Hummer Forums by Elcova - politics.......I like this......

Quote:

Originally Posted by usetosellhummer

Can't afford to be the worlds police man. We started off strong then fizzed out. No warsince WWII has ended in total victory, Nam, Korea, whattt???? NO I am not backing a pull out as the left is pushing but this ain't working. Can we win??? or leave another country divided by walls,fences. Reagan did it the right way in this time, MONEY will tear any goverment, country, or dictator down. The USSR was starved out, we can do the same to the middle east by taking the money away. We become the worlds largest oil producer! Russia is cutting back door deals with China on energy and we keep giving money to the sultans to ship us oil.
We buy more natural gas now then we pump? What? I don't know the answer but what is going on now will not stop a people who will fight a cowards war (middle east) They have been fighing since the dawn of time.
How do you win against a people who will strap thier kids with bombs and throw them in 24/7

We can afford to police the terrorists who are being funded by the guys want to kill us and are trying to build nukes. It's like the popular anti-war slogan in France in 1939-40 when Germany had invaded Poland, but had not yet attacked France: "Let not one Frenchman die for Danzig!" Of course, no Frenchman did die for Danzig, but about eight months later, the Germans marched into Paris. They were able to do this because the anti-war french did not see the need to fight in another land. This permited Germany to fight two winable one-front campaigns, whereas it would probably have been crushed if France had invaded from the west while most of the then fairly-small German army was tied down in Poland.

As far as "winning," this war had, I believe, several important goals--some have been accomplished, and some have not.

One of the most important to me was to reduce the tide of increasingly powerful crazy foreign dictators who felt bold enough to aggressively threaten the U.S., its allies, and its interests. The best way: take the craziest one*; destroy his military; and dig him out of a spider hole. You see, until we did something like that, we could chase terrorist orgs around, even successfully, all day, and the foreign heads of state (the ones with the real ability to hurt us) wouldn?t really care. Bin laden supposedly had/has millions of dollars to fund actions against the U.S.; Kim Jong Ill; the Iranians Mullahs; Khadafy (he got scared and went away); etc.. had hundreds of billions of dollars. They are the ones who need to be scared of us. And they were very scared for a while. The only reason this awesome use of deterrence has faded somewhat is because the Democrats (with about ? the political power of the country) want to throw in the towel so that they can declare the war a failure rather than help win it, which might help Bush and the Republicans politically. Shameless.

The war would probably be much closer to a successful conclusion if the enemy did not have the inspiring hope radiating from the Democrats? deep desire to lose this war.

That's what scares me; not suicide bombers. The Japanese too used suicide missions (not just Kamikaze ones) against us during WWII and the Nazis troops and political operatives were possibly the most fanatical of their kind in world history. For those and other reasons, our military prepared for a decade long Vietnam-style guerrilla war in both countries to last well into the 1950s at the end of WWII. Why didn?t it happen? Because the Germans and Japanese knew it would be hopeless. The Germans knew that Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, their militaries, and their populations would crush such insurgencies brutally if necessary. That could be true here and now, but, regrettably it?s not. The insurgents know that they just have to work hard enough long enough for the Democrats? failure message to carry the day. Instead of being united, which would easily carry the day, we have the opposition party hoping for failure and possessing just enough power to cause that result.

* Saddam launched numerous unsuccessful wars; was trying to build a nuke (was two years away from one in 1990); and is the only person to use chemical weapons on a large scale against civilian or military targets since 1918. He?s the first one you go after-easy.

As a former adviser to Margaret thatcher states better:

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Originally Posted by [COLOR=black

John[/color] O'Sullivan]

Defeatism Is No Winning Strategy
Dems and Iraq.

By John O'Sullivan

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada declared last week that the war in Iraq was ??lost.?? Alas, the leader of the Senate Democrats lacked the courage of his defeatism. When he came under attack, he promptly corrected himself: The war, he said, was going to be lost if President Bush?s current policies were not changed.

But this was a backflip, too.

Back in 2005, as historian Arthur Herman points out in the April issue of Commentary, Reid was among those senators who wanted to send more U.S. troops to Iraq to carry out exactly the kind of counter-insurgency warfare that Gen. David Petraeus is now waging in the ??surge.??

Reid is representing his Senate colleagues and the wider Democratic party in his confusions. They genuinely believe the war is lost.

They argue that the U.S. ??occupation?? both causes and prolongs the Iraqi ??civil war.?? They want to withdraw U.S. troops as soon as possible. But they don?t want to get the blame for an American defeat and for what might follow.

Many ordinary Americans seem to share these hesitant opinions, according to the opinion polls. But are they correct?

Since the ??surge?? got under way, several distinguished and cold-eyed observers have visited Iraq. Almost all of them ? reflecting also a change in media reporting of the conflict ? admit that the surge seems to be producing results.

For instance, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the former drug czar, after a survey that was sharply critical of past failures, civil and military, nonetheless reached this broad conclusion: ??In my judgment, we can still achieve our objective of: a stable Iraq, at peace with its neighbors, not producing weapons of mass destruction and fully committed to a law-based government.??

That would constitute a clear-cut victory. It is far from certain that the United States will attain such a victory. What is plain, however, is that we can hold off indefinitely the defeat that some Democrats think we have already sustained. The United States is the dominant power in Iraq. In conjunction with our allies in the Iraqi government, we can remain in Iraq and control its government for as long as we wish. No combination of insurgent forces can possibly drive us out. We have not ??lost.??

As Arthur Herman points out, however, in his Commentary essay, the French were in an equally strong position in the Algerian war. Indeed, it was a French strategic thinker who first devised the successful counter-insurgency strategy that Petraeus is now using with success in the surge. What defeated France was French public opinion ? persuaded by its left-wing parties ? that the war had been lost and so no more French soldiers should die in pointless struggle. The French duly left, and those Algerians who had supported them were massacred. Some were forced to swallow their medals before being shot or buried alive.

But won?t Iraqis settle their differences peacefully after a U.S. departure, as for instance presidential contender John Edwards maintains? Listen to the testimony of John Agresto, an American academic, who from pure idealism went out to Iraq to help reform its educational system. In his superb new book, Mugged by Reality, Agresto is scathing about the failure of America?s good intentions in Iraq. He points out that establishing a stable government in a broken society is a task that requires intimate knowledge of the society ? and many years of dedicated effort. He is scornful of the quick-fix-to-democracy approach of too many Americans and of the neoconservatives in particular.

But he is much more scathing about those who think that an American ??scuttle?? would make matters better: ?? . . . the truth is that our leaving would not give peace a chance but would give anarchy, mayhem and full-scale civil war its best chance.??

Will we give Iraq the time it needs, however?

On that the most interesting testimony comes from the distinguished British military historian and commentator Sir Max Hastings, also just returned from Iraq. Hastings is a longstanding critic of the Iraq war, of Bush, of Prime Minister Tony Blair, and of the neoconservatives. But he recognizes two new realities ? that defeat would be a strategic disaster for both the West and ordinary Iraqis, and that the surge, brilliantly conceived and led by Petraeus, is producing real if partial victories. He remains pessimistic, however, simply because he thinks that the surge will not be given time to work. That may, alas, be right.

If it is right, who will have refused that precious commodity to America?s men at arms?