Oh, I agree with THAT 100%... but there are certainly people in this country who don't think it's "right" to bomb people with RPGs from stealth bombers.

(10-13-2009 10:17 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  Oh, I agree with THAT 100%... but there are certainly people in this country who don't think it's "right" to bomb people with RPGs from stealth bombers.

Understand. Where the objective is well enough defined and important enough, and we get in, get it over, and get out, those views don't get much traction. When people have seen their kid or their neighbor's kid come home in a box or missing some appendages, and bin Laden is still alive 8 years later, those views start to resonate with more and more Americans.

I truly believe that Rummy and Cheney knew full well that the American public didn't think Iraq was important enough to support the kind of effort we needed to win. But they wanted to go to war there so badly that they opted for a half-@$$ed war in the hope that it would work out. It was never going to work out, and hasn't. Worse still it took our eye off the ball before Afghanistan was done, and in the post-9/11 world that is probably the one place they could have gotten away with a real war.

If the targets are named Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, I think most Americans are fine with any approach that leaves them dead.

Alright, people have peered into the future, and this is what they see.

See also this breaking news.

(10-13-2009 09:40 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  

(10-13-2009 08:42 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(10-13-2009 04:28 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  yup... but Vietnam showed that American's in general don't agree with us.

Is that in response to my comment?

Because I would disagree if it is. Americans in general got tired of Vietnam because it was a quagmire. That's what always happens if you don't take out the bad guys. Same for Iraq and Afghanistan. We took out some--but not all--of the bad guys.

I will certainly defer to people who experienced it, but at least according to one military professional I respect a great deal... policies on the war in Vietnam were impacted by public reaction to being viewed as (or seeing ourselves as, among other things) "baby killers". Many of our somewhat recent intelligence failures were the direct result of not being able to infiltrate some organizations because of the inability to "break the law" in order to do so... a direct result of policies in reaction to Vietnam

I remember during Desert Storm the negative public reaction from the "Highway of Death" north of Kuwait City scrubbed the plans for VII Corps to wipe out the Republican Guard when they had them pinned against the Euphrates outside of Basra. People thought we were "piling on" the Iraqi Army.

Had we taken out the Republican Guard then and there, Saddam might not have remained in power past 91.