Tw would never be so stupid as to let Urbane Guerilla massacre good American soldiers in wars that are unwinnable, have no purpose, and were never justified by a smoking gun. Wars as advocated by Urbane Guerilla are defined even by Sze Tzu as how to win battles while losing the war. How to win conflicts only to lose an entire kingdom. Urbane Guerilla maintains as did William Westmoreland that Vietnam was winnable. We deployed 1/2 million men, sacrificed 50,000 American, all in a war that even Johnson and Nixon said was not winnable. Nixon was so despicable as to maintain the Vietnam war just so that it was not lost on his watch. And yet Urbane Guerilla, who spent years in the service to rise to a rank of Corporal knows he is a leader of men? Yea. Lead them right into the Valley of Death. In Nam, such righteous leaders got fragged so that good Americans would come home alive and intact.

Meanwhile, note what Sen John McCain calls for to 'win' a war in Iraq that had no purpose - was promoted on lies. We must massively increase American troop strength in Iraq if the "Mission Accomplished" war is to be 'won'. Curious. That was one of two alternatives that Tw also posted. Other Cellar dwellers proposed that the Iraq war would bring back the draft. What is John McCain, essentially, calling for? The draft. He says we must massively increase the US active duty numbers to take the excessive load off the Guard and Reserves. And he is correct. If we are to win a military victory in Iraq as Urbane Guerilla proposes, we need 1/2 million American soldiers in Iraq. That does not guarantee victory. But that is necessary if we have any hope of winning in Iraq as Urbane Guerilla or George Jr say we must.

Furthermore, John McCain is talking about such massive numbers of troops for something on the order of four years. I believe occupation would be closer to ten years. However, it does not matter which is right. Were you willing to be at war for 7 to 12 years in Iraq? That is what you should be asking yourself when someone here was warning of this time span almost three years ago.

One year ago, the George Jr administration was hyping all the good work and reconstruction that was ongoing throughout Iraq. All these claims when reporters in country could not even leave safety (green) zones without military protection. All these claims when commanders in the field were citing how virtually all their reconstruction was terminated or routinely sabotaged.

One year later and the number of attacks on Americans have literally doubled. Notice even George Jr has stopped claiming all this reconstruction is ongoing in Iraq. Why? The insurgency has literally doubled in the past year - may be even larger. Whole towns that were fought for in the past year are simply reoccupied by insurgents. Literally every American general in Iraq says he does not have sufficient troops and supplies.

And so again, a worst option is the status quo. Time for you, the reader, to start making up your mind as Sen John McCain has basically called for this week. Do we massively deploy troops to Iraq or do we get out? The current situation is not winnable - as was obvious so many years ago. It should now be obvious even to those without military training. You the reader must decide whether America does as Urbane Guerilla advocates - massive American deployment to a war once declared "Mission Accomplished", or do we cut our losses so that many more thousands of Americans - soldiers in the field and civilians around the world - are not killed.

I will tell you bluntly and honestly - neither is a good answer. And yet those are now the only options we have left. In this, our current situation, Iraqi insurgency will only grow as it did in Vietnam.

My bias - I love the massive deployment option. It is my nature to attack a problem, solve it, and get done. But history has too often demonstrated that the harder option - cut the losses and get out - is many times the greater victory. These are hard questions that we should all have answers for. The alternative is the worst option - what we are currently doing.

In order to survive, Iraq will have to break apart or at least into a loose federation of three states. Similar to what happened when Pakistan was created, both in the fact that tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India became so bad that the Muslims had to be granted autonomy, and in that Pakistan itself was created as a loose federation to ease tensions between different groups.

As for the draft, the prediction I made to my son when we invaded Iraq that there was a chance the draft would come back while he was under 27 seems more and more likely. The only other alternative would be to build a large 'foreign legion' of non-citizens, an extremely dangerous choice.

Of course such a move would be political suicide, which is why the Bush adminstration will dump their mess on the next president.

We may see the devolution of the National Guard now that combat has become more likely. From a cost-benefit point of view, an individual should sign up for the Reserves or active military if the government is as likely to use them.

After watching soldiers be kept in combat after their contracts expire, fighting a war based more on foreign policy than on actual homeland defense, the non-active military will suffer losses. For all the 'gung-ho' public speech from the Guard troops, noone can know their true thoughts as a group until they get home, given a code of conduct that is in effect a gag order. They will vote with their feet as will their relatives and friends after they can privately ask them 'was it worth it'.

Oh for Pete's sake, Rich, foreign policy IS homeland defense, particularly in time of war, declared or otherwise. A formal declaration of war -- though there isn't any enthusiasm for it because it feels too weird -- would clarify the thinking of certain mudheads nationwide who mistake a Republican President for the big-E Enemy. Talk about misordered priorities!

I agree on the federated Iraq, as we've seen what attempting absolutist control has wrought there under the Saddam regime. Dividing Iraq à la Gaul might give you proud independent states, but a greater likelihood of general poverty and less stability as well -- the likeliest meddler being Iran, in spite of its having been bled white in the first half of the eighties.

You know what? I think the Democrats will lose the next Presidential general election too. They don't have any war fighters, and no military strategists either. All they have are people who waste their time searching for some substitute for victory. That's searching for something that doesn't exist.

Well, we agree about foreign policy, which is why Bush's lack of competence goes from being merely funny to dangerous.

As for war fighters, the list below seems pretty split, proving once again that despite the rhetoric being absorbed by less-than-intelligent members of the public, Republicans do not have the exclusive franchise on patriotism or self-sacrifice. This of course has not prevented smear campaigns against disabled veterans.

Keep in mind that many retired 'war fighters', the only ones publicly able to speak freely, disagree with much of the adminstrations handling of the war and foreign policy. In fact, many 'war fighters' might prefer a Democratic president, simply based on the fact that he or she would not be hampered by having to pretend that the Bush adminstration had effective policies.

McCain probably wouldn't care, but someone like Frist would be hampered by not being able to completely change direction without having to acknowledge past mistakes, which would cost the %30 of the party that feels that Bush was right.

A CORPORAL???!! Geez Louise, UG, my MOTHER had a higher rank than that! My lesbian cousin who served in the Marines even achieved the rank of Corporal. From being a CORPORAL you got all this "knowledge" about leadership, foreign policy, and the messy but necessary doctrine of premptive strikes??? Talk about a sheep in wolf's clothing..... :eyebrow:

Tonchi, look up "Petty Officer First Class," which was my rate, and then know just how full of shit tw really is. It's amusing.

No need, mate. I already had very little respect for your bombastic proclamations, but since you seemed to think of yourself as the Robert Duval character in Apocalypse Now I thought you might at least have a few boards on your chest to back it up. My mistake. But after all, this is America and you have the right to be an idiot if that's the best you can do. At least, you have the right SO FAR; our "rights" seem to be in transition at this point thanks to the people and programs you so rousingly endorse.

Meanwhile the exact language in that John McCain amendment approved by the Senate 90 to 9. This quote directly based upon the US Army's own field manual. And yet George Jr - classic of a religious extremist - advocates so much torture that even FBI agents withdrew from locations where torture was ongoing. Why do we know? FBI agents carefully documented the torture before they withdrew.

Just another example of why religion has no place in politics or as justification for war. Meanwhile, who is trying to quash the McCain amendment? VP Dick Cheney (who is the defacto president but who was also on vacation during Katrina when George Jr decided to act as president). Dick Cheney wants to keep using "enhanced interrogation techniques". Need I point to how propagandists will rename torture so as to justify torture?

Tonchi, among the "few boards" I number two Navy Expeditionaries. Sounds like I've got the stuff to back the "bombast," no? There are good reasons for me to be as I am. What reasons you've got to try gainsaying this -- well, I don't know -- why would you think they are valid, please?

I also take vehement, and I think informed, exception to the idea that Vietnam was unwinnable. Hindsight suggests a number of strategies that would either win the conflict outright or make the execrable Communists' victory impossible. Strategic errors aplenty can be found, and are cited as foundations for this theory or that of why America lost that war.

The thing that really put the cherry on top was that North Vietnam defeated the US Congress, rather than the US military. We'd never been vulnerable before in our legislative branch's collective psyche. There are Americans now who are foolish enough to try attacking our government's morale in the current war, of which the Iraq campaign is but a part of the whole. We shall require a Congress that is indefatigable and undefeatable to stymie the Islamofascists who pursue a Caliphate that never was, and a revenge upon the West for, well, being the West.

Stuff we didn't do that we should have: we didn't hit the foe everywhere and all at once. Instead, the bombing of North Vietnam was an on-again, off-again, arbitrarily micromanaged from far away affair that, in Kissinger's words, was only "powerful enough to mobilize world opinion against us but too half-hearted and gradual to be decisive."

We didn't start an insurgency against the communists in the hills of Laos and the hinterlands of North Vietnam. The latter would have been much harder to accomplish, Hanoi having committed genocide against all the "enemies of the people" it could reach between 1954 and 1959, but if established, it would have given Hanoi insuperable difficulties. Hanoi was never exactly popular; there was never a communist uprising in the South however much Hanoi and the Viet Nam Cong San tried to have one. Southerners going north to fuck up the commies might have had quite some success, had it ever been tried -- a different sort of "counter-insurgency."

We didn't hit the most important targets in North Vietnam until too late. We never plagued the entire North Vietnamese coastline with amphibious raids they would have had to commit military resources to counter. Instead, the Communists enjoyed sanctuaries -- arbitrary and antistrategic (from our point of view) sanctuaries at that.

It took us until 1967 to even begin using counterinsurgency warfare there, owing in large measure to our last two major wars having been WW2 and Korea -- large-unit, corps-scale battles of conventional armies. The United States, particularly the US Marines and Special Forces, wasn't without experience in counterinsurgency campaigns, but there was a long delay in recognizing at the highest levels that they should wage a counterinsurgency campaign.

Guerrilla warfare isn't invariably successful. Success, in fact, is nearly as difficult to measure for the insurgents as it is for the counterinsurgents. Insurgencies have been defeated in Northern Ireland, Israel, Italy, Germany, Spain, Greece, the Philippines, Malaya, Turkey, Kenya, El Salvador, Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico, to borrow an incomplete list from Max Boot (The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, p. 314). Che Guevara quixotically tried to foment a revolution in South America, and got shot by a bunch of Bolivians. Martial competence? Well, what does it sound like to you? War is chancy regardless of how you fight it, and it's every bit as chancy for the non-Americans as it is for us sons of liberty.

Switching to a strategy of counterinsurgency warfare mid-war actually worked. Take the population away from the guerrillas and the guerrillas wither like plants in a drought. This includes the population shooting at guerrillas, viz., the Regional Forces/Popular Forces and People's Self-Defense Forces. William Casey headed up the counterinsurgency tactic of the Phoenix program, which broke the back of many a collectivist-totalitarian cadre, killing 26,000 of them, capturing 33,000, and turning 20,000 -- a ballbreaker when it came to cadre for dictatorship. Ann Coulter was correct, if rather simplistic, when she remarked that under the Nixon Administration, we were winning. But still...

A rather subtle and not widely recognized problem in the Vietnam War was that President Johnson didn't fight it to win it. He fought it so as not to lose it, which is a very big difference and which seems to be a chronic problem with Democratic Presidents stretching back about three generations now. It's a problem the Republican administrations don't seem to suffer greatly from. (There's an instance or two otherwise, but the trend is that Republicans pick themselves up from setbacks, go for the win, and enjoy successes.) The Johnson Administration fought the war looking over its shoulder at Red China and this ended up signaling irresolution in the conflict, and Hanoi took fullest advantage of the situation.

The idea that such wars are unwinnable because, for instance, they are Vietnamese and we are Americans is a shibboleth among the thoughtless and among the Left, whose instincts are totalitarian, and who are smitten about as much as anyone by a romantic view of irregular fighters. The thinkers and the Right, quite bluntly, know better.

But do you come up with a warwinning strategy that makes getting tough with the America-haters (who were hating on us before we beat them up, so if there's any difference in their attitude it'd take a ten-power loupe to see it) completely unnecessary? You do not. Bitch bitch bitch about fighting a war only made necessary by anti-Americans is all you ever do. Any idiot can complain, and tw certainly is the first and foremost of the complainers.

Tw, you do not know how to win the War On Terror. I'd say the third demonstration of that in a single thread is conclusive.

...*several deep breaths*...

Urbane Guerrilla, based on your previous posts, and what I see here, you're so, so, so wrong... I want to speak calmly, and using simple words and relatively short sentences, so I can be as clear as possible. I have no hope that you'll be persuaded by my words, but I offer them to the rest of the dwellars as evidence that your words are only an abberation, a misspoken utterance, not representative of the vox populi.

First off, I hold tw responsible for offering a strategy as to how to win the war to the same degree that I hold you responsible for the same, which is to say, not at all. You're "just some guy on the internet", after all, same as tw. I hold our President responsible, and to this point, he has not been forthcoming. He's got squat.

You tried and failed to slyly change the subject from "Torture is bad, why is our VP promoting it" to "You don't have a strategy for winning the war, so shut up". There are other threads dedicated to the war and it's many aspects, including torture. Go whine there. Or, maybe I'm reading you wrong. Do you contend that a necessary tool for "winning" this "war" is the freedom to torture? Are you saying we can't win this war without torturing prisoners? That is just flat out chickenshit, and you know it.

As to being a complainer, tw is granted the same freedom to complain as you so freely enjoy. If you don't like it, go away. I mean it. You're like a rude comic that startles an embarassed chuckle from an audience. Titillating in small doses, but spiritually toxic at longer exposures. And where do you get the authority to claim that tw is "the first and foremost of the complainers"?! Back off, jack; I deserve consideration for that honor. I find this whole prospect that America has traded the reputation as "the home of the free and the land of the brave" for "We don't torture." reason for complaint. I am complaining.

This is the heart of your mistake, pay attention. Why would you want to associate the attitudes of "America-haters" with the actions of those who "beat them up"? Oh, they hated you first. "Beating them up" didn't change their attitude, so it's ok. That's why you support torturing them? To change their attitude?

I have a question: Can you explain why torture is a good idea? Tell us if you support it (as it seems you do), and if so, why? Explain it's usefulness, it's validity. I defy you.

If there ever was an "anti-American" attitude, torturing prisoners is it. The more loudly you support that idea, the more you become what you say you hate. It would be better for you (and far more pleasant for everyone else), if you would just shut up. Dick Cheney not need your help, if this is what you consider help.

The essence of my irritation with tw is that I want the war won, and tw broadly implies, though he will never say it aloud because the whole board would turn on him, that he does not.

When you are fighting an insurgency, intel on the insurgency is as vital as oxygen. This gives the intel collectors a LOT of latitude. Since I, for one, and very likely you for another, don't want to get ambushed in my bed, I don't have much problem with our self-made, self-declared enemies getting leaned on, tortured, and squeezed dry, for their sins. A certain kind of violent and virulent anti-Americanism must be ruthlessly opposed, broken, discredited, ruined, and practiced only by dead people. It must be read as licence for Americans to come and kill you in your backyard. For too many decades my nation has been the longsuffering target of every damned idiot with a bomb and a grudge, and I was heartily sick of it in 1975. Imagine how savage I get about it thirty years on. We've been too easy on those who would assail us, when they could be making far better lives -- at least through being wealthy enough to buy options -- emulating us instead. I deride the whole bomb-and-grudge crowd as a pack of idiots, and idiots never have good causes.

Your claim that my view is "chickenshit" is an extraordinary claim made without supporting evidence. You'll have to come up with it, and it had better be suitably impressive.

Why should I need some conferred authority to remark that tw is the first and foremost of the complainers when we all have the evidence of his posts? Of all the CellarDwellars, does he not complain the hardest? You get the impression the guy doesn't believe Republican Presidents exist, or something. You certainly come away with the impression that Republican foreign policy leads to defeats for the kind of people tw likes -- communists and suchlike fascists. (I don't see much practical difference between these varieties of dictatorship. Both are reprehensible. Unfreedom in general is reprehensible, and our foes are all about unfreedom -- for such as we anyway.) So, he utters the most disgraceful hogwash. The man's a leftist and a mental mess. Being a crank isn't good if you want to be taken seriously -- the guy's understanding of recent history is beyond mistaken and into the bizarre.

If you're going to say our policy is all wrong front to back, it behooves you to come up with a credible alternative, one that actually is better, and one that advances our interests while you're at it. Tw is ducking this kind of responsibility, and I don't think you, BigV, should help him duck it.

Oh, and one last note: don't use short words. Use the right words, regardless of brevity or of sesquipedalianism. Assume I have the sophistication and vocabulary of a William F. Buckley, and act on that assumption. Where we (excluding tw and one or two others who aren't putting a dog in the fight) differ is not in mental powers, but in worldview. Don't misplace your priorities: our foes represent unfreedom, and the last war we lost to the unfreedom-creeps meant two separate, unconscionable massacres: North Vietnam committed genocide against "enemies of the state" in 1959 and again in 1975. In 1975-79 that also generated a million refugees from a shitheaded social philosophy and its murderousness, and not much less than that in 1959. My point is that our enemies do not have a legitimate grievance or point of view; therefore I show them a hard face. They are not to be allowed to oppress us or anyone else. If they insist on it, they must insist from the gibbet -- to the carrion crows.

W told me the mission was accomplished, how will I know when the war is won? :rolleyes: