Why is Rumsfeld blamed for the Bush doctrine and Obama gets the credit for Gates' surge strategies?
Why are these bloggers still allowed to target republicans? Get with the program, it's supposed to be open season on RINOs who lost the election in the first place. Why not point out that Obama will not be able to fulfill his primary campaign promise to end the war in Iraq when American forces won't be scaled back until after two more years, and why of course, because Obama doesn't want the bad press of running a losing war. That was Bush's job to be demonized. Obama's not a centrist, he's an authoritarian statist coasting from the success of the Bush era with the help of an Egyptian-style media eugenics cult which refuses to vet him or his policy.
This is like Rush vs Steele. An unbelievable waste of time to argue petty details when republicans and free-speech libertarians need to find common ground if the conservative movement is to mount a solid opposition vote next year.
You can make any strategy successful, and any war winnable, as long as you stick with it. It's the role of leadership to decide how it is presented on TV and how long they want the war to last.
We've conducted this war as an economy of force operation since it began, and it's been sliding into the loss column as a result, just as Iraq did when our leadership failed to grasp that shifting to an economy of force operation there, as well as a complete misunderstanding that the nature of the war changed dramatically with the fall of Baghdad. We treated it as the end of the war, the enemy simply shifted from trying to match strength to strength (which few militaries on the planet can do against the Armed Forces of the United States) to pitting their strength against our weakness.
Once we went through the pain of learning the lesson (and far too few senior leaders suffered in the learning, which I believe is one reason it took so long to make the shift... more scalps, please) we re-taught ourselves lessons we'd learned in Vietnam and incorporated others learned by others.
This blogger sits behind the old media blasts against the war comparing Iraq to Vietnam (which was a completely different theater) and there was no need to “relearn” the lessons on the ground because under the Rumsfeld strategy special forces operational modes were streamlined and improved and only needed the support of more airbases and conventional infrastructure. They were more experienced and more capable. Either you want the troops to succeed or you drag them down in futility. I'm not going to assimilate to these guys' opinions just because they have a nice structured article. Shut up and do your job instead of whining like Ron Paul in his frequent blame-shifting TV interviews. Lead follow, or git out the way.
