Re: Afganistan and Irag
Actually the situation in Afghanistan is pretty stable, which is why the media mentions it so very little these days. Essentially the only times they'll even say the word "Afghanistan" is when some US troops get killed there or as a contrast to Iraq, intended to give the impression that they didn't really want to limit our response to 9/11 to group therapy sessions and programs to help us better understand the problems of the oppressed Islamic peoples. Do US troops die there? Of course they do, unfortunately. But the local government is doing the bulk of the work, and has as good or better control of the country than any government there in history. It's a culture where people tend to kill other people whenever they feel their family, tribe or other group has somehow been dissed. No government, not the Russians, not the Taliban, not the US, not the Hamid Kharzai government, is going to stop that.
If we don't win in Iraq it will be for the same reason that we didn't win in Vietnam. The military will defeat the enemy and establish a relatively sustainable situation, but the media and the hate America crowd will keep whining about "quagmire", "atrocities", "right-wing extremists", yada yada yada, to the point that the American sheeple no longer want anything to do with it. Then the outside forces that had pretty much been outside the country will wait for some domestic situation like Watergate to guarantee that the administration is totally distracted and neutralized, and invade in force.
After Tet the VC were totally destroyed as a real force, and essentially never seen again. In simple language, they lost the war. A few of years later, after the US had gone home, the North Vietnamese invaded successfully. The real insurgents in Iraq are just about in the same situation as teh VC. All the jihadists that we're seeing in in Iraq now are coming in from other countries. They qualify as "insurgents" in exactly the same was as NVA troops did in Laos and US troops did in the early days of the Iraq invasion. What history has really proved is that countries that keep obsessing about whether all the i's were dotted and t's crossed properly, whether they might have done something better or differently in the past, or whether the uninvolved will approve of their actions, once they're already in the middle of a war, are almost certain to lose, not necessarily to the opposition but to their own neuroses.
Ken
And Ken you definately say it better than I did.
![[wink]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/002.gif "Wink [wink]")
I know Glenn would rather go as broken as he is,but I think MEPS would have a kitten.
