Going to war.

Consider this fact for a moment or two and then go puke. We have not won a war of any consequence in over 65 years! The once invincible United States of America has become a toothless tiger and the laughing stock of every tin pot despot from here to tim buck two. We have gone from speaking softly and carrying a big stick to having the biggest stick in the world and crying from the roof tops that we will never use it, no matter what. It amazes me that no political cartoonist, not a single one, has depicted Obama getting off Air Force One with a giant umbrella over his shoulder with his tail between his legs. Well, our cartoonists are not what they used to be either!
But I digress, as usual. The point is that, incredibly as it may sound, a decisive victory at war, no longer seems to be an option. Apparently, the whole concept of beating our enemies into submission, as we did in WW2, simply is to politically incorrect to consider. The consequences of this no win foreign policy has been disastrous for America, to say the least! Tens of thousands of our military personal have been unnecessarily killed and hundreds of thousands needlessly physically and mentally wounded because we insist on fighting with both hands tied behind our back. All of this at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars with no end in sight.
The only thing (yes I think thing is the right word here) that has benefited from this policy of appeasement is the Veterans Administration, for which I worked for nearly 30 years. Prior to 9/11 and the second Iraq war the VA was slowly but surely becoming a thing of the past as the WW2 and Korean war vets died off. Thanks to the casualties generated by the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts the VA will go on for the foreseeable future.
In any case, we should not go to war unless we intend to win it! We should avoid, at all cost, getting involved in foreign conflicts that do not directly affect our national security. In this respect, history has shown unequivocally that to win a major conflict you have to break a lot of things and kill a lot of people. Depending on your enemy this means killing hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of people. More to the point, if you are going to bring an enemy to its knees as quickly and economically as possible, large numbers of civilians will have to be killed as well as their uniformed and none uniformed military personal. We might still be fighting the Second World War if our leaders did not understand this simple principal.
This simple concept is the basis for the first and most important rule of war: do not go to war unless you are willing to kill a lot of the enemy and in particular do not go to war unless you are willing to kill a lot of the enemies’ civilians! The converse of this rule is just as important. If the issue in dispute does not unequivocally justify the killing of large numbers of civilians, stay out of it.
For example, we did not have a dog in the fight before we let ourselves get dragged into the war in Kosovo. The combatants on either side had done us no harm and there certainly was no justification for us to kill large numbers of the combatants, or their civilians; thus, we should have stayed out of that fracas.
The 9/11 attach on the world trade center, on the other hand, did justify the immediate destruction of Mecca as I discuss at some detain in the chapter on this event. We are still paying for our failure to respond with overwhelming force to the terrorist attach of the World Trade Center and we will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
The second rule of war is this. Use your technological superiority to end the conflict as soon as possible with a minimal loss of your troops. Under no circumstances should we allow the third world rag heads to drag us into a door to door street fight wherein our technical superiority is negated to the point of being nonexistent. The lives of our American troops are our greatest treasure and we should not fritter them away simply because our enemies do not have modern military equipment. This politically correct nonsense should be brought to an immediate end.
A perfect example of the politically correct insanity which has resulted in the unnecessary loss of American lives is the battle we fought to control Sadr City. We elected to go door to door to root out followers of the defiant mullah Sadr at the cost of hundreds of American casualties. The alternative would have been to wipe out this rats nest with smart bombs (I will have more to say about these thins shortly) without the loss of a single American life.
However all may not be lost! Apparently we are now using drones which can be controlled by military personal located thousands of miles away to destroy Taliban strongholds. It is not clear to me why the same goals could not be accomplished by conventional aircraft which are capable of dropping bombs from 30, 000 feet. However, the concept is correct in that our military is using our superior technology rather than ground troops to destroy our enemy. We can only hope and pray that this military tactic will continue.
Another example of the insanity of our politically correct politicians is our agreement to the international ban on the deployment of land mines. This rivals, in scope, the insanity of banning the use of DDT in third world countries where hundreds of thousands of people, most often children, die each year from malaria (another example of a liberal policy that has gone badly amuck). In any case, how many thousands of American’s best died needlessly or were maimed by roadside bombs in the Iraq war as they made their way to and from the Bagdad Airport and along the other highways in Iraq? The judicious placement of land mines would have prevented this carnage, would it not? It makes you wonder whose side our leaders are on, doesn’t it? One thing’s for sure they don’t give a damn about the welfare of our ground troops.
One final thought before I wrap this chapter up. I have always maintained that smart bombs were in fact actually dumb bombs! As everyone knows smart bombs are designed to surgically remove a target while leaving adjacent areas relatively intact. This, of course, is exactly the opposite effect we should be attempting to achieve when we go to war. To win a war as quickly and cheaply as possible, with respect to the loss of American life and treasure, our bombs should be deigned to break things and kill people, the more of each the better! As such these so called smart bombs are in reality liberal dumb bombs and they have little or no place in our war against the Muslim terrorists or anyone else for that matter.