I'd have to admit, that that is an opinion, for which I cannot provide specific documentation as a proof.
Actually, I could provide lots of documentation, but it would be a futile exercise, as it would convince nobody. My evidence, my documentation, would be treated as sort of an ink-blot test, where everyone sees something different. A wild array of responses, which say nothing about the inkblot, and everything about the inkblot-interpreter. The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, pages and pages of inkblots.
We are at a stage where everyone's opinion's are fixed, and data is used mostly to back up those fixed beliefs. Unfortunately, we are going to have suffer defeat in a major battle in the War, equivalent to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, before there is any serious re-assessment of our beliefs and worldview (and the tactics that flow from them). Which means we are going to get further behind, before we adopt winning methods. It's going to be a long war.
Just to head off any claims that we won the Tet Offensive:
We won that campaign, using the standards of conventional warfare: we killed a lot of them, and we held the ground at the end. But it wasn't a conventional war. By the standards of guerrilla warfare, we lost: they destroyed our will to fight. They demonstrated that their willingness to suffer for their cause, would last longer than ours. |
