IGX

DARTH wrote:No, how historical accurate of me. You wanted to compare us about 100-150 years ago to Ragheads today, and still fall short, but you suck dick so there is that.

stanley_white wrote:Is stopping an Afghan male from raping an Afghan child worth sacrificing the lives of Military Members?

What if the Military Member was your child?

-Stan

Shafpocalypse Now wrote:We seem to have a permanent communication deficit, Darth.

I am not a 'man of peace'. I have both bled and made people bleed. I hunted extensively in my youth and have experience with firearms. I hold people whom I do not know and I am not related as less 'valuable' to me. If it came down to having to shoot someone to protect my family, I hope I can make the right decision, I've never been in that spot, though I have deliberately hurt people before.

Concurrently, I am not a 'man of war', either. I would prefer to avoid violent situations if at all possible, especially with my family around. I would rather drink a beer and swap amusing stories with most people than argue and fight with them. I am pretty easy going overall. Community matters, your neighbors, and at a huge macro level, your fellow citizens, provide a buffer of civilization around you for mutual benefit.

This makes me pretty normal, I imagine.

Protobuilder wrote:You know who hated child rape and actually did something about it?

The Taliban.

Related, you know who was against Al Qaeda and the kind of Islam preached by ISIS?

Saddam Hussein

Shafpocalypse Now wrote:Ok Dux. I'm on board. I have never been in on the ground anywhere and will defer to the folks who have

Shafpocalypse Now wrote:The longer this goes on, the more I side with the dlyna, and with what pl says above...those people are not goi g to stop what they are doing unless we make it very costly for them.

stanley_white wrote:On a related note I suggest everyone read "Why We Lost" by LTG Daniel Bolger.



-Stan

The Truth About the Wars

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/op ... istan.html

AS a senior commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, I lost 80 soldiers. Despite their sacrifices, and those of thousands more, all we have to show for it are two failed wars. This fact eats at me every day, and Veterans Day is tougher than most.

As veterans, we tell ourselves it was all worth it. The grim butchery of war hovers out of sight and out of mind, an unwelcome guest at the dignified ceremonies. Instead, we talk of devotion to duty and noble sacrifice. We salute the soldiers at Omaha Beach, the sailors at Leyte Gulf, the airmen in the skies over Berlin and the Marines at the Chosin Reservoir, and we’re not wrong to do so. The military thrives on tales of valor. In our volunteer armed forces, such stirring examples keep bringing young men and women through the recruiters’ door. As we used to say in the First Cavalry Division, they want to “live the legend.” In the military, we love our legends.

Here’s a legend that’s going around these days. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq and toppled a dictator. We botched the follow-through, and a vicious insurgency erupted. Four years later, we surged in fresh troops, adopted improved counterinsurgency tactics and won the war. And then dithering American politicians squandered the gains. It’s a compelling story. But it’s just that — a story.

The surge in Iraq did not “win” anything. It bought time. It allowed us to kill some more bad guys and feel better about ourselves. But in the end, shackled to a corrupt, sectarian government in Baghdad and hobbled by our fellow Americans’ unwillingness to commit to a fight lasting decades, the surge just forestalled today’s stalemate. Like a handful of aspirin gobbled by a fevered patient, the surge cooled the symptoms. But the underlying disease didn’t go away. The remnants of Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni insurgents we battled for more than eight years simply re-emerged this year as the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

The surge legend is soothing, especially for military commanders like me. We can convince ourselves that we did our part, and a few more diplomats or civilian leaders should have done theirs. Similar myths no doubt comforted Americans who fought under the command of Robert E. Lee in the Civil War or William C. Westmoreland in Vietnam. But as a three-star general who spent four years trying to win this thing — and failing — I now know better.

We did not understand the enemy, a guerrilla network embedded in a quarrelsome, suspicious civilian population. We didn’t understand our own forces, which are built for rapid, decisive conventional operations, not lingering, ill-defined counterinsurgencies. We’re made for Desert Storm, not Vietnam. As a general, I got it wrong. Like my peers, I argued to stay the course, to persist and persist, to “clear/hold/build” even as the “hold” stage stretched for months, and then years, with decades beckoning. We backed ourselves season by season into a long-term counterinsurgency in Iraq, then compounded it by doing likewise in Afghanistan. The American people had never signed up for that.

What went wrong in Iraq and in Afghanistan isn’t the stuff of legend. It won’t bring people into the recruiting office, or make for good speeches on Veterans Day. Reserve those honors for the brave men and women who bear the burdens of combat.

That said, those who served deserve an accounting from the generals. What happened? How? And, especially, why? It has to be a public assessment, nonpartisan and not left to the military. (We tend to grade ourselves on the curve.) Something along the lines of the 9/11 Commission is in order. We owe that to our veterans and our fellow citizens.

Such an accounting couldn’t be more timely. Today we are hearing some, including those in uniform, argue for a robust ground offensive against the Islamic State in Iraq. Air attacks aren’t enough, we’re told. Our Kurdish and Iraqi Army allies are weak and incompetent. Only another surge can win the fight against this dire threat. Really? If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I think we’re there.

As a veteran, and a general who learned hard lessons in two lost campaigns, I’d like to suggest an alternative. Maybe an incomplete and imperfect effort to contain the Islamic State is as good as it gets. Perhaps the best we can or should do is to keep it busy, “degrade” its forces, harry them or kill them, and seek the long game at the lowest possible cost. It’s not a solution that is likely to spawn a legend. But in the real world, it just may well give us something better than another defeat.

Daniel P. Bolger, the author of “Why We Lost,” retired from the United States Army last year as a lieutenant general.

Four years later, we surged in fresh troops, adopted improved counterinsurgency tactics and won the war. And then dithering American politicians squandered the gains. It’s a compelling story. But it’s just that — a story.

The surge in Iraq did not “win” anything. It bought time. It allowed us to kill some more bad guys and feel better about ourselves. But in the end, shackled to a corrupt, sectarian government in Baghdad and hobbled by our fellow Americans’ unwillingness to commit to a fight lasting decades, the surge just forestalled today’s stalemate.

Look at the son of the CAIR guy who brought a countdown timer in a briefcase to school in Irving, Texas. Boo-hoo a poor muslim lad was profiled and discriminated against and they are mean and cruel and white Texans...
except if Miss Colorado in her sash and Nurses Scrubs and Stethoscope walks through Security at DFW a few miles away and runs that briefcase through the scanner she is in for a long, long day ahead. Hot or not.

powerlifter54 wrote:FWIW, my belief formed in AG after seeing it up close and talking to locals and "terps-interpreters" for many hours is we need to have a notional wall around their crapholes and tell the jawas we are leaving you to do whatever the hell you sick bastards do in your countries to each other, but if you export it in any way anywhere anyhow you will see a mushroom cloud bloom close by and if you do it again we will triple the response everytime thereafter. I know this is not measured or complex or erudite or maybe even immoral. We are dealing with more than a difference in culture, we are dealing with almost a different dimension. Hard to describe.