Tactical Jenga vs. The Strategic Stopwatch

[jcustis]

I see your point Ken, and I do think I have a good grasp on the endstate. I'm at a loss, however, when I read comments posted to Youtube clips, military servicemember support sites, and even on threads on Military.com. I tend to think that I'm not the audience for the IO campaign, but we aren't getting through to the level we need to be...The American public does not have an inexhaustible well of patience, especially in the midst of a looming recession.

Although I agree that we will be in Iraq for a long time, the risk factors are going to change within a year of the new President coming into office, regardless of party affiliation. We will downsize sharply and the guys left on the ground wil be advisers in a pure sense that we are familiar with from wars past (to include yours). I'm not worried that it will come to that, I suppose, because I don't think our military is going to be broken in the process. The collective will of our nation will be broken before the troops, and I'm afraid that we won't see the watershed before it's already on top of us. That watershed is going to be something akin to another Samarra Mosque bombing, or a fight on the order of Fallujah in Nov 2004.

I wish I didn't hold that view, and I may sound overly-fatalistic, but I've always seen that damn glass as needing a refill.