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We're getting so good at warfighting now that I actually worry that we're getting *too* good at it.

I don't. Somebody someday would have made the great breakthrough. I'm glad it was us.

War will always be horrible for us, because we care for our troops that defend us. And we will always have grunts down in the mud.

But those grunts will not only be able to kill the enemy, they will spread despair among those enemy we haven't yet engaged. We did that in a small scale in Iraq, which represents almost a quantum leap, despite the klinton years, in military capability. And it's accelerating.

The Poles, the Germans, and the Japanese all fought bravely to the bitter end. That's because they all knew that at least they could hurt their attackers, even if they would be destroyed. But if they can't even smudge our paintjobs, all hope is gone. As someone said of this war, it was the biggest mismatch since Godzilla vs Bambi. Personally, I thought it looked more like Robocop walking through the drug lab, from the movie, Robocop.The depersonalization of war is good for us, bad for our enemies. It's a way of denigrating their status as a worthy opponent, and mocking any self-image they may have of themselves as warriors, or even men. Why inconvenience our troops when we can send assemblies of computers, explosives, and bandwidth to hunt them down without feeling or hate? We're saying that as an opponent, they are worth only as much as a cheap weapon. If I can shame and insult an enemy into giving up, so much the better.

From what I can tell, the fighting in the first few days was pretty intense. Iraq did everything it could to make the entire country into an Iwo Jima, other than throwing in aircraft and armor, which they didn't have much of. After the first few days, the word got back that not only weren't they hurting the Americans, but their troops were blown away almost without effort. As somebody else said, it was the biggest mistmatch since the British Army vs the Martians in HG Well's War of the Worlds. Sometimes this brings its own problems. For one thing, we left a lot of enemy troops, now in civilian clothes, thinking that we were weak in not killing everyone in sight. They come from a brutal country, and cannot comprehend any form of mercy. So they hope that by killing us in ones and twos, they can achieve some form of victory, since they could not kill us by the thousands.

Iraq was remarkably untouched by our campaign, Saddam did more damage in peacetime than we did in the war. If Baghdad wound up looking like Berlin after the Red Army got through with it, and there were a million Iraqi civilian casualties, I guarantee they wouldn't have any inclination to give us a hard time, or sit on the fence to see how things shake out.

Sorry, sort of drifted away from your initial statement. I think the more antiseptic and long-range we make war, the more it demeans the enemy's fighting spirit, and sows despair. That means we have to kill fewer of them, and have fewer things to fix when we win, along with saving more of our own troops' lives.

You've got some interesting points there, too, 300w. I agree it's an advantage on the psy-war front in that respect. On the other hand I also see the left trying to turn that advantage against us in that when we win so efficiently some people have a harder time perceiving the fact that we're threatened by our enemies. I guess the left will always try to do that, though; but that aside, in the overall big picture it's a huge psychological and military advantage, I agree.

I don't. Somebody someday would have made the great breakthrough. I'm glad it was us.

And so am I. And of course I completely agree with everything you said. Yes, we are head and shoulders above any prospective enemy and we should stay there forever.

In a very real sense, one of the ways that we *saved* both friendly and enemy lives in Iraq was through our overwhelming "shock and awe" campaign that no doubt convinced many of the enemy to give up and/or depart the battlefield. This was an exquisitely good thing.

Your comments are well said. I agree wholeheartedly.

As an aside... If there is anybody I really feel sorry for in this, it would be the senior Iraqi staff in the meetings with Saddam right up to and into the beginning of the war. These would be officers with clear memory of the pounding they took in 1991. These are the guys that just *had* to know what short of barrel they were looking down the business end of. But yet they had to sit in those meetings and pretend in front of Saddam that they had some kind of credible defense to offer, and yet the whole time they had to know better. Poor bastards, they were victims in a way, along with the thousands that were convinced to fight the hopeless battle.

Oh well...