couldn't have said it any better

An old friend shared a note that he sent to one of his old friends. I think it summarizes my rants of the past three years, so I've shared it with you:

"There are plenty of heros in our armed forces (and a few losers, as evidenced in that latest article: the guys who just stood there while there leader was being shot at), but there is some truth to the general feeling that the "higher-ups just don't get it", according to Yon. In his article, he points out that this particular mission was one of the exceptions in that it was actually pretty well-conceived. But then, I think that this has always been the case: the guys on the ground have always thought that their leaders back at central command didn't have a clue: from WWII through Vietnam. That's probably normal.

I don't agree with Cindy Sheehan (to leave Iraq now), who is a nut who happened to be in the right place at the right time to get a lot of media coverage, but don't you agree that someone needs to be held accountable for the policies that led to our forces being wasted in a more-than-likely futile war? Doesn't it piss you off that our heroic and capable soldiers are over there dying and being wounded/wasted for a muddy and ever-changing cause? That they're basically being used as target practice by every got-nothing-to-lose Islamic fundamentalist nutcase with a gun and a hard-on for "the great Satan", America?

All the while we've been burning hundreds of billions of dollars (over $200B, last count) and thousands of good soldiers lives (not counting all the wounded), as well as exhausting our military capital and reserves, for what? So that an artificially created country (similar to Yugoslavia; the British put it together earlier this century) full of ethnic and religious tensions can create what will, at best, probably be a Shiite Islamic "democracy"? Hell, they're already buddy-buddy with Shiite-run Iran, who's working as hard as they can on an Islamic nuclear bomb, probably to aim right at us! How is this good for us; you and me? I never really gave a crap about what a thug Saddam was to his own people: there are plenty of thugs running countries elsewhere in the world that we're not willing to spill American blood to "help" remove their tyrants. Nor should we. That rationalization is seriously lame.

Yep. Now that we've got a bead on the real enemy, Iran and it's verifiable nuclear ambitions, we don't have any dry powder. We're screwed, militarily. We've exhausted our resources, and for what? A badly thought out and hastily conceived opportunistic mission against what was seen as a soft target (Iraq). One that would allow us to establish bases to start working on the other countries in the region, like Iran, Syria, etc. Sounds good on paper! But reality bites.

Only problem is that the civilian officials that planned all this seriously miscalculated about how hard it would be to deal with actually winning the war, none of them actually having been IN a war. The chief architects of this, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, all have the distinction of never serving in the military or having any military-related experience. In fact, they acted just like the "media elite" you mentioned in that they attacked the experienced military generals (like Shineski), that had real war-time experience when those generals disagreed with their rosy scenarios. See http://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/invasion/ interviews/fallows.html for an even-handed look at this.

If our leadership had been more experienced in the reality of war and it's aftermath, ANY war, maybe we wouldn't be reading Yon's blog today, and we'd be ready to take on the real threats to our country, like Iran and the fundamentalist crack-heads in Saudi Arabia. And then there's always that Osama guy; remember him? But he's safely hidden in Pakistan, our "ally" whose top govt. scientist (Khan) was caught selling nuclear technology and secrets to other Islamic countries!!!! WTF!!!!!!!!! Why aren't we taking over Pakistan? Those guys are the real deal!

Guess you can tell that I'm just a little bit frustrated with the "leadership" that has led to our present situation. Certainly the military has performed as heroically and competently as they can, given their inept civilian leadership. Some heads should have rolled a long time ago, but instead they got medals. Go figure.

I just hope that we can achieve some sort of "success" in Iraq in the near future, at least in avoiding creating a failed nation-state that can be easily compromised by terrorists and thugs, like Afghanistan was by the Taliban. If we don't succeed, it will rank up there as one of the worst geo-political moves in U.S. history.