http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqc_Q0XLW2Q

Western troops’ withdrawal from Afghanistan raises the inevitable question: what was that all about? Whether or not we leave a lasting legacy in the country found in South Asia, Central Asia and to some extent, Western Asia, is an open question. That no one seems to care about, overmuch. But it’s certainly true that the US Armed forces therein gained an enormous amount of operational familiarity. We now know how to fight a war. What guns to use. How to use them. When to use them. True?

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103 COMMENTS

  1. Do we have experience? some……….but, do we know how to fight a war? not hardly. I believe we started losing the knowledge on “how” to fight this war in 2008. from there it has been a downhill slide. The one that wish to do us harm are just waiting us out.

    • I thought we started forgetting how before I was even born. I thought Vietnam was the start of that. Ever since we have decided that we were too worried about an innocent woman or child being killed, the opposing forces have used that against us. Though it may be very sad, if we would go back to how we were with Japan in WWII and just start leveling areas, I think we would see them crumble MUCH faster and we would suffer a great deal less losses, both of our own soldiers and monetary losses. It is certainly sad to see innocent life lost in a time of war, but we need to realize that they don’t give a damn about killing our innocent people, and we need to start to feel the same about if it happens to theirs.

      • I guess if we’re not willing to shed civilian blood to break the spirit of a particular regime or peoples then it’s probably not a war we need to be involved in.

        War will never be pretty nor pleasant. And to paraphrase R.E. Lee, it’s fortunate that war is so disgusting lest we become too fond of it.

        • “War will never be pretty nor pleasant.”

          There’s not a person here that doesn’t know that.

          The real question is, “but is it just?”

      • There weren’t any Afghans or Iraqis involved in 9/11. So why should we be killing their innocents?

        The killing of innocents is never right and should never be done. PERIOD.

        • That’s a bit much. The Iraqis were not involved with 9/11, but the Afghanistans gave land to the Al Qaeda to train and their leadership was based there. We can’t allow a nation to not take responsibility for the knowing acts committed against us from their lands.

        • The Taliban and Al Queda were pretty cozy, and as I recall most AQ were Afghans.

          Yeah, bin Laden was a Saudi expatriot. However, AQ was and is an international organization, and they set up shop is where the volunteers are.

          As for Iraq, I comfort myself with knowing that we’ve less for which to atone than did the Germans, and they turned out alright.

        • There’s no nation called “Afghanistanis”. There are Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara etc.

      • And yes, there are definite parallels to Nam.

        At least the homecoming reception is better.

        • “the Afghanistans gave land to the Al Qaeda to train and their leadership was based there. ”

          And their choice was WHAT, exactly? Pass them an eviction note?

        • The homecoming reception is certainly much better, and that is something I’m proud we’ve done. I do, however, think we civvies went over the other direction too much and decided we weren’t going to question when our current wars were being “planned” and again when the occupations got uglier and uglier. More importantly, Congress ignored its oversight responsibilities and didn’t ask military brass AND the civilian leadership uncomfortable questions before and during all this crap.

          Long story short, yay for treating the troops better, boo for letting the Pentagon screw around for a decade while a lot of people got hurt and killed.

      • “Ever since we have decided that we were too worried about an innocent woman or child being killed, the opposing forces have used that against us.”

        And that’s wrong because what? I don’t blame them. Do you?
        All’s fair in love and war, and sometimes not in love.

        • Thanks largely to political meddling and often unrealistic ROE’s our servicemen are too often shackled and made victims by political cowardice.

        • It’s wrong because if the enemy’s population feels no pain when actions by their government hurt us, why should they stop their government? Who is in the best position to control their government, them or us?

        • You’re not fighting anyone’s government in Afghanistan. That’s precisely the problem – the war against Japan was a war against a nation-state. The war in Afghanistan is a war against a loose group of people that are knit by ideology more than anything else, and who don’t really have any well-defined geopolitical boundaries.

      • Blame television for that. We got a weak stomach once people were able to sit in their living room every night and see pictures of what was happening taken by civilian reporters in the war zone. Before that, the government was able to sensor everything that came back.

    • We can have an endless debate on when we stopped knowing how to win a war, but our most recent episode started in 1991 in the Gulf War when that fool Schwarzkopf allowed the republican guard to escape largely intact, and continued in 2003 when we tried to conquer Afghanistan with just a couple of battalions

      • Didn’t Stormin Norman hold back on orders from the white house? Something about the one sided killing was horrifying citizens?

        • I don’t think they actually had a plan on what to do when we’d blown Saddam’s tanks out of Kuwait, much less if we went all the way to Baghdad. They were too focused on blowing up tanks, i.e. playing WWII, and didn’t think about what to do and what would happen once they were done blown up.

      • It was not Schwarzkopf’s decision, the order came directly from Bush. Bush decided–and to my way of thinking, wisely–that Saddam was beaten and the objectives of the war–freeing Kuwait–had been accomplished. Had we continued the conflict we would have been in violation of our own battle plan and preparations as well as the UN mandate. As the second war demonstrated, the Republican Guard was highly overrated; the battle we lost was not the conventional war, but the peace. We have yet to discover how to defeat an insurgency after the conventional war has been prosecuted. Same problem the British had in 1776, and again in 1812-never lost a battle in the beginning, but could not defeat the insurgency.

        • I think rightly so, they feared following the Iraqi army back into Iraq would lead to the mess that was the 2nd war with Iraq.

    • The average afghan, from out west in the big city of Herat to the outlying villages in the middle of nowhere all the way to Kabul, has no idea why we are there, what 9/11 and the twin towers are, etc. Hell, a lot of them thought we were russians and that the U.S.S.R. still exist, and that was 2010-12. Most have no clue, so its a bit much to think that we should go and start slaughtering women and children for a couple of knuckle heads that decided to pick up PKMs and AKs and mix in with them or run into thier house, etc. I like to think that most americans, soldiers or not, would not want us to start wasting non-combatants just to kill a few bad guys…

      • Agreed. The fundamental problem with Afghanistan is that there is nothing there. The Brits ruled there for a long time without problems but eventually left because there’s simply no reason humans should be living there.

  2. We could of won Afghanistan years ago if we didn’t go to Iraq and leave AFG on the back burner.

  3. We know how to fight battles, but as a society, we seem to have given up on the idea of winning wars.

      • I’d say Korea. Once Truman fired McArthur because McA wanted to nuke China, our military has been a political tool rather than a war winner.

        • MacArthur was an egotistical jackass who never even set foot in Korea. The only reason he wanted to nuke China was because he over-played his hand, ignored every warning that the Chinese would enter the war if he went too far north, got his ass handed to him as a lot of people died on the way back south, and then panicked. Oh, and completely ignored how a civilian-controlled government was supposed to work. He wouldn’t have won the war, he would have turned East Asia (at the very least) into one giant, nuclear crater right before the Russians brought out their nukes. Ridgway did an amazing job to clean up MacArthur’s mess and get us into the stupid stalemate we’ve had every since.

        • Clauswitz said that war is politics by other means. The idea that the military is a political tool used to achieve political objectives is not new, novel, or particularly surprising. War objectives should be political. War methodology should not.

        • MacArthur is also the ass that was over run in the Philipines and then when they were getting desperate and looking to surrender, he ran off in a submarine and left a lower ranked Marine general in charge to surrender. I don’t care if Roosevelt wanted him to leave, a good officer would have refused and would have insisted that if he were so valuable, then they needed to find a way to get more munitions and supplies to him rather than take him away alone and leave the rest to the bayonets of the Japs. I’ve no respect for him.

        • But that would have required Mac to dirty his aviators’ jacket. Couldn’t have that.

  4. We should have left Afghanistan in the first months of 2002, after Tora Bora. Every death since has been in vain. Iraq was nothing but a pit for American blood and money.

    • This is absolutely right. We had to go into Afghanistan to get rid of Al Quieda and the Taliban that were protecting them. Once we got rid of those guys, we should have had a vote, declared victory and got out. Sticking around changed us into conquerors and Afghanistan has a history of beating conquerors. We snatched defeat out of the jaws of our victory.

      Iraq was a giant mistake from day one. Really just a bunch of lies promoted to make Haliburton and their ilk rich.

      • That sounds nice, but Al Qaeda would have been only slightly inconvenienced by that tactic instead of being knocked on the butts so badly that it took until this year in Boston to finally attack us again.

      • I have to ask, when exactly did we get rid of the Taliban? Because I don’t think the fighters in Astan got the message. Also, it took years of drone strikes and special operations to actually hit Al-Qaeda and make them decide the franchising game was better than dying like the dumb bastards they conned into Semtex cumberbunds. Tora Bora was a lost opportunity and a chance for the Air Force to pat itself on the back for making big explosions, not a victory.

        • “Because I don’t think the *Taliban* fighters in Astan got the message.”

          Left out a word that would have clarified, but that’s exactly what I meant. 🙂

        • I should have been more specific. Removing the Taliban from governing Afghanistan and thus being able to provide national protection to our enemies was a goal that we needed to accomplish. Once that was complete, its hard to see what a large US military presence was going to really accomplish other than turn the civilian population of Afghanistan against us. We would have been better served in our war with al Qaeda by maintaining a special operations presence in Afghanistan, pulling out the majority of our combat troops and turning over the civil and military administration of their country back over to the Afghans. Like in 2002 – 2003.

          Fighting al Qaeda should have been our focus after 9/11 and instead we went into a holding pattern in Afghanistan while we focused our resources in Iraq. As a nation, tt did us no good.

        • Okay, I understand what you’re saying better. I disagree somewhat because although we kicked the Taliban out of Kabul quickly enough, they still kept popping up in whatever part of the country we weren’t paying attention to at that particular moment like a game of Whacka Zealot. From what I remember, they essentially had free reign in the southern parts for quite awhile, while the central government had no control over vast swathes of land courtesy of no infrastructure and massive corruption (and, yes, Taliban attacks) preventing that infrastructure from being built.

          Where we come back into agreement is Iraq being a distraction. If we’d hadn’t siphoned off troops for the buildup and invasion of Iraq, maybe we could have focused on more than one province at a time in Astan. Say, take half of the 100,000 that got sent into Iraq and send them into Astan so we could have finished up there. Pure speculation now, and there were probably other hurdles that I’m missing. The point is that we split our forces and our focus and failed all around.

        • Goofyguy, we had plenty of troops to fight in both theaters, one problem is that we kept rotating them in and out. If we kept our men fighting until we won then I’m sure we would have been long done by now.

          The rotations served to constantly disrupt continuity of the plans. Every rotation brought a new learning curve. It also, after a short time brought a tendency to want to leave hard problems for the next guy (but this wasn’t from fear, more like laziness) or a desire to make a flash for a commander to make a name for himself in his one chance at command.

          The rotations also made an institutional inertia for planning that tended to self-perpetuate.

          Instead we should have acted like this was a real war and fought it with all we could spare and keep our men over in the fight until it was done. That has its own issues, such as a tendency towards some finding ways to build fiefdoms in the military bureaucracy, but the bigger result would be that the American people would clamor for results so loved ones could come home.

          Instead it became tolerable to send people over and have them return shortly without really achieving much towards ending the war by winning

        • Skyler,

          I’m curious, what would winning be in Iraq and Afghanistan? Specifically, what goal would we have to accomplish to win? I get what you are saying about commitment and operational continuity, but how that would help us win eludes me.

          I would say that our goal in both cases was to remove the current regime and replace it with a regime that supported our goals more and had enough popular support to stand on their own. I think that we were doomed to failure in Iraq from the get go (a government that would have been friendly towards the US would be considered Quisling by the populous because we did conquer Iraq).

          I think we had a chance in Afghanistan if we could replace their government without exerting too much of a military footprint. Once we stuck around, we alienated the population and made it impossible to accomplish our goals. I’m curious about your opinion on that

        • TT, that question, “What actually counts as winning?”, was exactly the question that never got answered by anyone, civilian or uniformed, before we started these wars, and everyone involved, Americans, Afghans, Iraqis, and all the allies have paid for it in blood, sweat, tears, and money ever since.

  5. There wasn’t a defined end-state or goals. There is no way to win when you don’t know what it is you’re trying to do.

  6. The Brits never wimp out. They just declare victory and scadaddle. Started this strategy in Boston back in the late 1700’s. Will they PLEASE take Pearce Morgan back?
    How many thousands of years has the middle east been at war? And we’re just gonna fix it and leave? Now that Iraq sells all it’s oil to China?

    • That would be Iran, not Iraq. Iran had sanctions imposed that prevent it from selling its oil elsewhere.

  7. The thing that most people on both sides of the aisle don’t seem to get, is that it takes a generation or more to build a country. If you go in with the thought “when will I get out” you should have just left the previous regime intact. Look at Germany and Japan for examples of how it works. When did we get out of those places? Oh, that’s right.

  8. We never learn anything , we die for what we know not for! Not for Liberty,not for America, we die for nothing! We don’t give our man a fighting change. WAR is a RACKET GEN.BUTLER USMC..

    • There isn’t a General in the world that would:

      A. Write English like that.
      B. Say anything like that.
      C. State that “war is a racket”.

      Get a life.

      • Papachop, that was a quote from a book and a movement led by a very famous Marine general.

      • If you do a little checking Major General Smedley Butler USMC , Wrote a book “War is a RACKET” for you see there is no such thing as tin foil hats, He won many awards in the Spanish American war, WW1, the the South of the USA wars… He was a real HERO ! even told the truth , saved FDR’s life from a wall street plan to over throw America…YOU see the Globalist run America ! that’s the truth ! Like it or not ! FACTS! my boy!

  9. Smedley Butler is one of the few to earn TWO Medals of Honor. He became critical of war profiteering after he got out.

  10. The United States is awesome at fighting World War II. We learned from (most of) our mistakes in that war, and spent the next 45+ years practicing to get it right because the people in charge thought that’s what WWIII was going to be like. Whenever we go into a war that doesn’t go like WWII, things go pear-shaped, we get beat the hell up, and eventually, slowly, bloodily start figuring things out… usually just in time for us to get out-maneuvered politically or the public to get sick of fighting for years and years without any progress or direction. Then the powers that be take all that “not-WWII” knowledge and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine so they can go back to practicing beating back the Nazis/Imperial Japan/Red Army. That lasts right up until we get into another “not-WWII” and the brutal cycle of acquiring and losing that knowledge begins anew.

    The First Gulf War was an aberration. We went up against the one dumb bastard who wanted to play war OUR way, and we blasted the snot out of him… and left it at that. Snot blasted. We blew up a lot of his toys, but he still managed to get some home, too, and things just rotted from there.

    Fast forward to Iraqi Freedom and “Bomb the Afghans a couples decades back into the Stone Age” and the wonderful jobs of nation building we handed ourselves. Did we look back at post-war Germany and Japan for ideas, for inspiration? Nope. Did we dredge up the manuals and writings and experiences from Vietnam that had been locked away out of shame and an institutional yearning for the “good ol’ days”? Nope. In the massive build-up to the Iraq invasion, was any planning done about what to do after we’d blown up the Iraqi Army… again? Nope. We just had 100,000 troops sitting in a shattered foreign country, and a bunch of neo-Con civilian louts making it up on the fly, flailing around with more airy-fairy BS and good intentions than a decade of Summers of Love.

    I gave up trying to decide the right and wrong of WHY we went to war twice in a decade, but the abject, criminal FAILURE of HOW we did it is there for all to see.

    (I hate being serious. Never feels right. I need some fart jokes.)

    • gyufgy, What is the sharpest thing in the world? A fart. It cuts right thru your pants without even leaving a hole.

  11. This isn’t about what we have learned. It’s about what we seem to NEVER learn:

    There can be no functioning democracy in the presence of Islam. Period.

    We waste time and lives trying to do it. We should have gone in, killed those who needed killing, and left. Same with Iraq. Islam is irreconcilable with democracy and freedom. It’s very core is based on violence and despotism, and only violence and despotism can bring order of any sort to it.

    Iraq never stopped being a cesspool, corrupt and murderous, and neither will Afghanistan. Western Democracy is an system of order based on Judeo-Christian ethics, and Islam is a competing and incompatible (and markedly inferior) method of societal organization.

    • I don’t have anything against Muslims . . . but you’re correct. Islam is incompatible with “democracy.” Which is fine. Democracy is for people who want it. For those who don’t, there’s Islam, or communism, or whatever else they want their system to be. It’s not up to us to tell them.

      And in case we forget, it was “democracy” that gave us Obama, Feinstein, Biden and the rest of those scvmbags. Democracy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

    • As someone raised muslim with tons of muslim associates I can tell you that muslims are no less suited to democracy than any other population, like say the mostyl Christian US that is 75% happy with their government destroying their rights in the pursuit of a nebulous muslim terror threat that kills fewer innocent Americans per year than car crashes.

    • democracy and religion have no function to enlightened peoples anyways.

      the US was founded as a representative republic by theistic rationalism.

      rationalism being the most paramount attribute to the beliefs of the founding fathers.

      christianity is just as incompatible with freedom as islam.

  12. Ike gave a speech before leaving office about our war industry and the dangers it was for America! How many times do we have to be told …The Brits run the world’s drug trade that’s what Afghanistan is about.. The Bush/Clinton family are AmeriKa’s drug LORDS .South East ASIA was about control of the Asia drug trade , the Middle EAST is about control of the OIL and the PETRO DOLLAR… all about MONEY… THAT’s the reason>>>>!!!!!!

    • Of course the middle east is about oil. Why else would we bother with it? It’s a sh1th0le.

      We all get so self-righteous about fighting for oil, but when our children are freezing for lack of it we’ll all be playing a different tune.

    • Oil? And if the Nips or Germans run out, the global economy falls into rapid deflation as production of industrial goods and food slows and unemployment out-races inflationary forces. Doesn’t have be the US that tanks to …tank the US. It’s simply true that the Big Boys that most influence US policy and spending play a global game, the chips are valuable, and you and I don’t have many, comparatively. There’s a reason we have a volunteer army now that you pay for but don’t control (they’re volunteers, remember, and war’s a bipartisan call so you can’t get much revenge at the ballot box), saved Saudi from Saddam, worked hard to toughen up a few Sunni nations, but also their Shia rivals. It might not make sense from a general citizen’s POV, but from the vantage point of the big owners of the empire (we did call it that for a time, in the late 19th century, occasionally, without guilt) and their key employees, things are working out OK. Or not? I’d point out that “we” owe the big bucks to pay for the game, not them. Really. That’s why they call them US Treasury Bonds. We’re the US, not the Them. Get used to it. Could be worse. Maybe.

  13. What really frosts my cake is that we’ve spent trillions upon trillions to build up a huge nuclear arsenal, just to agree with the Russians to destroy it. WTF?

    • Well, from a monetary stand point, we are also spending billions and billions of current money just to keep the nukes around, more nukes than we need to make some very large holes in the world. The trillions we sunk into R&D are just that: sunk costs. We ain’t getting it back. I’ll flat out say I don’t remember all the numbers, how many they have, how many we have, how many would get taken out in first strikes, second strikes, third strikes, fourth base (WOOHOO) or whatever, but can’t we cut out a few billions worth of maintenance that I don’t think we need to blow up the entire goddamn world?

      That’s leaving aside the whole “MAD Doctrine vs. the ability to blow up the whole goddamn world” ethics/scary stuff debate that I really don’t know the answer to, but I am here to have a quandary about it.

    • Yeah, what’s with that de-nuking bit? Not gonna happen. Just Obama needing to change the subject for a few days. Too bad about the Berlin sun on the teleprompter, though. And because it’s Saturday Night, Political Science:

      No one likes us, I don’t know why
      We may not be perfect but heaven knows we try
      But all around, even our old friends put us down
      Let’s drop the big one and see what happens

      We give them money but are they grateful?
      No, they’re spiteful and they’re hateful
      They don’t respect us so let’s surprise them
      We’ll drop the big one and pulverize them

      Asia’s crowded and Europe’s too old
      Africa is far too hot and Canada’s too cold
      And South America stole our name
      Let’s drop the big one, there’ll be no one left to blame us

      We’ll save Australia
      Don’t wanna hurt no kangaroo
      We’ll build an All American amusement park there
      They got surfin’, too

      Boom goes London and boom Paree
      More room for you and more room for me
      And every city the whole world round
      Will just be another American town
      -Randy Newman “Political Science”

  14. Ralph. It served it’s purpose. That being said as the Great one stated “Trust but verify”

  15. I spent three years in a special operations unit, ten months in Baghdad, and I will graduate soon with a degree in social studies education. I’m confident that the U.S can win almost any war. It’s winning the peace that we’ve had a hard time with and one could write books on the numerous reasons for that.

    • The US beat Iraq the second time around as soundly as the first. Our casualties were in the 10 yr occupation of a people with corrupt religious leaders. They use their followers in their struggle for power. They use ignorance and fear to keep the people in line. The government is equally corrupt and ineffective. Any educated Iraqi bemoans what their country has become, but they aren’t in Iraq, they left their country long ago.

  16. We now know how to fight a war.

    Well, we now know how to fight this war. Which means (if history is our guide) when the next one starts somewhere else, we’ll be ready to fight this one all over again, and get our asses kicked for the first eighteen months or so while we figure out how to fight that war.

    • An old saying: The Army is always preparing to fight the last war it fought. It is never prepared for the one it is facing.

  17. Back in 2003, someone observed that 100 years ago Colonial Officers would have ended the fighting by simply rounding up the villagers and clans from where the criminals, terrorists, insurgents, rebels, and whoever came from and then shooting the families and relatives as a warning to others not to challenge colonial authority.

    What was that all about?
    — Primordial human emotions, what else? Oh yeah, money and egos and power game playing.

    • The Germans tried that in both WWI and WWII in the occupied territories. It didn’t work out so well for them. The Romans were the ones that came up with the idea in the first place: to “decimate” is to line up the villagers and kill every tenth one as a warning to the others. It didn’t work out too well for them either. At its end, the Athenian Empire was wracked by rebellions from its island territories. It had a choice: let them go, or go and conquer them to maintain the empire. Realizing that the first choice meant the end of empire, and to “keep the peace,” it on more than one occasion invaded the rebellious island, killed all the men, enslaved the women and children, burned the crops and salted the fields so that nothing would grow. Didn’t work for them either. Tyranny sows the seeds of its own destruction, as the American experience demonstrates only too well.

      • Decimate for the Romans wasn’t to line up people of a village. It was for when a military unit behaved badly in battle the would choose one tenth of them by lot to execute, the execution to be performed by the remaining nine tenths.

    • If you ever travel in Britain and enjoy seeing some of the monumental estates which are now (the ones not still private) part of the National Trust, you’re looking at “What was that all about?” The UK and the Dutch hold magnificent assets globally, all through their tax havens one way or another. Even hip Mr. Branson does it. But again, the citizens owe the debt, they just don’t own the global assets. There’s a fairly obvious pattern to see. You don’t have to go full “George Carlin” to realize that (50 or 300 million) fools and their money are soon parted.” But folks are still willing to soldier. It’s all very odd, frankly.

      • And I should add I was one of the willing. They have to get you when you’re young, when an almost-patriotic war tour seems infinitely more alluring than ringing a cash register in Smallsville or than another seven years of school. Many, even among the clued-in set, were convinced by the PTB that Afgh/Iraq were a new WWII. Don’t think it’s playing out that way. Brave boys, I salute you. Fat old politicians (that remind me of “A Separate Peace,” we’re lookin’ at you. We’ve got questions.

        • That is part of my outrage regarding these wars. The Vietnam generation and my generation pay the price while the people who started this go on speaking engagements and book tours. Our armed forces willing put their lives on the line, having faith in their superiors, civilian and uniformed, that they would be lead effectively and justly. Instead, we ended up with “a private that loses a rifles gets into more trouble than a general that loses a war”.

        • your contention is absolutely correct roping down.

          reaping the rewards and having the people pay for it is a insidious form of 21st century slavery. Debt creation.

          As soon as we bury these dinosaurs, the debt/death paradigm will continue on.

  19. We complain what one nation does to another nation in an act we call war but the greatest atrocities a cure when a nation turns on it’s on citizens for the soul purpose for power, control and gread.Freedom is hard to attain and near impossible to keep.

  21. Just curious. Of all you people arguing this right now, how many of you have actually worn the uniform? Much less fought in a war.

    Coming to you live from Afghanistan, back to you Chet…

    • When immigrants attempt to murder myself on the high-street so they could take my resources from my decimated corpse, I responded to this WAR with WAR. I was inadequately equipped & apprehensive in my capacity thanks only to the current Government’s “Rules of Engagement” (Law) and desire to minimize collateral damage (Offensive Weapon Criminalization Act). I used the Brownshirt favored weapon, my bone clubs (fists) and the occasional mad cow (boot leather).

      I’ve been to war son shine, and like many I had to pay for my own damn ‘uniform’ and the shiny ‘awards’ & ‘trinkets’.

      • No, O.E. you haven’t been to war. Ignorant trailer trash bitch slapping each other over the rights to the local 7-11 ain’t war. Clean yourself up, laser the swastika tat off your forehead and beat feat to the recruiting station. After you’ve pulled a tour with the Royal Marines you may have an idea what it’s all about.

        • I don’t work for a Jewish wannabe Royal dynasty,
          I don’t work for Rothschild war profiteering tribes,
          And I don’t measure myself against those inferior creatures who do.

    • The notion that someone, M0331, can blog from a brutal war zone about what it means to wind down his war… is intriguing. Sure beats 1971, when the best we could do was mail a letter-to-the-editor by snail mail, knowing it would not be published. Col. Haig and Nixon were discovering what took me a week in-country to observe, that the southern leadership was selfish, greedy, and incompetent. Imagine. While I was still in-theater Kissinger was sending love letters to Communist China in order to worry the Russians and get them back in line. Perhaps there’s no such thing as “too soon” to create Russian oligarchs, letting the Party gangsters come out of the closet and express their inner thug the way it should be done, with real dollars in tax-haven-cooked opaque deals for western factories and Marbella mansions. Sure beats secret Party congresses and bad sausage. Besides, somebody’s got to bid up NBA teams and get the Rouge River Plant working again. And we got a bag of rogue states in the Caucasus for free. “But wait, there’s more!” Now we’re meeting with the Taliban in Qatar to tell them how we want them to run Afghanistan. As MacEnroe once said, “You cannot be serious.” Be brave. It speaks well for you. No regrets. The honor of a soldier has nothing to do with the politics of kings, but only with his own conduct. It’s just the Illiad all over again.

      • Gen. Lewis Walt , I have this on tape :We were not allowed to win in Viet Nam as it was never about fighting and winning: the reason being the Globalist who control America and most all else . It’s about CONTROL::: the American troops are the troops of the NEW WORLD ORDER: and YES I Am a combat Marine with 2 Purple Hearts, and be DAMMED if i will be told to not tell the TRUTH. Afghanistan is about the DRUG TRADE. Saudi Arabia is behind 9/11 and the Arab Spring. why are we not at war with the Real enemy ??? and America by 2014 will have more oil than it uses. OIL we now know is a product of the earth that keeps being made over and over.

    • I will freely admit I am a civilian medically ineligible to serve who has merely read a lot of books. Never have been in uniform, never will be. I have massive respect for you guys and gals that are. I have no respect, however, for the assholes at the top who have failed for 12+ years to effectively lead our armed forces. I also think we civilians, we citizens, have failed to hold those people at the top accountable.

    • I have. I deployed to Afghanistan twice to be exact.

      Yes, it is about the GOD principle, just like every other war in the past century. Guns, Oil, and Drugs.

      But this is old news. The bad news is that it does not benefit the American people.

      • Not to mention, a nasty strain of ‘Islamism’ that infects the middle east combined with geopolitical interests and despotic governments.
        In short, your usual cluster screw.

    • I’ve been hearing about this American race war since the 60’s. If it ain’t happened by now, it ain’t gonna. If the murder of Dr. King didn’t trigger it, it ain’t gonna happen. Keep chewing on that hate though and it’ll repay you with an early stroke.

    • The color war will remain a cold one, pushed by libtards (democrats) who play the race card fast and loose to grow ‘Big Gov’.

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