Our actions, our failed reactions in Iraq has trained our enemy and freightened our allies rather than the other way round. Senators may ask about supposed terrorist training camps in Iraq under Saddam, but they miss the point. Iraq is a training camp now. A training camp, a test bed and proving ground. It is a free fall zone. Shoot, drop — do what you want, when and why you want. It is a zone of widescale freedom with widespread ammunition. Iraq is the second amendments dream field. We’ve played crash test dummy to the bomb makers as they have perfected their means and methods. They now have too many motives.

When we withdrew from Vietnam:

The pro war campers suggest that our withdrawal from Vietnam caused the collapse and widescale killing across southeast asia. They must have learned this from their K Street Readers. They are wrong.

Weather and famine across the Mekong did the part in the apocolypse of the horsemen. but the US actions, our take the war to the hidden command center of cambodia was what drove the farmers from their field to strain the cities. There was no way to suceed in our campaign. There was no central cambodian cammand. That was a fiction of our own. A mistake made because we modelled our enemy as we would model ourself. We had one, they must have one. Remember at one time the code of the cavalry was never kill the officers horse… breeding you know, breeding.

Ice Cream

It is not bad, nor an error to focus on the Iraq war. It is this war that we can win. But we can win only if we know when and which battles are wasted. Our error of the Green Zone was that we spread pain instead of “gain”…. we excluded most of the Iraqis from our “ice cream palace” just as the Bathists excluded them.
A tour of the ice cream zone. Our troops practiced drive by warfare. Hardly the way to win, but a way to remain safe. Generals get stars, sargeants get stripes, troops get medals and we all get home. But we can never win without engagement.

Now we are spending the last of our time fighting a splintering and vengeful populace. You can’t split wood without splinters. Repair won’t need more hammer blows. It needs more Iraqis picking up the splinters. Even if they don’t do it the way you want. Step back enough to let them take the shot. Maybe they have better aim, a clearer view of the target than you do. Tell me can you identify, at twenty yards each of the tribes, sects and nationalitys on the road. Probably no better than an Iraqi can distinguish the Alabama from the Texas accent.

Just recently we had the hubris to have an “Iraq Study Group” without any Iraqis. Oh sure, we sought testimony. But not a plan. Our military plans and executes the killing operations, while our think tanks and geriatric politicians plan the future of Iraq. This is the secret sauce of imperial thinking. Trickle down idealism. The trickle is blood and sewage.

The Glory That Was McCain’s is over.

Perhaps McCain’s memory was blocked by the bars of his cage. Or perhaps his partisan positions are causing his myopia on this matter.

The war from fast speed or high altitude isn’t the same as the one with smells and grime. Soot from charcoal stoves amidst the acrid fuel of a flame thrower is a long time leaving. It takes more washings than washington warriors will ever understand.

I was never a captive, nor was I ever captivated by war. As a draftee I felt a prisoner, condemned to salute those I didn’t respect and shoot those I didn’t hate.

from the GOP on FOX 9.6.07

McCain,

a withdrawal is a defeat…

[why? is this a one play game]
he can’t see clearly. still fighting his captivity, like lost generals of loses past he fights daylight during night.

He misses the power of preparing to leave. The impact that makes, more on your hesitant Iraqis, by attending only to his imagined opponent. The feint, the dodge and stutter step is the prize fighters best move. Get them to reveal with a small step back, draw them to your punch.

I’d like to see us fight this one to win. that means fighting a different way. the only way to win against a non-army warrior is to enlist the population. what we thought about and tried, limply and ineffectually in Vietnam.

Use the locals to hunt and set traps. That is the way to fight an insurgency, to win, use the locals to win them.

don’t alienate them, ally with them. this means convert your pace, plan and practices to theirs, not the other way round. eat their meal to gain their zeal.

Bowling in Baghdad ought to be a joke, a reference to a Vietnam failure, not an “achievable goal.” This isn’t freedom, it’s farce.