Re: Anybody else listening to W?
"we wiped out the fifth largest standing army in the world in about six weeks"<br /><br />We didn't wipe them out. We defeated the ones who stayed on the battlefield, then sent the angry survivors home to their weapons caches with no paychecks. There were plenty of them who just faded off of the battlefield without fighting, so that they could fight us from the shadows later. <br /><br />I have made the point over and over again that this war, as the administration has defined it ( a war on ideology and "bad guys", bascially anyone who hates the US), is logically unwinnable, battlefield victories not withstanding. It is set up to be endless, and so therefore the special emergency powers that W is claiming will also be endless. No one from the pro-W side of the discussion has even acknowledged that point, let alone tried to refute it. <br /><br />No military person in their right mind would enter into a war where victory is defined as killing all who would oppose us, or wiping out something as vague and pervasive as "evil" or "terror". That is unacheivable! And that doesn't mean the same thing as "run away." There is a vast middle ground in between those extremes and it just drives me nuts that we are trapped in this situation by extremist wishful thinkers, who apparently see permanent war as a positive outcome. <br /><br />I don't believe in "run away" either. Personally, I and many other reasonable people opposed even starting this mess for many of the reasons that have now come to pass. However, we are in it now and need to do something more than "run away". But I do not see how "kill all the bad guys and defeat evil" is a reasonable, mature plan. If you want independents like me to get behind this war, then your heros in the white house need to grow up and start talking like adults about what needs to be done and what realistically can be achieved instead of throwing around such lofty, "lord of the rings" style "we will wipe evil from the face of the earth" pronouncements.
