[af_vet_rr]

I would cringe everytime I would hear Bush/Rumsfeld use the "stay the course" line.

You and me both. Everytime Bush/Rumsfeld/etc. used that line and somebody criticized them, some FReepers felt they had to jump down their throats for daring to disagree with the administration - those FReepers seemed to have quieted down a bit.

To me, from the beginning, "stay the course" was the same as saying "we don't know what to do, so we are going to keep doing the same thing", which is not what I want to hear when it comes to the military - Rumsfeld of all people preached about a mobile, quick-to-react, flexible military, and while we moved towards that, we still ended up with a leadership that was inflexible - what good does having a flexible military do if the leadership isn't?

[Sacajaweau]

Whatever happens "in the good news from Iraq" category, the Dems will take credit for it. This is "paragraph one".

We have heard from the beginning that this will take time.

Go back to our own Revolutionary War. It took from 1776 to get to the 1783 Treaty with Britain and to 1789 to seat our first President and we had a Colonial Government in place to start with. Plenty of British loyalists around every step of the way.

It wasn't until the Treaty of Ghent that the whole matter was satisfied.