Bing West: Arm the People

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President Trump has urged the people to remove the Islamist regime. The problem is that one armed zealot/hard man can control one hundred townsfolk.

In WWII, the OSS parachuted weapons, explosives, and agents into occupied Europe. The French Maquis, Yugoslav Partisans, and Polish Home Army all received arms this way. The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 was fueled by hopes of such resupply. In 2011, France and Qatar supplied weapons to anti-Gaddafi rebels, with French airdrops into the Nafusa Mountains. In 2014, the U.S. armed Kurdish Peshmerga via airdrops.

Israel and the US have hundreds of thousands of semi-obsolete weapons — AK-47s, machine guns, old anti-tank explosives, etc. Also available are disposable, cheap communications systems. Yet there is not one report of arming the Iranian people. Why are we not parachuting in cheap weapons by the thousands to hundreds of sites? There is no apparent downside.

When I was in the Korengal in 2009, food was provided by parachute because the road was a death zone. The villagers would race our soldiers to grab the packets. Losing some races was the normal cost of doing business.

Similarly, many parachuted weapons and communications radios will be seized by the regime. But so what? The regime thugs already have weapons. What difference does it make if regime thugs seize half of all parachuted weapons and swagger around with two vs. one AK?

If not supplied with arms, the people lose.

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