Author Topic: We have watches, they have time. (Read 307 times)

Mickey1992 · « **on:** October 23, 2006, 12:34:50 PM »

Michael Yon's website hardly gets any updates anymore, but the recent one from a Colonel leaving Iraq is a good one. I am curious to see if James Baker comes up with a similar solution for Iraq.

http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/one-colonels-final-thoughts.htm

DREDIOCK · « **Reply #1 on:** October 23, 2006, 05:05:59 PM »

Good read. Thanks

Maverick · « **Reply #2 on:** October 24, 2006, 11:43:17 AM »

Good read, he's obviously well informed and has a strategic view rather than a narrow tactical one.

Mickey1992 · « **Reply #3 on:** October 24, 2006, 02:16:32 PM »

I have found out why he has not updated his web site in so long. The military is refusing to grant him (and others) an embed.

"....earlier this fall there were only 9 reporters embedded with 150,000 American troops in Iraq. There were about 770 during the initial invasion."

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/844nigml.asp

Captain Virgil Hilts · « **Reply #4 on:** October 24, 2006, 03:00:48 PM »

Even better, and absolutely more crucial to the current situation is this article .

For those of you old enough to remember, or who are fortunate enough to know someone who was there and knows the truth, we are about to witness the only TRUE way in which Iraq compares to Vietnam. What we are about to see, is a repeat of the tragedy and travesty that came of the 1969 "Tet Offensive". U.S. and South Vietnam forces without question destroyed the NVA, and routed them completely in the "Tet Offensive", and the entire structure of North Vietnam was in danger of complete collapse, both militarily and politically. However, the media, and Walter Cronkite in particular, chose to portray a resounding victory for the U.S. and South Vietnam as a total and complete failure and defeat. The result was the failure to win Vietnam, and withdrawal in disgrace from a war in which the U.S. and the South Vietnamese never lost a major battle until the U.S. withdrew and left the South Vietnamese without support. The war was won on the ground, and lost at home and in the media. A war is a test of wills, and the U.S., thanks in great part to the media and politics, lacked the will to win, for the first time in the history of the nation.

If we see this repeated, the U.S. will lose any respect, authority, and prestige it has left. No attempt at military action or diplomacy will have any chance whatsoever of success. Anything attempted in order to defeat or at least control or minimize terrorism is doomed to utter failure. Our enemies, in particular OBL, Al Queada, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah, and worse yet, both North Korea and Iran, will declare the U.S. to be a cowardly paper tiger. Remember this, and remember it well, failure in Iraq will carry a far higher price than failure in Vietnam did. Bet on it. Again, war is a test of wills. The question is, will this era repeat the errors of the previous era, and again fail to have the will our nation had? Are we merely a cowardly paper tiger? Will we again commit the greatest atrocity, and send our finest to serve, sacrifice, and die, only to abandon what they strived for, because we lack the will to finish what we asked them to sacrifice for? If so, then this nation is fading into history.

-dead- · « **Reply #5 on:** October 24, 2006, 07:51:44 PM »

An interesting counterpoint to that from Fred

Quote

However, the Warrior does not grant the public the right to grow weary. For him, America exists to support the military, not the other way around. Are two hundred dead a week coming back from Asia? The Warrior believes that small-town America (which is where the coffins usually go) should grit its teeth, bear down, and make the sacrifice for the country. Sacrifice for what? It doesn’t matter. We’re at war, dammit. Rally ‘round. What are you, a commy?

To the Warrior, to doubt the war is treason, aiding and supporting, liberalism, cowardice, back-stabbing, and so on. He uses these phrases unrelentingly. We must fight, and fight, and fight, and never yield, and sacrifice and spend. We must never ask why, or whether, or what for, or do we want to.

The public of course doesn’t see it that way. In 1964 I graduated from a rural high school in Virginia with a senior class of, I think, sixty. Doug took a 12.7 through the head, Sonny spent time at Walter Reed with neck wounds, Studley I hear is a paraplegic, another kid got mostly blinded for life, and several, whom I won’t name, tough country kids as I knew them, came back as apparently irredeemable drunks. (These were kids I knew, not all in my class.) It was a lot of dead and crippled for a small place. For what?

Cowardice? I was on campus in 1966 on a small, very Republican, very patriotic, very conservative, very Southern campus. The students, and their girlfriends, were all violently against the war. So, I gather, were their parents. Why? Were they the traitors of the Warrior’s imagination? No. They didn’t want to die for something that they didn’t care about.

This eludes the Warrior. Always, he blames The Press for the waning of martial enthusiasm, for his misunderstanding of the kind of war we are fighting. Did the press make Studley a paraplegic? Or kill the guy with all the tubes who died in the stretcher above me on the Medevac 141 back from Danang? Did Walter Cronkite make my buddy Cagle blind when the rifle grenade exploded on the end of his fourteen? Do the Warriors think that people don’t notice when their kids come back forever in wheelchairs?

They don’t get it.