My late wife Cara had a child when she was 17. Although easily characterized as a mistake at the time and the enormous struggle brought about by raising a child at that age Alli was easily the greatest thing that ever happened to Cara and Alli, along with me, was the love of her life. The point is that though mistakes happened and consequences dire at the time, the greatest of joys was brought about as a direct result of those mistakes.
I recently learned about a vehicle in testing for our armed forces that are IED proof. The vehicle is based on a V shape that directs the blast outward as opposed to straight up on today’s military vehicles.
Another weapon I learned of on Discover Channel’s “Future Weapons” is an AT-4 rocket launcher that can be fired from enclosed cover. Previously if the weapon were fired from cover it would cause harm to the operator due to concussive blasts from the firing of the rocket. The improved version of the AT-4 is perfectly safe to fire from a small room.
Innovations such as these are a direct involvement in an urban based guerilla style conflict such as we are seeing in Iraq today. From my perspective these innovations are a direct result of our shortcomings in Iraq. If we had vehicles practically immune to IEDs how many of our brave warfighters would still be alive?
Now that both houses of congress seek to deliver us a defeat in Iraq these innovations may not ever have the chance to fully blossom and help our armed forces deliver a swift and crushing devastation that our enemies in Iraq deserve. Future efforts to safeguard our freedoms will be stifled not only due to the raucous resolve of terrorists enabled by congress’ democrats as a result of the “timetable” legislation but also the stifling of current the War on Terror’s lessons.
Like it or not, wars will be fought. Binding the hands of innovation, even as a direct result gruesome misjudgments, will cause more problems in the years to come and hamper our ability to defeat our enemies, present and future, home and abroad.
The solution? Stay the course and adopt a warfighting strategy that is not politically correct.
The failures in Iraq as in Vietnam have little to do with the aailble weapons. The failures are the liberal attitudes about killing the enemy forced on the military. This war should have been over years ago. Liberals love to lose and they will ensure in Iraq as in Vietnam that we do lose.
I agree that liberal attitudes have a lot to do with the percieved failure in Iraq. Notice I never mentioned failure in my original post. I said mistakes. Liberals think the Iraq war is failure, I do not. I believe even with mistakes being made we are and can be successful.
The mistakes I speak of are ones like disbanding the Iraqi military, not doing anything about looting, pre-war intelligence failures, thinking taking over Iraq and stabilizing would be a walk in the park (taking the country over was but stabilizing it wasn’t), not responding to attrocities in a swift and deadly manner (ie fighting a politically correct war; fallujah should have been leveled because of what they did to those contractors), and stuff like that.
The Bush Administration has made some very costly mistakes; Bo’s list is pretty comprehensive. Even if the Surge is successful and Iraq eventually emerges as a stable democracy, history will remember the squandered opportunities during the first four years of the war.
Although we were long overdue for a change in direction in Iraq, the “slow bleed” that the Democrats are now advocating isn’t the answer. I’m particularly angry about the hypocritical political games that the Democrat leadership is playing. Harry Reid’s comment about the war not being worth one more “drop of American blood” makes for good political theater, but if he really meant it, he’d be cutting off all funding for the war.
But he and the rest of the Democrat leadership want to be able to prolong the war to beat the Republicans over the head through the ‘08 campaign. Don’t cut off the funding entirely, but pile on so many conditions that success will be virtually impossible, and this at a time when there’s at least a chance of turning things around.
Despite his total wrong-headedness about the war, I at least have more respect for Dennis Kucinich for being sincere and consistent in his opposition to the war from the very outset. If the Surge is successful, there will be no shortage of Democrats trying to take credit for it.
I think it was John F. Kennedy who said, “Success has many fathers; failure is an orphan.”
The solution? Stay the course and adopt a warfighting strategy that is not politically correct.
I was just agreeing with your last statement. Beginning with Korea and progressivly getting worse as the liberal’s have grown in strenth, the hand’s of the military have become more and more tied. Regardless of the equipment provided the troops if they are continually set out on the field of battle to be used as targets, the enemy will eventually find away to overcome any protection. And when we do fight back, our troops are being hauled back to stand trial for murder as we increasingly see. These judgements being made by liberal layers in the justice dept.
Turn our troops lose to kill the enemy till the enemy begs us to stop or quit wasting their lives on a quagmire. No handing out candy, no building mosques with tax payer dollars, no rebuilding of infrastructure, no respect for thier garbage culture, just kill them all till they beg us to stop. All else is a waste of young American lives.
This sums it up better than anything I’ve seen yet:
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/peanuts43.php
LOL yeah that about says it. You need to post that over at the panhandle terroist supporter.