NYT page one: Photo of wounded, bleeding Marine

I can’t understand the whole characterization of the war as a disaster.

Marines in the montage were acting as they were trained to act. They seem to still be teaching young Marines the intricacies of fire and maneuver. We can still see the principle of junior taking over when senior are incapacitated. The chain of command and command and control seem, in this case, to have been maintained. That’s how movement to contact works.

On the other hand, the terrorists digging in, hiding so it’s hard to ferret them out. That’s what you count on an enemy to do: make it difficult to get at them.

…sounds like war to me.

The whole “disaster” thing must arise from the ethic which says that if *any* of our young Marines gets hurt, it’s too high a price. If that were the case, I’d have to ask why we spend so much to recruit, train, deploy and maintain them.

Money is only valuable if its in circulation. The military is one whopping luxury of fit young men in flashy uniforms useful only for parades if they aren’t used when the nation needs to use them. It’s the using of them that gets messy. Some of them get hurt. Some of the die. It happens on both sides, theirs and ours.

…so, again, that’s war.

That is unless we’re going to actually listen to the utopians who think that militaries are an unfortunate and unnecessary feature of nations, no longer needed by “modern” humankind. Personally, I don’t think that humankind has evolved the point that negotiation is the be-all/do-all/end-all of conflict resolution between contesting parties. Recent history seems to bear this out.

If we’re not supposed to defend ourselves, if America isn’t worth the lives of our young men, then let’s not only disband the military. But, if this is so, let’s also disband Congress, the judiciary and send the President packing. Mind you, that’ll also necessitate sending the press packing as well…because, in short order, we’ll not have a country to defend.

Maybe we’re not supposed to defend ourselves *at* this juncture, against this enemy. Maybe it’s just that we don’t understand this enemy, because somehow they — unlike the rest of the jihadis from Manchester to Jerusalem to Kuala Lampur — managed to keep themselves pure of the taint of “Death to America”. If this is the case, would someone tell me who we *are* supposed to fight to keep these 7th Century barbarians from attacking us again…as they have vowed to do, quite publicly and quite often, from the pulpit to the soundstages of Al-Jazeera.

…or, we can throw off the shackles, stop navel-gazing about Gitmo and all those “secret interrogation sites”. We can stop tolerating folks making movies about killing our President and celebrities and politicians musing over the moral fiber of our troops. We can stop worrying about whether the jihadi the young Marine just shot deserved a little more ordnance. We can simply fight the war to win the peace and the ordeal can be over for *everyone*, Iraqi and American.

There doesn’t seem to be any question that our troops are performing up to standards. It’s just the bozos we have here at home, fat and sassy when they aren’t all snug in their beds, who’re the ones who’re the “disaster”.

The least costly war is the war you get on with, not extending a day or hour or minute once its been engaged upon, by fruitless “what if-ing”.

…as they used to tell me in my little niche in the Army that we’re there to close with and kill or capture the enemy. Maybe we need to get on with it, expecting to take our lumps, see families suffer, see civilians suffer as well. Modern wars aren’t like the wars once fought on the same ground. The phalanx today is a missle. Swords were more discriminating…but I wouldn’t pack our young men off to Iraq with swords. We fight with bombs smarter than they’ve ever been…and young men smarter than they’ve ever been, too.

Let our Marines be Marines. Let our soldiers, airmen, sailors and contractors do their jobs. Let the Iraqis have security and peace.

Puritan1648 on November 4, 2006 at 9:51 PM

All people see is US Soldiers being picked off one by one, like sitting ducks.

…if they’d've released information about Slapton Sands and Operation Tiger, we’d never’ve gone into Normandy. If we’d've reported every mosquito bite, let alone every casualty on Guadalcanal, mothers nationwide would’ve been up in arms.

For every victory up to final victory in World War II, there was a Dieppe, for every Midway there was Coral Sea, for every El Alamein there was a Kassarine Pass. People in the ’40′s maybe didn’t *want* to see the casualties, and were content to get by on Hollywood’s decidedly more supportive “take” on that war, rather than face up to the daily grind that it must’ve been.

We won in the Pacific by hunkering down behind Tarawa’s sea wall, fighting tooth and nail on Iwo and incurring terrible casualties on Okinawa. In Europe, our paratroopers were chopped up at Ste. Mere-Eglise and fighting toward Nijmegen and Grave. Bastogne and the Hurtgen Forest were sites of incredible grit and bravery…but of incredible suffering, as well.

If you constantly rub the noses of the American people in puddles of blood, they’ll not have time to assess what’s been bought with that blood, nor will they be able to judge fairly how much more they’ll have to spend in treasure and the futures of their children because the cost of losing will get lost in the endless parade of corpses.

World War I was fought for a lot less lofty reasons than this war is based upon. Nobody’s freedom was put at risk by the killing of Franz Ferdinand, only the ambitions of men too foolish to see what they were betting on. We fought and won. This war is a lot more like Korea, with our forces trying to secure a future for a people under seige and at risk of falling under the sway of what remains a tyranny of medieval proportions.

…let’s hope that we can muster up enough sense to fight this one better than we have had to *and still do* fight in Korea. We can’t afford a draw here, folks. A line on a map and even the most rigid and well policed fence won’t keep the jihadis out.

The risk is real. So is the blood. Do we need a press cannot see beyond it?

Puritan1648 on November 4, 2006 at 10:16 PM

…bravo, georgej. Very well said.

We saw the movie, as well, my wife and I. Masterful. A must see today, in times like these.

Puritan1648 on November 5, 2006 at 9:25 AM