How do you win hearts and minds?

And?

When the US left Vietnam, a third of the country was in insurgent hands, and the rest of it fell in two years.

When the US left Iraq and Afghanistan, the US-backed, internationally backed governments survived.

>This is what neocons believe

Fuck off, Bush.
It's past nine PM in Texas anyways, you should be in bed.

Vietnam was at war against its northern neighbor, an active recognized government with a standing army. Not really the same circumstances.

That's the point I'm trying to make, it's a dumb comparison.

In Vietnam the US lost the small war and won the big war.

In Iraq and Afghanistan the US won the small war and lost the big war.

>torch of civilization
>this is what delusional Amerifats think

Holy shit that delusion. I'd bet most Iraqis would rather have Sadam back, instead of the clusterfuck there now.

Iraq and 'Stan was a mistake, all the way to the very end (at least as far as the American public was concerned in 2015) we were still sending supplies to the Iraqi Army and putting American lives in danger escorting them there, just so ISIS can get their hands all of it when the Iraqi Army "deserts"

Its bullshit and it kills me to know that some of my friends are still in the sandbox

>Iraq loves America

Put a stranglehold on food, water and medicine in a region so most of the civilian population are dependent on the state. The propaganda front will present it as humanitarian mission, the real purpose is to separate civilians from militants and make it difficult for them to obtain weapons.

People entering "shelters" will be searched and added to a meticulous census. While the town is empty, engineers and troops search it for holdouts, arms and anything that might be used to make explosives. After arrangements have been made, adult men will then be uprooted, assigned homes in another region and work in state farms and factories, with their families if they have a family. Fatherless teenage boys will be assigned tasks in the local area.

Of particular importance is preventing corruption within your own ranks to make sure they do the job properly, there should be various checks and balances and a clear delineation between different wings. The propaganda machine should explain this is temporary and they have to "win the peace" to prevent further bloodshed in the future and there should be institutional efforts to prevent the Stanford prison experiment effect.

To begin with movements and sensitive tasks are restricted to the military and state workers. Once a region is utterly devoid of insurgency, restrictions on movements within it can be relaxed for economic reasons, however movement between regions will still be restricted to prevent people trying to get back home.

Children will be fed carefully crafted propaganda in schools. There will be 2 different kinds, first an overt corny utopian vision like socialist realism mixed up with entertaining music, cartoons and movies, second will be a covert introduction of ideas that negate the previous order, for example Muslim children will be informed the world is a big place with many religions and some people are atheist, fostering moderation.

>In Vietnam the US lost the small war and won the big war.

We seemed to had won over Japan.

Money

>How do you win hearts and minds?
By fucking off and not invading and destabilizing entire countries for Oil and Israel.

You would have to do a Marshall Plan/ Occupation of Japan tier occupation. Nothing else would work.

Is that why they suck Irans dick?

Being historically illiterate is comparing three situations that are totally different and acting like they are the same.

We defeated their will to fight through brutalization and total war. Their hearts and minds remained very independent and loyal to the government and emperor that they followed into capitulation.

Afghanistan was fully conquered in 1905 and still British.

All it takes is trying to reach out, money, kind actions and words go a long way. Pressuring only makes people hate you.

>people need names written in to recognize those countries

Iraq isnt example of inner resistance. Its conflict of occupants (Britain+France against USA).

>Iraq loves America because America brought the torch of civilization passed to them back to the spot where it was lit.
Which is why ISIS was able to take over half the damn country, right? Because they love America?

>what is nippon
>what is korea
>what is third reich

Look at what the GCC is currently doing in Iraq. That's how.

Philippine American War.

Keep the population happy. Separate the insurgent from the population. Exterminate the insurgent.

Generally everything is labeled in a political cartoon.

STOP

>[full stop]

We need to address what the term 'victory' means, relative the objectives of the administration(s), counter the 'hearts and minds' campaign 'at home'.

'hearts and minds' happened as much in the US as it did in Vietnam. The intelligence operation was different, and the lasting impression scaled different in time, but the purposes worked for their intended goal.

You got Intel playing 'hearts and minds', when the NVA/VC played terrorism.

You told the US it was a 'domino effect' threatening 'freedom', when in reality, the pentagon made the Geo-strategic policy of a long Vietnam war clear; detain china, make a MIC economy.

The goal is not to 'win' a country you are occupying, just as it seems, the goal of the last administrations was not 'peace and order' in Iraq, seeing as how everything they did brought upon sectarian violence - that now plays into foreign policy laid out prior to Iraq and Afghanistan (that of Iran)

You caused that mess, so it's your job to fix it, burgerfat.

The Iraqi government has become a close friend of Iran though, so that obviously didn't fo as planned

The British succeeded in resolving the Malayan Crisis favorably. They did it by learning the nature of Maoist revolutions (which were fully misunderstood in the west). They first found that firepower and jungle patrols not only had little effect on the enemy in terms of casualties, but were actually counterproductive as they created more support for the enemy. Then they discovered that the enemy received most of their intelligence from villagers. They also hid among villagers in plain sight.
The British eventually adopted a policy of minimum necessary firepower. They relocated villages to new ones near their centralized power and told them it was for their protection. They secured these villages with fences, floodlights, etc. They set up local governments to police them and provided incentives on any information of the enemy. This made it much harder for insurgents to hide. They continued this until the enemy became frustrated and launched terrorist attacks on citizens, which increased the amount of information that they were willing to provide the brits. Then they started an information campaign with leaflets, loudspeakers, etc that asked for leaders heads (by name) and offered immunity and money. Takers with actual heads started turning up.
Things carried on in this nature until villages began to normalize and governments began to solidify and provide their own security (working closely with the British). Eventually "terrorist occurrences" were down to very low monthly numbers and the Brits declared the crisis over and the Malayans were allowed and encouraged to form their own government.
Here's a book on a comparison to Vietnam. The writing is very dry, but the argument is great.

>post war Germany and Japan

This.

But that also illustrates that it takes a predisposition on the occupied people's part.

Forgot to mention, for Maoist revolutions, it's important to recognize that the goals and thereby nature of warfare is political. Conventional warfare's strategic goals are usually holding territory. A revolutionary movement seeks to garner support from a sufficient amount of his country men to make his cause inevitable. You also have to accept that by it's very design, it will be a slow war. The protracted and politcal nature combined with the inefficacy of firepower and unwillingness to adapt are what has stacked the odds so heavily against the US.

>How do you win hearts and minds?
After you destroy their shit then rebuild it and make better then what they had before, enforce your rules but respect theirs.

Good bait user

>When the US left Iraq and Afghanistan, the US-backed, internationally backed governments survived.
When did we leave???

This

Yuan Dynasty is a good example

I prefer Qing Dynasty, Yuans got BTFO by the Mings.

Germany and Japan had both had democratic and free systems in the past before their country got taken over by dictatorships. The horrible destruction the war these dictatorships started caused discredited both authoritarianism and made many of the ideas their propaganda used suspect.
Both countries were fertile soil for the post war re-education attempts. I'd even argue that it didn't actually take any work to turn around those nations, since far more intensive propaganda campaigns have accomplished the exact opposite direction when applied in other countries.

This shit doesn't work in third world countries, because they are ripped apart by internal conflict and plagued by corruption and ineptitude on all levels of society.

Vietnam was lost, because the Southern government was AT LEAST as evil as the communist one, but far less competent.

The Muslim countries were lost, because they aren't even real countries, just a collection of tribes temporarily unified by a strong dictatorship who hate each other as much as they hate the idea of western civilisation and have no history or tradition of rational governance or liberal democracy. The people there don't even want it. They want a sharia based authoritarian government that shits on everyone, but a bit more on the others.

nothing irritates me more than the people who thinks Iraq/Afghanistan are vietnam duplicates

So what? The US set up the government in the Philippines and there's been an active insurgency thee for decades.

I'm not. Read the thread before opening your know nothing mouth.

It does and can happen in third world countries, the examples of Nigeria and Kenya show the power of a war of ideas when the dominant ideology actually believes in what it says. British-style parliamentarianism won out over tribalism and monarchism because the British had little respect for the native traditions and insisted on the superiority of their system, America will fail to do the same in Iraq and Afghanistan because modern Americans don't believe their system is superior, and instead show undue reverence for the backward cultures they have come to dominate.

>US lost the Vietnam War
>US won the Cold War

try to keep up m8

Neat

The failure in all three of these cases is not so much a failure to win hearts and minds, but our endorsement of incompetent and corrupt governments who are pfficially our "allies" but end up poisoning the well for us in the long term. Successive South Vietnamese governments were just as shitty as the North so we had no moral leg to stand on in the eyes of the populace. We let Maliki enforce Shiite majoritarianism while leaving their political system a byzantine religious/ethnically delinated mess, and the Afghan governments since Karzai have been corrupt to the core (for fun look up Bacha Bazi, nearly died out under the Taliban but was revivified since).
ISo i think the fundamental problem is we pick shitty proxies and then go all in on them, and dont go far enugh in setting up an American style system like we did elsewhere.

Didnt the chinese hate the Yuan?

>Republicans

This You have to start for believing it yourself. You also need the desire to be a good leader and not just a leech. You follow that up with being competent at leading, which requires many years of study AT LEAST. And assuming you are pushing an unpopular idea, you're going to have to be either very good at talking or fighting because you'll have enemies inside and outside.

People will eat whatever idea you put down their throat if you can fulfill these requirements, because ultimately any serious on the field right now with a decent following can work when done right.