With a weed-eater.

You're not reading. Quit wasting time.

Marichiko, that is the last fucking straw: you are lying in a quote box, deliberately. You have no ethics left. Deep shame on you.

How many other obviously stupid things do you do in a single day?

PM sent. If that doesn't do it, I'll find something that will.

Might I suggest The Truth, With Jokes by Al Franken, then?

Don't trust these guys
 

I can remember when the FBI took 18 months to locate a guy name Ken Kesey. Know who or what he was? An LSD crazed novelist. Then they took over 12 months to find heiress Patricia Hearst who had been allegedly kidnapped by a group calling themselves the Symboinese Liberation Army. They consisted of 6 or so self-agrandizing bank robbers. That same FBI could tell you the name of every woman the Reverand Martin Luther King, Jr. had ever slept with. J. Edgar Hoover may be dead but his spirit lives on.

These guys tell you they are on the up-and-up. Just keepin' us safe from terroists. I can guarantee you that the Shrub and his boys are using the information to keep track of the political oppostion, anti-war folks and libertarian types. They could also used them to run down renegade state legislators like they used Homeland Security to find all those nasty Texas Democrats. They won't find any more terrorists this way than they do making you take off your shoes in the airport or carry a passport to pop over the border for Tequila and Whoppee.

I spent the last 10 months of my four year Army tour at the NSA. I can tell you what the NSA is. It is thousands upon thousands of mindless bureaucrats who whould unquestioningly execute each and every one of us if their overlords so ordered. These are the very same kinds of people Hitler relied on to construct and implement the gas chambers. You need to be very, very afraid of these people. I know I am.

And were long before 9-11, I suspect. :eyebrow:

You may not. Al doesn't yet wish to keep the Republic. In related reading, scope out One Hundred People Who Are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken is #37), by Bernard Goldberg. Of late he's been hitting the talk shows plugging 110 People, instead of a mere hundred.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006...lance&n=283155

Mjohn, I've more experience of NSA than you do, both NAVSECGRU and civilian. I came to the opposite conclusion: that those guys are too busy at their secretive jobs to do such conspiracy-theory stuff. They haven't time for it; they just don't think that way, from Special Executive Service down to the cleared janitorial personnel.

He certainly does, especially compared to Michelle "intern the Japanese" Malkin.

I had a chance to meet Mr. Franken and found him to be a highly decent, thoughtful and patriotic man. He was very kind. I'll stick with my direct assessment over your mediated rabid spin. I think your fears (the great many of them) that fuel your energies, are unfortunately misplaced. There is plenty out there to fear, but I am not sweating Al Franken.:)

I always thought the point wasn't that they did it in their free time; rather, that their secretive job was the stuff we make conspiracy theories over.

Fear Al Franken? Come now, cannot one of you get it right?

Contempt is not to be confused with fear. I think Al, on the basis of such of his words I read before disgust overtook me (I have a strong stomach, so I wasn't taking the trip to Rising Gorge) is unwise, and quite the Big Fat Idiot. Unwise idiots are not to be feared, but to be rebutted, scotched, and defeated.

Monkey, some free advice: don't indulge in slander you can't substantiate. The Left's habit of doing that is a central reason the Left is too stupid for me.

I don't.

Urbane Guerrilla just graduated from the Rush Limbaugh school of logic and international analysis. When caught lying, then attack the messenger.

Actually, I am reading. I even know how to use italics, too. I do agree that it really is a waste of time to argue with you. You are the ultimate conservative. If you'd been in the Nuremberg docks or sitting next to Ollie in the Iran-Contra hearings, you would probably have been the one guy who stood up and said to the judges/senators "I still don't see what the fucking problem is".

It might be that we need guys like you. Too many men mix in conscience with duty, causing problems. You seem like you would be unhindered by any qualms. Illegal order? I doubt that you would even consider that such a thing is possible.

I feel stung on UG's behalf.

Ouch. Dayum!

Ayup. Sometimes you can get singed just by being in the general vicinity.

It's called collateral damage. :smack:

I never take RichLevy too seriously. His writings never give me reason to.

I want the war won. Rich doesn't want it as much as I do, and so conspicuously that I wonder if he wants it won at all. Puts the poop in nincompoop, I tell ya.

I still here people, usually with no military experience, say that if we were willing to double the number of names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, we could have won Vietnam. Are they patriots or idiots?

Idiots.:(

Idiots.

I think the best nutshelling of what was wrong with our Vietnam effort I've ever seen was on the pages of The Sunshine Soldiers by one Peter Tauber: we were trying to fight a polite war, as one of Tauber's DI's put it.

When an armed enemy enjoys arbitrarily unassailable sanctuaries and an equally arbitrarily uninterrupted supply of munitions, he's going to be hard to even delay, let alone defeat.

Shades of Korea.:(
WW II was the last one we did right.

Stay long enough in the middle of any insurgency, and soliders will eventually end up taking it out on the civilians.

In part this is because of the correctly held belief that the insurgency would probably not exist without either active or passive support from civlians. Unfortunately, making the distinction between 'guilty' civilians and true bystanders is impossible, and false ID's are almost guaranteed.

Of course, the more assaults on civilians that take place, the more civilians will engage in active or passive support for the insurgents.

This is why it is not possible to wipe out an insurgency except by becoming Saddam Hussein. Hussein kept out terrorists and insurgents simply by being the most brutal bastard in the region. The Germans in WWII were almost as effective and the various resistance movements probably would not have succeeded without Allied support.

The only other solution is to make the insurgency obsolete by addressing the political and social problems leading the the dissatisfaction that the populace feels. In Iraq, this would mean getting the goverment functioning and the occupation/liberation troops out. This would remove popular support. Unfortunately, there would still be the issue of support from foreign sources, which would require a trained indigenous force to handle.

This means that we will be there a while. At a guess, figure 2 to 2 1/2 times where we are in terms of money and casualties.

That an insurgency cannot exist without passive support from civilians is true.
If all civilians told all they knew about all insurgents... guess what? No insurgency. Simple.
The same is true of the Muslim community as a whole and terrorism... they gripe about being singled-out, yet in communities where cells are known to exist, no one talks. They have no one to blame but themselves.

Goes right back to a basic concept of war. The victor owns the battlefield at the end of a battle. For example, US Navy was devastated in so many battles against Japanese in The Slot. But the Japanese withdrew everytime. Therefore it was an American victory. A devastating but still American victory.

Problem with Westmoreland's outright violations of war principles in Vietnam was demonstrated by his nonsense called 'Search and Destroy'. For when a sweep completed, only the enemy held that terrain. The 1965 battle in la Drang Valley, praised as a victory by Westmoreland, was a devastating defeat for Americans. At the end, Americans did not hold the battle field. Instead Westmoreland would cite enemy casualties to call it a victory.

Why did VC win? Americans saw everyone as gooks. VC would live in the village, work for the farmer, or pay the farmer for the chicken. Therefore a farmer knew who his friend was - and therefore who remained on the battlefield after a battle.

What we learn applies to Iraq. Same thing. Victory required nation building in the very first months. Looting (that George Jr's administration denied) demonstrates how Americans were losing a battlefield (while proclaiming 'Masson Accomplished'). We did not have enough troops to meet a definition of a victory. We did nothing - no nation building - for seven months. By that time, insurgents were so welcome that famous pictures show insurgents setting up a mortar all morning and even using a transit right outside the walls of Abu Ghriad. Why could those insurgents spend all morning setting up for their attack? Because again, who controlled the ground?

It is Military Science 101. To hold the ground, one must hold the hearts and minds of those who control and live on that land. Instead our government only made enemies as Americans also did in Vietnam.

Then that is what they want... so it's what they get.

It gets more complex. Define 'They'.

It is not more complex... if they, those in Iraq, want Democracy, then they need to turn over the insurgents.
It is not complex. The insurgents live among them, travel with them, shop where they shop and work where they work... the locals know who they are and if they want this all to end all they have to do is say the word.

If it's what they want, than what's the point of us being there?

Tadaaaaaaa!

'Cause that's not what the world wants?
I guess Afghanistan wanted the Taliban. (Maybe they still do.)

That's the trouble with starting a war with the ostensible purpose of helping the citizens of the country you're invading. If they don't want you, then what is your purpose there?

Wait a minute, there may be a difference between what they want and what they have come to accept in order to keep their heads from being cut/blown off.

Teacher! Teacher! Johnny has an automatic weapon!!
Rat-a-tat-a-tat. :rattat:

Wot Bruce sed. IOW, can you ever trust what a Fuehrer says about public opinion in his country?