yep. but this is nothing new. the usa has quite a bad track record when fighting nations far poorer and desolate in comparison to the almighty usa. look at nam - got your butts kicked by a load of gooks with blow pipes and bamboo traps. iraq - again, your (our - under american command) butts get kicked by a mob with a few toyota land cruizers and ak-47's somalia, ivory coast etc - again, you get a new butt ripped open by some mad nutters wearing grass skirts, chucking spears and the odd m16 (courtesy of usa!!!). afghanistan - this is my favourite! with all the spy satellites and technology THE WHOLE US ARMY CANT FIND 1 MAN WHO IS PERHAPS THE BEST KNOWN FACE IN TODAYS MODERN WORLD!!! bwahahahaha!!! can you name ONE WAR the usa has been in since ww2 that it has came out on top? fuck me! hasnt the usa got the message yet - you cant fight for shit! dont you guys learn from history? and please dont give me any of this ww2 shit either. since then, we gave it hard to the argies without your help in the falklands. and we gave it good! we did it without your help thanks. we also did the ira in quite nicely - despite americans financing them to the hilt!!! USA! USA!! USA!!! what have the americans given the world? aids crack the dukes of hazzard. thanks!
Desert Storm You seem to have forgotten the whole point of this discussion. Soldiers fight wars. Politicians simply stick their noses into fights. A place for them to make money. I love you Brits; I really do. However, your food stinks! You'd figure after centuries of inter-breeding with Saxons and Normans, some of those Frenchmen would teach you guys how to cook.
You really need to calm down. I know it's humiliating for you Brits to have to rely on us to protect you, but name calling and distorting history doesn't help. You can't even get your facts right. Vietnam was not won by the viet cong. They were pawns that the North Vietnamese and their Russian masters cynically used up. The North Vietnamese army defeated the South Vietnamese, long after we pulled out. Did our politicians sell them out? Yes, but the whole point of that war now is to understand what happens when you put troops into battle, but for whatever reason force them to fight with one arm tied behind their backs. Iraq? We defeated Saddam's supposedly elite forces twice, in Desert Storm and when we took over the country, and barely broke a sweat doing it. Somalia? Not a defeat but a humiliating withdrawal to be sure. Clinton again violated the vietnam lesson. He sent troops in without adequate means to defend themselves, a typical mistake that liberals make over and over. Afghanistan? We kicked the Taliban thugs out in a couple of weeks. I'd call that a pretty complete victory. A few guys we wanted escaped. Clinton could have killed them years before but chickened out of a raid when some kids showed up. So 3,000 american kids later lost their fathers on 9/11. Nothing to brag about, considering we fought an allied country all to give muslim thugs a european base of operations, but we defeated the yugoslavians pretty easily. None of the euros, Brits included, made much headway without us to do the killing. And what's this crap about the IRA? I agree Irish/American assistance to the IRA was shameful, but in fairness, your lot never really defeated them. Blair surrendered and called it victory. You did defeat Argentina and retained a colonial possession, the beautiful Falklands islands. Congratulations. I'm sure the 75 residents and their sheep are grateful.
Invading Iraq to begin with needlessly put our troops in harm's way. History is littered with fatal examples of commanders carelessly opening a second front to a war while the objects of the primary front remained unmet. There is no doubt in my mind that if the same man-power and resource commitment was made in Afghanistan, the culprit of 9/11 would have long been caught; dead or alive. However, after watching the cluster-fuck at Tora Bora, I realized that our troops lacked the dynamic leadership it required to get the job done. Gone are the Schwarzkopfs and Powells that are required to hold the politicians at bay and inspire their junior leaders to get the job done right.
Actually Clinton ran an extremely well-executed war in Yugoslavia, did not screw up the economy, balanced the budget, improved America's image and international relations all over the world. It can all be done but of course if you elect an ignorant buffoon (twice) to be the leader of the free world you get exactly what you bargain for. PJ O'Rouke: "Republicans are the party that complains that government doesn't work, and when elected, prove it."
Had Bush not outsourced finding Bin Laden, and finished the job of crushing Al Qaeda.....then the fear would not have been kept alive for Bush to bamboozle the sheeple into thinking that Iraq was a threat. One of the biggest con jobs in history.....
Patrick J. Buchanan WND Commentary The neocon temptation Posted: March 3, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2006 Creators Syndicate Inc. "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed ..." There may be a better description of what is happening in Iraq than the words of Yeats. It does not come to mind. Before President Bush ordered Gen. Tommy Franks to invade, four forces held Iraq together: Saddam's regime, the Baath Party, the secret police and the army. The conquering Americans, as has been their way from Sherman to LeMay, smashed them all. The center that held Iraq together, repulsive as it was, is gone. But, the comment of Yuval Diskin, head of the Israeli security agency Shin Bet, may yet prove incisive: "I'm not sure we won't come to miss Saddam." The Shiites have been the principle beneficiaries of our intervention. Liberated from Saddam's rule, under U.S. rules of "one-man, one-vote," they were, with 60 percent of the population, the certain inheritors of the estate. Yet, Shiite conduct calls to mind the remark of the Austrian prime minister after Tsar Nicholas I intervened to save the Hapsburgs from revolution in 1848: "We shall astonish the world with our ingratitude." America has made many blunders in this war. The greatest was to invade Iraq on the pretext it was a threat to the United States and inflame 300 million Arabs and a billion Muslims against us. But that decision, endorsed by a Democratic Senate that gave Bush a blank check, cannot be revisited or reversed. As Dean Rusk used to say, "We are there, and we are committed." What should we do? And what will Bush do? In surveys, 63 percent of Americans believe Iraq was a mistake, 70 percent have lost confidence in Bush as war leader and 72 percent of U.S. forces in Iraq believe we should be out by year's end. Bush's base is slipping away, and 2006 is the make-or-break year. So, where do we stand on this third anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom to bring democracy to Mesopotamia? The dynamiting of the Golden Mosque in Samarra has brought reprisals against Sunni mosques and imams, and pulled Iraq close to the brink of sectarian and civil war. To understand what could happen to the Shiites north and west of Baghdad, and to Sunnis in the south, one might reread what became of the Greeks in Smyrna when the Turks arrived in 1922, or to the Hindu and Muslim peoples when India and Pakistan tore apart at independence in 1947. The new Iraqi government, army and security forces are too weak and divided to prevent civil war without the U.S. presence, the indispensable pillar of the state. Our fate, it seems, is to be that of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. As punishment, he was chained to a rock, as vultures ate at his liver. And so, too, are we chained â by our own responsibility for what is about to happen â to the rock of Iraq. If Bush should reduce our forces to 100,000 by year's end as planned, he risks the civil war that will destroy all we have accomplished and wash down a sewer everything for which 2,300 Americans died and 16,000 have been wounded. That sectarian war could spread across the Islamic world. It is impossible to see how Bush, who must know a pullout could bring chaos and civil war and convert into a historic defeat and debacle a war he launched, is going to do this. A stubborn man who yet believes in the cause, Bush seems certain to soldier on in the hope it will all turn out well, as it did for Lincoln. But while we retain the forces in Iraq to prevent a collapse, we do not have the forces to defeat the enemy. And as our allies depart, it is unlikely Americans will support more U.S. troops or many more billions to rebuild the country. Were this a financial investment, Iraq would have been written off and our losses cut a long time ago. But for Bush to write it off is to write himself off as a failed president who committed the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history. And so the president is now being offered a way out by his neocon counselors: escalate. Take the war to the enemy, as we should have from the beginning. Use U.S. air power to wipe Iran's nuclear facilities off the map. Go all-out for victory. Emulate Lincoln, Churchill, FDR, Truman. With his poll ratings in the pits, and his party facing almost certain and heavy losses in the fall, Bush may yet yield to the neocon temptation. For unlike LBJ in 1968, he does not seem reconciled to going back to his ranch as a failed president.
Your troops have definitely taken needless casualties, but I don't think it's to appease the Muslims. I think the thing that has created needless casualties, when you look at the situation as a whole, is the difficulty in defining the ongoing mission in Iraq. You mentioned that the US soldiers have been put in a war-like situation but have been forbidden to act in a war-like manner. Surely a part of the problem is that the US didn't have any of the traditional reasons to go to war with Iraq, and in fact they always claimed that they weren't making war on Iraq, they were there to depose the dictator and murderer Saddam Hussein and establish a democratically elected government in Iraq, thereby undermining the effort to initiate and carry out terrorist attacks on US soil. It is difficult to explain to people why, now that Hussein is in jail, there is more murder and mayhem than ever before, why it seems to us over here that if Iraq was a hotbed for the development of murderous terrorists before the war, it is now a blast furnace, minting murderer's at a frightening rate. There is a poor level of understanding among ET right wingers about Islam, the problems that exist within Islam, the mindset of radical Muslims, the reasons that more mainstream Muslims aren't rising up and proclaiming there disgust with the actions of the murderous mullahs and their brainwashed followers. What are the American soldiers actually doing in Iraq now? We can't say they are there fighting a war, and this is why they are taking casualties. Whose side are they on, the Shia or Sunni? They are in an impossible situation. They can't hammer the enemy because they have no clearly defined enemies left. Their remaining enemies might be the woman walking down the street with her baby or one of a group of young men watching them on a street corner, but they won't know which one until one of them explodes, taking US soldiers with him. The war in Iraq is supposed to be over and that is why so many young US soldiers are losing their lives... needlessly, IMO. A more general statement of the problem is this. It's impossible to take a big template labelled democracy, a template the size of Iraq, and use a thousand helicopters to pick it up, and fly it over Iraq and drop it, then hook it up again and lift it off Iraq and then say 'Look! A democracy!!'. Another problem is this. There is no proof, as far as I can see, that this war isn't accomplishing all the objectives of those individuals who started it. In their view, it seems to me, things are going along swimmingly.
Yes, well that's always possible when the people you are fighting are themselves generally reasonable and able to understand when they've been beaten and have better things to do with their lives than waging endless, fruitless warfare. Unfortunately, as you, as a Jew, should well understand, Muslims are very different kettle of fish.