Military types speak of the tension between "force protection" (trying to bring all your people home alive) and "mission achievement" (getting the job done).

Cordesman is right to warn about the dangers and costs of stressing the former over the latter, especially in the emotional aftermath of something like the Mosul episode.

One thing to note: What the terrorists did in Mosul w/ a single suicide bomber on foot, they did on a far larger scale (more than 10x the # killed) in Beiruit in ’83 w/ a truck bomb.

This may be something of a microcosm of how the struggle against terrorism works. Let’s face it: The terrorists we’re up against, in Iraq and elsewhere, are very determined. They will find ways through or around any system of passive defenses-in-place. But you can suppress their level of lethality and greatly stretch out the time and other resources the terrorists need to mount attacks.

The Palestinian terrorists who attack Israel, for instance, would love to be able to fly jetliners into Israeli buildings. But they can’t, so they have to content themselves w/ strapping C-4 to young losers and sending them onto Israeli buses. Ansar al-Sunnah would have loved to drive a truck bomb into our Mosul base (and will if they get a chance), but security is too tight for that so they have to use small-scale attacks, hoping that Western media coverage will spread defeatism and despair.

This suggests a final thought: The more you suppress terrorists toward the small end of the attack scale, the more important to them media (and in our case, Democratic Party) defeatism and negativism/panic become, since the terrorists rely on this [objectively] "fifth-columnist" sentiment (the kind that saves its real hostility for Bush rather than bin Laden) to leverage a small-scale attack into a huge public-relations blow.

Good link! Let us hope that our military will fight the war on their own terms, rather than following the lead of the press and their negative-thinkers. The enemy only understands brute force, and for us to take a defensive posture is a big victory for them.

I am most thankful that this discourse can go on. In the Vietnam era, the mainstream media was virtually the only source of information and opinion on the war. The views were skewed and continually painted the dismal image of eventual defeat.

The advent of the internet and the weblog phenomenon has finally begun to open up the information highway so views contrary to the radical left and their mainstream media can reach an audience hungry for real thinking.

Much of the world wants Iraq to be another Vietnam for the US. Let us pray (and work hard, too) to make sure that doesn’t happen because the media paints only the dark corners of the whole picture.

Thanks for the good work!
DRK

PJC is 100% correct, absolutly!!

If they don’t start acting right and cooperating with our boys who are doing God’s work, and trying to liberate them, maybe we’ll just have to nuke a couple of their citys??

First, leadership in America is not expecting the U.S. to win; they expect Iraq to win for themselves. We will help, but in the end Iraq must take the reins. Iraq is already paying huge amounts of blood for her freedom. We are playing the part France played in our own American Revolution.

Second. Aggression is only part of the war. If it were only a military war we would have won already. It isn’t. During Vietnam Westmorland bled America, literally and financially, escalating the war with no gain. Abrams stepped in and fought more like the U. S. is fighting in Iraq and made great headway. Sadly, In Vietnam, America had already lost heart from Westmorland’s shortsightedness by the time Abrams started fighting smarter rather than stronger.

The military can’t broadcast the progress we are making. We now have a growing intelligence force (a lot of Iraqis infiltrating the enemy) so we are capturing the enemy (check the news and don’t look for it on the front pages)and getting rid of their infrastructure and supplies. Remember, it doesn’t matter how much money and weapons foreign countries want to feed the Iraq terrorists if there is no place to send them. Information wins wars; blood doesn’t.

We are winning. I get tired of officers who are retarded (oops, I mean retired) talking about this situation when they know less about it than the reporters that ask the questions.
G.M.

I know George intends the analogy only as a loose one, but lest anyone get the wrong idea about French help in the American War of Independence, I’d like to point out that while France did begin selling us munitions thru the West Indies in 1775, French ground troops didn’t arrive until July 1780:

https://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1197.html