"Shortwave Sportfishing" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 08 Aug 2006 13:19:08 GMT, "JoeSpareBedroom"
wrote:

"Shortwave Sportfishing" wrote in message
. ..
On Mon, 07 Aug 2006 21:58:47 -0400, Harry Krause
wrote:

wrote:
Don White wrote:

Why are you dissin' the French? They softened the Viet Cong up for
you
al through the 50's and you still couldn't win.

Courtesy of the Paris "peace" talks?

I'll diss the french on that one

What's absolutely amazing is that we didn't seem to learn much from our
war against Vietnam and its various "insurgencies." I'm hearing the same
sorts of really stupid talk from our Prez and company about our war
against Iraq as I remember from the late 1960s and early 1970s, and
there is still a large percentage of American people who actually
believe the Chimp-in-Chief and his henchmen. When will they ever learn?

I'm not sure you can directly analogize the Vietnam conflict with the
Iraqi War, but I get your point.

If you made a product comparison chart for the two wars, you'd find enough
shared characteristics to be alarming, at least to anyone who doesn't NEED
to kill something in order to be happy.

Here is what bothers me about the whole Iraq "thing".

Nobody believes that it wasn't a good thing to rid of the world of
Saddam - what ever the excuse used.

Actually, there are people in our own military who thought that keeping him
roped in was a better option for various reasons. But, that didn't fit the
Bush/Cheney religion & oil picture.


You can't fight a civilized war with two
different constructs for how you wage it.

Bingo!



However, I don't believe it's time to cut and run. If we can change
the paradigm, we will make progress. It's changing the paradigm that
will be the problem.

If we were doing that in Saudi Arabia, I would be all for the idea.
Unfortunately, we're in the wrong country. If the police did things this
way, they'd shoot a rapist's mother because she gave him money for the taxi
which brought him to the neighborhood where he committed his crime.



Every time I think about the current situation, I am reminded of the
first Lebanonese civil war in which kidnapping became a sport in which
civilians of all sort of Western nations were kidnapped and held for
various reasons. Two Russian diplomats were kidnapped and the KGB
merely walked up to the leader of that particular unit, explained that
they knew who they were married to, where their kids were, the names
and locations of the kidnappers extended families and that they had
exactly 12 hours to return the Russians back to the embassy.

They were back less than 3.

And I have an absolutely unimpeachable source on that.

The point of that is unless we are willing to do the same, we will be
there forever.

I believe this KGB thing was described in a book I read: "Veil: Secret Wars
of the CIA". These things work, but there are two problems, one absolute,
and one which can be solved. Absolute: Although tactics like the KGB's (or
the CIA's) have lots of positives to recommend them (and are much more
fascinating to read about 20 years later), it is sometimes difficult or
impossible for politicians to use these successes to any political
advantage. "Lebanese release 3 hostages because they were bored with them"?

What can be solved (but I don't know how): That book I mentioned said that
by Reagan's time in office, many of the CIA's most experienced and creative
risk-takers were retired. These were people who started with the OSS, and
pretty much invented tactics that we think are only appropriate in movies.
One of William Casey's frustrations was finding more people like this.