Amen!

Fighting Inside..

Speaking of enemies from within..

I think its always important to remember that throughout history we have had insiders dress up and parade around and pretend to be an enemy (Boston Tea Party anyone?) when really they were just trying to put down some of their own people and the scapegoat ends up being an innocent person or innocent group of people.
--Sitara Devi

to remember what you'd done!

The FIRST FUCKING PROBLEM of EVERY MILITARY OPERATION is to define an OBJECTIVE.

If your objective is to "win the hearts and minds" of an enemy, you send Walt Fucking Disney, not the 5th Marines.

-- Modified on 6/12/2008 9:29:24 PM

and the American whining that he had never been beaten on the battlefield, and the NVA asking, "so what"?

The lesson is crystal clear, that if you win all the battles and still lose the war, there's something going on you don't understand, specifically that winning the battles aren't the point.   The Vietnamese lost many times more of anything & everything than the US did, but it still didn't matter.   It was exactly like trying to solve the neighbor's domestic dispute - it's an unacheivable goal, and it wastes your time and gets you slapped around.

If you had any sense of history, you'd look at the American Revolution and realize the British could pretty much go wherever they wanted whenever they wanted, and clearly "won" most of the battles.  But war isn't a football game where you keep score.

The material problem in Iraq is identical to that of Vietnam, ie we're setting a vague social and political goal for military forces in a cultural contaxt where the dice are loaded against us (and then mismanaging even that).  Military forces are the LAST people who can accomplish that, but they will follow orders, while if you were to send a civil organization, you'd get laughed at.

If the Mexicans were to come to Atlanta to save you from Nancy Pelosi and the gays, what do you think would happen?  Exactly what happened in Vietnam and Iraq - you have a great weekend party and slap each other on the back, then everything goes to hell.

As usual, the winners here are the ones who stand aside and sell the weapons to the combatants.

How, exactly, did enemies from within shoot down John McCain's perfectly good airplane?

Edit.

Oh, I see.  You expanded my specific observation that John McCain, personally, lost one particular battle to a technologically inferior foe to an assumption that I was talking about the war as a whole.

To clarify, John McCain lost one particular battle to a technologically inferior foe and promptly surrendered (his current "no surrender" policy is apparently a recent development that applies to anyone but himself even though no one is suggesting that getting out of Iraq must involve a surrender).  This resulted in imprisonment by communists during which he was subjected to unimaginable abuse (but, he still never fought to the death, accepting his surrender - which is what I would have done as well because surrender was the intelligent thing to do), and was later released and became involved in politics which is analogous to the plot of "The Manchurian Candidate."

-- Modified on 6/13/2008 10:46:20 AM

or is it something you just know?