1827823By mentioning the fact that independent Iraq invaded the western vassal that was (is) Iran in 1720?
Or that Iranians got cucked by bongs all the time while Iraqis won their independence in 1920? Or how Bong steamrolled Iran in WW2 (1 week lmao) while struggling with Iraq for a month?
How do IRGCucks cope with the fact that they would've remained beneath Iraq's feet if it weren't for Americans and the only reason they aren't a US colony is because of the Iraqi resistance?
>>1827837>demonstrates Eastern superiority by clapping your cheeks with Soviet weaponsNothing personal kid
No.1827945
>>1827928>…including old French Mirages from Argentina…Yet if you search for "Iranian Mirage fighter" the only results you'll find either in text or in photo form are the Mirage F1s that flew from Iraq to Iran to avoid being blown up during the gulf war, with no record of Iran ever owning a Mirage III or Mirage 5 (the kind of Mirage jets operated by Argentina, trivial to distinguish visually from the Mirage F1 despite the similar name)
No.1827969
>>1827945This was written by the Iranian-Israeli arms dealer who broke the Iran-Contra story.
Iranians took them apart and shoved them up the Ayatollah's ass for all I care.
>>1827946Poor fucks couldn't even invade Basra, got re-invaded by Iraq in 1988 and then surrendered the same year. The only reason they have any foothold in the region is because of their US masters. I'd sleep on it.
No.1827996
>>1827969again I dislike them, but I'm not delusional enough to believe they have a secret alliance working with the US and Israel, they want control of the region and are aware that US and Israel destabilisatiing it is actually good for them, allows them to pick up the piece and create proxies in ethnic or religious minority groups, they do that in my own country, where Shia and even Sunni ethnic nationalists parties are financed and support ed by them
No.1828009
>>1827823Iraq was an ottoman province
No.1828011
>>1827946Wth are you talking about? How tf did Iran interfere in Pakistani elections? Most Pakistani involved with Iran were Shia refugees and volunteers joining Iranian proxy groups like Liwa Zainebiyoun due to increasing sectarian and religious violence in Pak
No.1828014
>>1828009It was independent from 1704-1831 and only collapsed because of an embargo by bongs and a crop failure, then Ottomans took the opportunity to chimp out and annex it.
It stretched from Basra to Zakho so literally the exact same borders today except for a larger coastline. Not to mention it being the heartland of the Abbasid Empire. Mesopotamian history, etc etc
No.1828023
>>1828011not our elections, but it does have links with shia parties(you'll find Khomeni pics everywhere) and it has worked with Indian agents and certain nationalists
No.1828050
>>1828009They were never an independent provice, Iraq, Syria and Palestine were all part of Eyalet I Misr
No.1828067
>>1828062All of ME should be under either Turkish or Iranian control tho
No.1828069
>>1828067Both should be under deez nuts doe
No.1832242
>>1832116>LE GULF MONEYRINOSThe Gulf loans didn't reach Iraq until Iranians were at the Gulf's gates in 1982. The value of said loans was about 1/4 of what Iraq got from USSR and other places and 1/10 of the war's cost for Iraq.
Saudi Arabia allowed Israeli planes to bomb Iraq using their air space. They also laundered billions as part of the Iran-Contra affair, funding Iran essentially.
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/30/us/white-house-crisis-evidence-points-big-saudi-role-iranian-contra-arms-deals.html No.1846343
>>1844730Did I assrape you with facts or logic or what?
>>1827928 Unique IPs: 26