Hacker News Reader

The problems is revolutions are people-based. No matter how many decades you keep American tanks in various middle eastern countries, if the people don't want to change, they won't.

Consider if China makes a better offer for the country than the US State Dept, which seems likely based on historical performance of the US State Dept. After the USA blows up all their old tanks, cementing anti-US hatred for generations, they can buy nice new Chinese ones after the treaty with China is signed.

This is very much a description of the fiasco US encountered in Iraq.

The battle was a total triumph, but aftermath a tragedy, and mainly so for mind boggling incompetence of post-war Washington policy effectively instigating a civil war, then backing one side in it, then another, and then showing a middle finger to both, and walking away.

All of this could've been avoided under different leadership.

> All of this could've been avoided under different leadership.

What do you mean? The war in Iraq has outlasted 3 US presidents, so clearly "different leadership" just doesn't work in practice.

IMO the US should completely change the modus operandi. "Invade & install new regime & call it democratic & steal oil" just isn't a good proposition for the local population. Unless the US can improve the proposition (to match China's "we give you lots of money and improve your quality of life") foreign military interventions just won't work.

What oil did the US steal from Iraq?

I've been asking that question for about 15 years now, when people casually toss such empty claims out there. I've never once received a facts-based answer (for obvious reasons).

Iraq was about Russia, not oil. The same thing Syria and Libya are about. Trying to limit or strip Russian influence out of the Middle East. It's two major powers going at eachother via proxy, the same thing that has been going on all around the world between the US and Russia since WW2. Vietnam also wasn't about oil. Afghanistan also wasn't about oil.

The US lost over a trillion dollars in Iraq trying to keep the two major factions from killing eachother. There is no amount of oil that could ever come out of Iraq for the US that will make up for that.

>> Iraq was about Russia, not oil

Not Russia, Iran. Iraq was/is a proxy war between Iran and the Saudis. Russia and America are distant twice-removed cousins to a longstanding family dispute.

It was called production sharing, but ExxonMobil and Chevron from via the KRG.

Seems very similar to the bull billing the china shop owner.

>Iraq was about Russia

You are entirely wrong. Iraq was about Israel. The neoconservatives in the US pushing the invasion are Zionists and the entirety of US intervention in the ME is about strengthening Israel's position relative to the countries surrounding it. Sorry it took you 15 years to find the correct answer. You don't need to spend trillions invading countries just to get access to their oil, you can literally just buy it from them.

Almost the entirety of the Iraq war as well as all major decisions which affected the outcome were under the Bush administration. In 2008, the Bush administration agreed to withdraw all US troops from Iraq, and the Obama administration completed it. While US forces have returned to Iraq repeatedly since then to deal with various issues such as ISIS which are intimately linked to the mishandling of the Iraq war, there have been a number of other developments in the middle east such as the arab spring and the Saudi-Iranian cold war which are much more proximate to these separate conflicts.

Please emphasize the "steal oil" part. Im pretty sure that the liberators became invaders once the local population figured out that OIL was the #1 target.

I'm going to guess they are talking about different leadership from the one which started the Iraq war.

Besides that, the past years have shown the American government to be a fickle partner at best who will abandon their allies on a moments notice. This is not something that the rest of the world will easily forget.

Ah customer versions of knockoffs of soviet tanks then :-)

>> Sanctions won’t work, but tanks would.

Southeast asia + tanks = bad mojo. Study the history. Tanks are white elephants in areas dominated by mountains and rainfall (both are tank kryptonite). Sure, US air power could dominate. They can use the same flightpaths they used in Vietnam, to the same ends. Myanmar is a country where light soldiers, guys with AKs and flipflops, are far more capable than a dozen tanks sinking into the mud.

If the recent Armenia Azerbaijan crisis was anything to go by, in mountainous terrain a drone/artillery combination is quite effective but a relatively new combat style on the scene.

>> in mountainous terrain

In mountainous terrain with few trees. Drones, and air power generally, become less effective over a dense canopy. The dry bare mountains of Afghanistan was a paradise for drones. Southeast Asia's jungles and river networks won't be.

US has a solution for this problem neatly packaged in barrels of all colors of the rainbow.

Welcome, Agent Orange... Let's hope we never see a repeat of such madness again.

Yangon surroundings is a plain, with a lot of roads, and agriculture, and it is situated on the coastline.

The same is much with the rest of South Myanmar, where most of country's population, and economy is.

Saigon and Hanoi are on flat coastal plains too, but you don't decisively win a war by only controlling part of the country, and Myanmar's economy is propped up by gas reserves and other resources in the wild northeast. Myanmar's army is less likely to inspire devotion than North Vietnam's, but can easily be propped up by China if it fancies a proxy war. The likely result of conflict would be everybody being a loser.

The question I always ask when people suggest warfare, especially an invasion: will you personally fight in it?

The predominant part of HN demographic are young military age men.

In case of any real conflict US will get dragged in, you will all be drafted, want you or not.

Becoming a soldier after being a freewheeling young man with 6 digit income, and effectively loosing everything you put into your career, business, education, relationship with your woman is not a pleasant thing.

But think, sooner or later US will be dragged into a real conflict. Everything is going towards that, and 2020, and multiple weak presidencies have only accelerated the timeline for Beijing, and Moscow.

China's strategy is to keep US in Iraq, and Afghanistan indefinitely, and have US dragged into fighting equally pointless, exhausting conflicts, whether they will be military, trade, or diplomatic.

They want to move that big direct conflict as much into future as possible, but that day will eventually, and inevitably come.

The question will be on whose terms will it happen.

What do you want? Loose everything and win, or loose everything and loose?

The kind of intervention HNer yuppies are advocating here in this case will only have poor, impressionable young men from the hinterland doing all the killing and all the dying for the elites, being desperate or straight up dumb enough to be manipulated into that.

WW3 is of course a different deal but that's way beyond the comfort zone of your run of the mill imperialist.

>In case of any real conflict US will get dragged in, you will all be drafted, want you or not.

A conflict doesn't have to be a global war to qualify as "real conflict" by any sensible definition. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were a real conflict, yet there were no drafts.

The dirty secret is that the US will probably lose either way.

Instead of absolute dollar amounts, if you compare China's military purchasing power with the US, adjusting for different labor costs and the fact that they don't include things like R&D in their military budget, then China is much closer to US spending than it appears.

Having a supply line to Asia versus China fighting close to home, that is a recipe for disaster.

Of course, even if average productivity per capita in China is half that of America, the total output will be twice as much. No one serious in Washington (or Moscow or Brussels or Beijing, etc.) believes America could win a war on China's home turf even if nukes are untouched. Same with India to a lesser extent.

It's not even a secret at all to at least millions of folks across the world. It's only the strange American media and brainwashing system that presents the idea that China can be threatened with force.

In that sense it's highly dubious Beijing is directly involved with Myanmar's current regime change. They can achieve their objectives anyways without getting their hands dirty. Of course there may be intermediaries involved that straddle both camps so it's not clear cut either.

Indeed. Realistically, China would have gotten what they wanted with or without a coup. They will support whoever is actually in power.

Not to mention the US's idiotic policy of allowing Chinese nationals to work in classified defense industries. Not only is China benefitting from their own massive defense spending, they are benefiting from a significant chunk of the USA's[1]. Presumably there are many more instances where this occurs that have not been caught.

[1] https://www.csis.org/programs/technology-policy-program/surv...

> Having a supply line to Asia versus China fighting close to home, that is a recipe for disaster.

It's worth remembering that World War II was a conflict where one side was fighting on a supply line 4,000 miles long, 3,000 by sea, and the other side was fighting a hundred miles past its own borders. The supply problems in the conflict were mostly concentrated in the latter country.

I can't speak to the quality of the Chinese military, but the US military is regarded as having perhaps the single most effective military logistics in world history.

"The Other Side" was fighting on four fronts at their borders, and had supply lines a thousand miles long on ground, with maybe a quarter of the material and manpower.

If you know anything about logistics you'd conclude that the latter had a much harder logistical challenge, especially since the Axis didn't have much of an Atlantic Navy.

The issue of a US v China confrontation is that this won't repeat. The US will not be able to go unopposed in the seas, and it will have to supply with non-naval means.

Also, it's worth remembering that in the case you're talking about, the US against the Axis in Europe, the US was not a major or deciding force, which is a major part of why it was able to afford such extended supply lines. In an alternative scenario where the rest of the Allies were so weak as that the US was the dominant power in the conflict, maintaining those supply lines would have been incredibly difficult.

Germany's logistics problems started cropping up in late 1941 during Operation Barbarossa, which failed largely because of logistical supply operations. At that time, the only other significant front would be the North African front, which wasn't really competing with Barbarossa for logistical support (North Africa being limited to trans-Mediterranean shipping availability, which the British were doing a passable job of interdicting).

> "The Other Side" was fighting on four fronts at their borders, and had supply lines a thousand miles long on ground

Do remember that it's basically fighting the same enemy on all the fronts (who have the same this-is-not-close issue as Germany). In the one case where it's different, keep in mind that Soviet factories were moved east of the Urals to places like Novosibirsk, which is further from Moscow than Berlin is to Moscow.

> the US against the Axis in Europe, the US was not a major or deciding force

The US was about ½-⅔ the total force in Western Front. While the Western Front was smaller than the Eastern Front, the US also played a major role in the supply chain of the USSR--virtually all of the trucks and trains that kept the USSR's war economy running were supplied by the US, which was also supplying Chang Kai-Shek via The Hump (although Britain was responsible for those logistics), while meanwhile reconquering the Philippines and other Pacific islands from the Japanese. And don't forget, most of the US manufacturing is several hundred miles from the coasts (the Great Lakes don't count for transoceanic shipping purposes).

Who will get drafted is a group that isn't well represented on HN: the people without a choice. People with money or connections will easily manage to avoid a draft.

Or the slots will be filled by volunteers who feel they have no other choice because they're trapped by student loans, or threat thereof, in a society that, up until recently, has demanded a 4 year degree to answer phone calls.

The word you're looking for is "Lose" not "Loose".

> will you personally fight in it?

Personally, like in piloting a drone? It's a good question to ask, to be sure, but its value continues to diminish as more and more tech is deployed in warfare.

Maybe a better question would be are you willing to allow crimes against humanity to occur if you can avoid personally fighting against it?

Plus there is a whole spectrum of physical intervention if we choose to. E.g. drones, supporting insurgencies, etc... that doesn't even require boots on ground.

This principle would be under R2P responsibility to protect.

We must have pretty different views of history if you think the actual goals of this kind of "intervention" ever included fighting "crimes against humanity", and they were not or did not lead to crimes against humanity themselves.

Also, killing <s>human beings</s> enemy combatants dispassionately with drones... Not something I'm energetic enough to debate today.

3-4 marine heavy brigades can easily stomp all tank battalions in Myanmar's disposal.

Yeah well unfortunately they're in the wrong hemisphere for that to be an geopolitically tolerable let alone domestically palatable.

The American public and international community could likely tolerate marines preventing regime change in some former bannana republic that otherwise seems to be on the up and up but ain't no way we're getting sucked into another jungle quagmire.

Ah, but the Panama intervention was all about American economic interests, and the Grenada one was about saving American lives. What economic or other interests does the USA currently have in Myanmar?

Limiting Chinese influence could be a goal by itself. Of course, boots on the ground would mean risking a Chinese intervention as well, like it happened during the Korean War. Different to that one and Vietnam though is, in Myanmar there is no comparable status quo ante belli. It is not at all clear whether the West has any support or some sort of stake in Myanmar. It would be like Irak all over again.

That would be exactly like Vietnam though (and like Korea too), the USA has no other reason to be there other than that they were trying to limit the Russian sphere of influence.

Close. You described Vietnam all over again. The only American interest was in, and still is, stopping hostile foreign influence.

Exactly.

>3-4 marine heavy brigades can easily stomp all tank battalions in Myanmar's disposal

And once that's done, how many years of U.S. occupation will it take when they can't get the locals to support a government run the way the US wants? Who will give up first, the US or the occupied country?

What's the incentive for the US? There were clear objectives when US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Without those the invasion is anyway more trouble than its worth.

There are none as far as I can see. US is much better off letting China deal with this place.

To comment more generally, Myanmar has probably the most enviable geopolitical _potential_ in the region if the not the world. It's the only country that can land connect China/India, has deep shore potentials that would wreck maritime trade patterns in the region... which contains 1/2 of the worlds population and is rapidly developing economically. It's almost in everyone's external interest to control Myanmar, or see it in dysfunctional shambles to create environment subject to easy influence.

Having long-term military basing there by US or China would be... strategically significant and only IMO possible via invasion. That applies to military basing in the region in general, too much colonial history and political baggage for anything other than logistics support during peace time.

Can you explain what a "heavy marine brigade" is? It vaguely sounds like a technical term, but I am not able to map it to a concrete unit type.

An amphibious brigade with a lot of tanks.

An MEB? 3 or 4 of those is 45 to 60 thousand soldiers. Is that what you had in mind?

Yes, that in case they are given at least 1 proper tank battalion each.

That will be pretty much the second Iraqi Freedom, maybe less.

Myanmar's mess isn't worth a single missile off a Predator drone. No more military interventions from the West please.