On 18 Dec 2003 08:31:14 -0500, Timothy Eisele wrote:

In rec.arts.sf.science Michael Ash wrote:
In article ,
Simon Morden wrote:

Which is what I would suggest. No country could currently defeat the USA in a
stand-up fight. So disperse your army globally and take out US-interest soft
targets: embassies, companies, tourists, registered shipping, anything that
flies a US flag.

The losses would be sickening, and it makes me nauseous to think about the
scenario. Especially if army elements managed to get on US soil.

Well, don't forget that only a very tiny percentage of any regular army
will be composed of people fanatical enough to become suicide bombers.
Your four-million strong Elbonian People's Happy Army will turn into a
handful of suicide bombers and a whole bunch of deserters if you tried
that strategy. Not to say it may not be the best use of that army, but I
don't think it would be that effective.

Which is why the ideal complement to this strategy would be the intensive
development of a really effective brainwashing technology. Once your amoral
dictatorship has the ability to really deeply convince people on a wholesale
basis that the regime is worth dying for, then you're in business. Especially
since this will have the useful side benefit of greatly improving your hold
on power with the general populace, if you can apply similar technology to
them as well.

This suggests that, rather than worrying over a few piddly little nukes or
chemical weapons (which are not really useful for aggression by a small country
anyway, since they could never be actually used against any
western nation without inviting the absolute destruction of the user),
we should really be paying a lot of attention to countries that are
spending a lot of effort on making advances in brainwashing methods and
techniques.

This has already been done. They call it "religion".

Al Minyard