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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (189106)	6/12/2006 12:01:59 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

And fighting a war on the enemy's terms is not winning either. It's no wonder that war cost so many lives. Instead of spitting up boilerplate right wing rhetoric, why not take the time to objectively evaluate why we didn't "win" in Vietnam, whatever winning would have been? That exercise might help to explain why we're well on our way to not "winning" in Iraq. Let me simplify the discussion through the use of a real life example. When the NVA attacked Fire Base Grant, a small LZ a few klicks from Tay Ninh, they attacked in waves and lost hundreds of dead in the wire. Do you think they saw that coming? Here's a clue; they dug their own graves on the way in. I saw the holes but there were no bodies in the graves. Too few of them survived to bury the dead. How are you going to "win" against a to-the-death committed enemy like that when "winning" requires destroying their will to resist whatever it is that you're trying to force feed them? And how do you avoid fighting "on the enemy's terms" when they can hide among the population or in the terrain? If they can hide then they have the option of fighting when, and where, they want. They stand and fight or they melt away. It's entirely up to them, unless you destroy the hive, but that would mean wholesale killing of civilian populations whose only crime was that they weren't "for us." Are you really so barbaric that you think whatever we were after in Vietnam and are after in Iraq would and does justify that bloodbath of women and children? In Vietnam we didn't have to lose. We could have continued to suffer the death of a thousand cuts and we'd still be there today, and still be dying. But we wouldn't have "won," ever. And I've got a bulletin for you. The Vietnamese were from a much less knee-jerk, violent culture than the Iraqis. The Iraqis are more like us; cold blooded, vengeful and unforgiving when we feel we're wronged. You can say all the "we could have won or we could win," feel-good things you'd like. The problem is that reality doesn't change just because you can spin something to look like something it's not. And, regardless of how you feel about the loss of Vietnamese or Iraqi lives, American men and women died by the tens of thousands in Vietnam and are dying by the thousands in Iraq. Stop listening to the hypnotic voices telling you what you want to hear and pay attention to the message that's coming from the continuing deterioration and chaos in Iraq; we're not welcome, we're not ever going to be welcome and they're not buying what we're selling. Ed