And your right-wing media DOESN’T push it’s own agenda and propaganda?!?!

Come on!

you guys are P.A.R.A.N.O.I.D

How can you know, how can any of us know the full story on this? Some of us have more insight to the functioning of the military, and we all have access to information from various sources, but otherwise we all have mostly the lessons of history, logic, and common sense to analyze this.

It sounds as though you have accepted the popular MSM message. The MSM has an agenda, has been shown to be factually wrong, misrepresenting, or peddling totally false information now so many times that it simply cannot be trusted, it is unreliable. Everything reported on the MSM, especially when it is political in nature, can assumed to be much less than the full story and should be automatically suspect.

We could have and should have done a better job in every war we fought, it doesn’t make the war a complete failure.

1. The troops in Germany, Japan, etc. stopped fighting more than 50 years ago. There is a big difference between being there and fighting there.

2. “You can simply NEVER prepare for or expect every possible variable. You do the best with what you have, you learn from your mistakes, and you adapt.”

President Bush’s administration could of and should have done a better job. Not a perfect job but better than what they did. Also this administration is very reluctant to even admit mistakes let alone adapt to lessons learned from their mistakes.

As has been demonstrated and debated repeatedly in this forum, the MSM cannot be trusted. The MSM for the most part has an agenda, and pumps out proganda and BS.

Now for a small comment on how long we may have troops in Iraq. We still have troops in Germany last I checked. While ,to my knowledge, we don’t have soldiers stationed in Japan proper, we do in Okinawa and are currently helping the Philippine government in its fight against what? That’s right folks Al Quaeda affiliated Muslim terrorists. 50+ years later we still maintain over a division of US soldiers in Korea. As late as the mid 80s, they were still accompanying Korean units on combat patrols in the DMZ. While I realize that our successes in Granada, Panama, and Desert Storm have lead everyone to have VERY high expectations of quick victories, sometimes these things just take time. We haven’t used all of the equipment at our disposal like we did in WWII which could’ve reduced the US Casualties and possibly sped the end of the conflict. However firebombing Tikrit, Mosul, or Fallujah like we did Dresden in WWII simply would not have been tolerated. Not only would the friendly moderate Muslims have risen up against us, the rest of the world might have as well.

To say this war has been mismanaged is to be ignorant of the basic underlying truth of war. War is directed chaos. You can simply NEVER prepare for or expect every possible variable. You do the best with what you have, you learn from your mistakes, and you adapt. There is a line in the movie “Heartbreak Ridge” wherein the Marines in the movie are instructed that they will improvise, adapt, and overcome. We are in the process of developing a lighter, faster, more agile while incredibly destructive military. While there is a clamor and hue for more Spec ops troops to replace the larger conventional units, it must be understood that many of the Special operations training programs are very selective to enter and equally as hard to complete. Ranger school lasts 8 weeks and when I was in, had a better than 50% washout rate. You simply didn’t ask to go, you had to be selected. Unfortunately, I passed up the opportunity. Army Special Forces (Green Beret)school is even harder to qualify for, takes over 6 months and is even harder to complete. Navy SEAL school is virtually endless or at least seems that way from what I’ve been told. It also has a better than 50% wash out rate. I do know that it can take up to a year or more depending on which specialty schools you are sent to. The individuals who even qualify to attend these schools are the best and the brightest that the military has and they still lose half or more of those who start the course before graduation. Obviously, while the idea of making more of them is commendable, the fact is that most don’t qualify to go to the schools, and most of those who do are unable to finish them. The other option would be to water down the schools to make them easier to pass and thereby reduce the quality of the graduates. Then exactly how “Special” would our Special Operations forces become?

How long will this violence (in Iraq) last? 1 year?, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500?, more??? If things stayed exactly like they are now then when whould you begin to say ‘maybe this wasn’t a good thing’?

The things you listed are pretty much why I was behind the American invasion in March 2003. Unfortunately our efforts have been so severally mismanaged and shortsighted that I fear that the future of Iraq will be no better than its past 30 years. 3 years later and it painfully dawns on me that President Bush and his administration don’t know what on Earth they are doing. They keep spouting out grand visions of peace and democracy without the pragmatic focus on how to realistically get there.

I think victory can still be achieved over there, but I don’t think our current leadership is capable of achieving it. Unfortunately by the time any changes are made in our strategy we will have been in Iraq for 6 years and by then it may be too late for success.