As much as I have said the same as the writer above. It is sad to see it penned in another’s hand. It confirms my fears.

It seems to leave me to my windmills. No more need to slay the dragons, that had been eating at our country. They are dead.

I pray we can go onto a better nation from here. Let’s never go down this same road again..

N. Korea, V.N. then Iraq..

That’s to much for one lifetime..

Peters has authored numerous essays on strategy for military journals such as Parameters, Military Review, and Armed Forces Journal, reports for the US Marine Corps Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities, writes a regular opinion column for the New York Post, and has written essays and columns for USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Monthly and Army magazine. He has reported from Iraq, Israel, West Africa and other trouble spots, usually for the New York Post.

Iraq is a mess simply because we are not willing to commit to total war. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, perhaps the human race will eventually grow up and learn to get along. But you cannot go to war (And expect to win) when politics and public opinion play a larger role than the decisions of the commanders directing the battle. 
The difference between the our forces and the elements we are facing is this:
We are fighting to stay alive, and protect innocent bystanders.
They are willing to die, and kill anyone else that happens to be in the way.
As long as these philosophies are mantained, we will never win in Iraq, but since our moral conscience will not allow us to fight in their manner, there is no easy answer.
We won WWII because we were willing to strike an overwelming blow against the enemy, to bomb them into submission, civilain casualties were not wanted, but were expected. As a nation, we no longer feel that is acceptable, and the enemy knows that. In fact I have no doubt that they play on that very sentiment. Every time we attack, they claim that we killed innocent civilians, perhaps it's occasionally true, our Intelligence community certainly seems to be suspect at times. But certainly not as often as claimed by the enemy. The point is, each time we hear that in the news, it puts the seed of doubt in our minds, till we reach the point that we no longer trust our leadership. ( I haven't for along time, but that's a different story)

Stuff like this doesn't really help either.


Bechtel, the giant engineering company, is leaving Iraq. Its mission -- to rebuild power, water and sewage plants -- wasn't accomplished: Baghdad received less than six hours a day of electricity last month, and much of Iraq's population lives with untreated sewage and without clean water. But Bechtel, having received $2.3 billion of taxpayers' money and having lost the lives of 52 employees, has come to the end of its last government contract.

$2.3 billion for nothing. Well, at least the office that was supposed to be the oversight for Iraqi contracts has closed so they won't be investigated. That is unless the democrats take over congress.

Could anyone here imagine if we only had 6 hours of electricity per day? Even in the summer.

Pro says:

only had 6 hours of electricity per day?

TK says:

I'd have to stay in the Prevost..

GRIN

ender9000, who is we......Has the Army found another good man in yourself..yet? Or is the fighting for "others" so that you can bask in the glory of victory?

TK (or should I start calling you Elmo),

did you mean a bus like this one?

http://www.prevostcar.com/c...

We won WWII because we were fighting a regular army on battlefields, not guerrilla fighters and neighborhood militias. They wouldn't exist if we had put something viable into the power vacuum we created when we overthrew the government. But we didn't, and nature abhors a vacuum. We couldn't fill the void with anything approaching what was needed, and now that the militias and fighters are established, it'll be ten times more difficult to remove them and replace them with anything approaching an objective police or security force. Our only remaining option would be to co-opt the existing militias and bring them under control of an objective, non-partisan security apparatus. But that's about as unlikely as Rummy picking up a M-16 and going there to take care of business himself.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Without a solution, you're a problem. We have no solution, no plan, no strategy for solving this, in the short term or the long term. We broke it, and now we have bought it. The question is if we're going to finance the payments, or try to make sure we aren't getting overcharged for this. Bush wants to finance it in blood and deficit spending until he's no longer in charge, when it'll become some other poor bastard's problem. But that's his modus operandi. Break it and have someone bail you out. It doesn't matter to him if it's one of daddy's friends or the American taxpayer. For the "Party of responsibility", they need to have the Democrats win next week to make them responsible.

It's great for business though , according to the latest IG report, we may be supplying arms to both sides...no wonder Wall St. went through the roof.

Iraq is not failing, we are killing more of them than they are of us. The Shiites loves us to death in the South, the Kurds love us and the oil in the North, and those in the Green Zone stockade,  Shiites, Kurds, Or Sunnis in  love our pay check, so why would you not think we are winning?

They should take our Bakersfield motto to heart  "Life as it should be"!

Ender wrote, "We won WWII because we were willing to strike an overwelming blow against the enemy, to bomb them into submission, civilain casualties were not wanted, but were expected. As a nation, we no longer feel that is acceptable, and the enemy knows that. In fact I have no doubt that they play on that very sentiment"
.
I'll give you that.  We call ourselves a superpower, but we are not.  Why?  Because we refuse to act like one.
.
Of course, we all know what "acting like a superpower" entails, and few are up to the decision.  (Is it the right decision?  That's a different question.  War is not my area of expertise, so if I were President, I'd be deferring to the advice of my generals a lot more often.)

We're not losing this war because the enemy is a guerrilla army. We're losing this war because there is not, and appears never was a plan.
Or,
We have to come to the realization that just because we say that we have the best military, maybe we don't.
Or,
We're so concerned with standing up and/or training the Iraqi police/army that we can't focus on the enemy, which may be the Iraqi army/police.