Fools and Damn Fools

I see that Iraq is not as pacified as we might have been led to believe.
al-queda has staged a little comeback and thumbed their noses at us by temporarily planting their flag in Baghdad, along with killing a number of people who had no wish to die before old age took them.

The fools currently in charge (and I have no problem with civilian control over the military, as long as those civilians are responsible adults) of our military strategy in both Iraq and Iran remind me of nothing so much as the Dynamic Duo of Nixon and Kissinger in the late 60's & early 70's vis-a-via the late lamented police action in Republic of South Vietnam. You remember...
...the one we withdrew from with our tails between our legs, which led to a decade of American sniveling.

The lessons learned by our then serving and future military and civilian leaders at the expense of 58,000 + American lives, over 7,000 of our SEATO Allies lives, 600,000 South Vietnam (ARVN) military lives, over 1,100,000 North Vietnam regular army lives, another half million Vietcong lives, and God only knows how many civilian lives on either side of the issue.

I think I want to throw up a little.

General Norman Schwarzkopf certainly remembered when George Bush the 1st told him, "General Win me this war", in our first little tussle with the Iraqi's. But then he retired in disgust when he was stopped short of Baghdad. (Of course that's not how it was reported).

Seems like it was something like 106 days and only a few more than that number of American deaths before the surrender of Saddam.

We've been in Iraq, What,... 7 years now. Not quite as long as we were getting killed in Vietnam. The first American pilot was shot down in 1954 at Dien Ben Phu, we fled with south Vietnamese hanging off the tail end of Chinooks from the Embassy roof in 1975, splatting to what was surely a more merciful death than the North Vietnamese had planned for them.
So roughly 25 years.

I know we've said we'd be out next year. Just like in Vietnam we've given the opponent a timetable to hiss us off in ignominy. That has to embolden and encourage them.

My Question, asked several years ago, is why we didn't promise every Iraqi a share in the Oil proceeds if they would agree to live in a peaceful democratic Iraq. Give them something to fight to save. The average Iraqi has no stake in the current government and surely non in the coming Mullah's Dictatorship. Afghanistan is no different. You want to win their hearts and minds.......give them something more than suffering at the hands of whoever is in charge to look forward to.

The point is that that just as in Vietnam, our overlords negotiate our hard one victories away for political or personal gain, counting as dross the blood our men and women have watered the sand with.

During my litte adventure in SE Asia I was an aircraft commander of an AH-1G Cobra gunship. Part of a Hunter Killer Team assigned to patrol the area from the South China Sea to the Laotian border along the DMZ. For a year we fought, bled, some died to report where the enemy was. Our Assessment......15 Armored Divisions inside the DMZ on the Northern Side in complete violation of the Agreements, just poised to come across the Que Viet River, and come across they did in the Easter Offensive in 1972, about six months after I'd left. And thankful to be gone.

An offensive that We completely won, kicking their asses back to whence they came at huge losses in personnel for them, only to be held back and told to stand down while politicians negotiated away what American and South Vietnamese blood had won.

If you go to war with any other point of view other than the complete destruction of your enemies until they beg you for mercy and are willing to do anything at all to stop the slaughter you are playing games with the men and women who have been sent to do your dirty work and, in my opinion many of our current and former serving elected officials are guilty of war crimes against their own country for not playing to win.

They say we have the best trained, best equipped military force in the world. I believe that to be true. Many of them are re-inlisting to stay in the fight as long as their brother and sisters in arms are in harms way, but they have been forged in the fire and if their leaders keep breaking faith with them there may come a day of reckoning at the hands of those very pissed off people that once went overseas gladly, happy for an opportunity to serve Truth, Justice and the American Way Or it may be at the hands of their fathers and brothers who we bloodied in another place and another time.

A friend of mine says it's time to move to the hills and woods with our guns, ammo and stores.......I hope it doesn't come to that, but, if it does.....I've been shot at before so it won't be as much of a surprise as it will to those strutting peacocks in DC.

If not now........when?