Balenza said:
Stulz wrote
Dont make me laugh. Their is no resolve to face up to Iran.
That may be true of the Politicians and a handful of kiss arse liberals, but I suspect not the real feelings of the public at large.
Regarding the idea of simply pulling out and letting the Iraqi's sort this out, Get real, it won't happen and cannot be allowed to happen. Of course I want to see former colleagues home and safe, I do not wish to see anymore funerals of those I knew, know or have worked with in the past, but we also have to be realistic here. This is one almightly foulup, Afghanistan was right, lets make that perfectly clear, unfortunately Iraq has deflected attention, and more importantly, resources, away from this theatre of operations. The military have been fighting with their hands tied behind their backs with outdated or flawed weapons and tactics from London and Washington. There was a naiave belief that once the war was won that it would be like the films, however none of the Allied commanders made such statements nor did they believe this, they all were accutely aware of the dangers of a protracted guerilla conflict and how difficult such a conflict is to win without all out war.
I have no hatred of the Afghan or Iraqi people, since this all started following 9/11, I have completed 4 tours of Afghanistan and 6 in Iraq, totally some 4.5 years in the theatre of Operations, and one thing I have learnt in that time is that the over-riding and vast majority of Iraqi and Afghan people are simply normal people caught up in a situation over which they have no control or little desire to be part of, they are hard working, proud people who simply do not understand why their world has collapsed into the chaos you lot see on your TV screens.
The majority of "Insurgents" in Iraq are not Iraqi, they are Egyptian, Sudanese, Iranian, Saudi, Jordanian, Syrian and Palestinian, there are even some Yemenese, Sommali and oddly I know of three Kuwaiti. In Afghanistan the majority are Afghans, but even here a lot of those in charge are not Afghan, but Saudi, Jordanian, Palestinian and other Arab origins.
Please do not make the mistake of thinking that the conflicts are simply mistakes made by the Allies, both are a lot more complex that you see on the News, Afghanistan is a simpler one to consider, but Iraq is simply being used as a fighting ground by the sick, depraved, the senseless, unfeeling and the downright criminal. I would doubt very few of the so called "insurgents" give a stuff about the fate of Iraq, certainly none of those I had dealings with did.
It is easy to sit by and be armchair soldiers or armchair politicians, but is is not so easy to watch people die and then develope a strategy that will allow you to bring the troops home and see the nation stabilise and not collapse into the chaos of outright civil war.