Sunday, May 09, 2004

Muther’s Day On this special day let’s give a Bronx cheer and two thumbs down to all those Muthers in Washington responsible for starting a war without the faintest idea of how to get out of it; with no understanding of what they were getting into; and doing it for all the wrong reasons. We might very well have dealt with the "evil" by doing business with it and corrupting it with money. Hell, the tactic looks to be working right here in America.   Bumper Stickers I was having a drink the other day with two neighbors when the election came up. Rather to my surprise, I admit, both women turned out to be firm Kerry supporters, and one, who I thought was a registered Republican voted for Gore four years ago. So…would they like bumper stickers for their cars? Well….they didn’t like to do that. After much hemming and hawing they admitted that they were afraid to do so. They were afraid of being harassed on the road. (By wackos with American flags and gun racks? Who knows.) I pointed out that I was seeing plenty of very expensive, very big, very luxurious cars with Bush-Cheney stickers but damn few cars with Kerry stickers. They should make their support of Kerry public…if for no other reason than that many people who oppose the regim seem oddly quiet about their opposition. If we are afraid to put a simple bumper sticker on our cars saying we support a major political candidate…then America is in very deep shit indeed. 9:52:11 AM    comment []

Tactics 1, Strategy 0 Thomas Ricks, in a Washington Post article titled "Dissension Grows In Senior Ranks On War Strategy," quotes high ranking US military figures who claim that we may win all the battles, but lose the war. Three short paragraphs to whet your interest: Army Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who spent much of the year in western Iraq, said he believes that at the tactical level at which fighting occurs, the U.S. military is still winning. But when asked whether he believes the United States is losing, he said, "I think strategically, we are." Army Col. Paul Hughes, who last year was the first director of strategic planning for the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad, said he agrees with that view and noted that a pattern of winning battles while losing a war characterized the U.S. failure in Vietnam. "Unless we ensure that we have coherency in our policy, we will lose strategically," he said in an interview Friday. "I lost my brother in Vietnam," added Hughes, a veteran Army strategist who is involved in formulating Iraq policy. "I promised myself, when I came on active duty, that I would do everything in my power to prevent that [sort of strategic loss] from happening again. Here I am, 30 years later, thinking we will win every fight and lose the war, because we don't understand the war we're in." Read the whole story in The Washington Post. 9:22:44 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Arthur Jacobson.