The last wars we have had have all been limited engagements with rules to be followed that impair our ability to win and only get our peope killed. If we go to war we must go to win. In order to win you have to make the enemy want to quit. They will not want to quit when you allow them to hide among civilians,run to a place we cannot get at them ordress as civilians one day and come out and kill us the next.
We lost in Korea, Viet Nam, Desert Storm and now Iraq.
Limited engagements with limited rules of war.
I understand your viewpoint, but I disagree that we lost in Korea, Desert Storm and Iraq.
In Korea, sure, we have had a divided Korea for 60 years, but we didn’t have a completely Communist Korea for 60 years. We COULD have completely taken North Korea and had a unified free Korea for sixty years, but that was a political failure, in much the same way Vietnam was, in the end, a political failure.
Desert Storm was not a failure. We did not end up with Iraq and Saddam Hussein standing astride the major oil fields in the Middle East, scheming and preparing to go into Saudi Arabia. We freed Kuwait and handcuffed Hussein. There was an interesting graphic a while back that showed American presence in the Middle East, and Iran was nearly completely surrounded by countries that had at least some American basing.
In my opinion, as long as oil powers our economy and way of life, and we have a vested interest in that supply, we do not have the luxury of taking a hands-off approach and “just let them kill each other”. I would infinitely prefer to use our own sources of oil, coal and nuclear technology, but we are prisoners of liberals and environmentalists in that respect.
I don’t believe we should or should have had troops in the former Yugoslav areas. I don’t think we should have troops in places like the Congo or Sri Lanka. We don’t have interests there and shouldn’t be there.
In that, I agree completely with you. We should not send troops to fight on the ground in places like the Congo and Sri Lanka.
I don’t have a problem with limited engagements and limited rules of war, but I do have a problem with some specific limited engagements and specific limited rules of war, such as the catch and release policy for certain known terrorists and insurgents, just to name one. Or the blanket restrictions on returning fire, to name another. Those decisions should be left up the people in the field.
But I just cannot believe we can’t achieve our goals by anything other than doing nothing or completely flattening a country from 40,000 feet. There has to be a middle ground, in my opinon.