just mulling

A thought that occurs to me:

Okay, say you're a Neo-Conservative. You believe in an American Empire. If you are a member of the Lord Bush's Cabal, you even have the power to make that Empire more real. So you invade (oops! "liberate") a smallish oil producing country. Naturally, some of the people there will not appreciate your efforts to "enlighten" them, and will take up arms, most in a clandestine manner. Soldiers, your soldiers, will be killed by these fighters - how do you get them to stop? The usual method, time-honored by conquerors everywhere, has been massive retaliation on local civilian populations. The theory is that if your enemy thinks you will kill his entire family should he kill one soldier, he'll put his weapons away and be a good little subject citizen. This has worked so rarely that one can only conclude that the conquerors know that killing everyone under the guise of "reprisals" is the true goal.
Which brings us back to our own Cabal. How to create a reprisal policy, without actually having "reprisals"? I could be wrong, but I suspect that there are not a lot of American soldiers who would actually carry out, in cold blood, a Nazi-like destruction of a whole village and its inhabitants. Oh, certainly you could find enough to make a special squad, but it couldnt be done quietly; somebody would find out and raise a stink (maybe it could be sub-contracted though, hmmm?).
This, I think, is why the Bush Corporation was so gung-ho on torture: It was as close as they could come to an intimidation tactic like whole-village destruction. Conventional Conqueror Wisdom says, you cannot stop the insurgents if they dont fear you. Obviously, since they are fighting you already, your guns dont scare them. Hot-blooded soldiers might slaughter a few civilians in troublesome areas, but not enough to truly cow a populace, plus it doesnt play well for the folks back home. Torture, though, torture is easier to hide, has a long local history of intimidation, can be explained away as an "aberation" and might even carry the by-product of revealing valuable intelligence. What psychotic, desk-bound Warrior who'd never suffered for even a day in his life could resist such logic!

You're not buying this, are you? Well, I cant say as I blame you. It was just a thought.

I suspect the truth is that Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzolas, and company are just simply assholes.