Hi Hawkmoon; Re: "Bilow, we simply have a failure to communicate here.. Or maybe it's just an intransigent effort on your part to avoid understanding my position. Simply put, 9/11 has irrefutably and irrevocably put this nation at war with Islamic militancy."
I understand your position perfectly well. You believe that we are in a war with Islamic militancy that we MUST win.
Okay. A war is composed of a series of campaigns. A campaign is composed of a series of battles.
There is always more than one way to skin a cat, and there are always alternative choices for campaigns.
Making your assumption that there is a war, the situation in Iraq is not that war, it is instead only one campaign, one campaign of many. For example, we have another campaign going on in Afghanistan, and you've advocated opening up other campaigns in other lands.
So from this point of view, that Iraq is only one campaign in a larger war, how important is Iraq? If we fail to win in Iraq will we all be dead anyway? (LOL!!!)
How much is Iraq worth?
Your failure to put a limit on how many casualties you would find acceptable in Iraq only proves that you have no clue what it is worth to us. It's simple mathematics to know that having 10,000,000 combat fatalities in Iraq is too high a price to pay. It is often said that the loss of one life is too much to pay, but we are both military types and we know that that is not how a general must think. Instead, a general must be able to decide how many lives that ridge over there is worth. He must decide this because there are always other uses for those lives, places where those boys lives could be spent and different territory be bought.
All I'm asking is how much is Iraq worth.
From the tenor of your posts it is already clear to me that you sense that we may not win in Iraq. If that happens, then what will you choose for your next campaign? Do you have a plan?
Re: "What is required is that we show we're willing to fight and, if necessary, die, in order to empower and motivate the moderate and progressive segments of muslim society who are currently repressed and intimidated by the militants seeking to dominate them."
How many, if necessary, of our soldiers have to die? You talk about this but you just continue to dance around the issue.
Re: "We need to forcefully invoke a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, possibly via a combined UN/NATO operation, which will remove much of the prevailing belief that the US is "controlled by Jews" and a pawn of Zionists."
Like the fantasy of getting the UN to take over in Iraq, this is not going to happen.
-- Carl |
