Quote Originally Posted by zealot66 View Post
. I think we are trying to fight a gentlemans war with barbarians. They do not honor the geneva convention or care about collateral damage. I think the only time this country truly won a war was in ww 2 when we literally took care of the problem. You can never win a PC war. The enemy laughs and shrugs and sees weakness in what we call moral strength.
You are of course correct in all aspects. Unfortunately, World War II was the last war we fought without adoptingng those kinds of 'civilized' constraints -- as if war could ever be civilized...

While you and I may agree on that and many others also agree, there are a number of people in this country who do not agree that Thomas Jonathan Jackson was correct as quoted by G.F.R. Henderson "War means fighting. The business of the soldier is to fight. Armies are not called out to dig trenches, to live in camps, but to find the enemy and strike him; to invade his country, and do him all possible damage in the shortest possible time. This will involve great destruction of life and property while it lasts; but such a war will of necessity be of brief continuance, and so would be an economy of life and property in the end (emphasis added / kw)."
... Well, the Seal got enraged one night and lit the village up. There was no more problem.
Things like that happened very frequently in WW II, frequently in Korea and occasionally in Viet Nam. They are and will be exceedingly rare today.

That declining occurrence rate is a function of the type of war, increasing gentrification (word of choice for a Family Board...), sadly increasing lawyerly involvement and vastly improved communication and reportage, the so-called 'information warfare' factor. It will only continue to decrease in acceptance as an acceptable response -- until the next existential war; then the gloves will again come off. Moral of that is to avoid thses little wars, they cost more than they're worth.
...I think one of the chief errors of the bush administration was prostrating ourselves to an imaginary border in pakistan. Who the hell is pakistan ? Who the hell were the Cambodes or Pathet Lao? track your prey, follow its spoor and kill it.
The Bush mistake was in staying to 'fix' Afghanistan and Iraq. We should've slammed in hard and rapidly, removed the problem children and left, throwing money at the UN ion the way out and yelling "Cleanup on Aisle three..."

As for borders, not that easy to ignore IF you're trying to wage 'legitimate' war -- and the Politicians who try to wage war on the cheap, ignoring Stonewall, have to use the legitimate ploy...
Hopefully the Taliban holds up in Helmand and wants to get their martyrdom in the spring. And we should disregard a two faced Pakistan and track down every insurgent in the valley and get rid of them. There should be no safe place. It sucked the blood from us in Vietnam and its doing it now too.
In both cases, the tactical and operational environments suffer from achingly poor strategic choices. Sadly, we cannot now disregard Pakistan. Nor can we change the rules at this point. We just have to suck it up and hopefully, resolve not to try this foolishness -- stupidity, really -- again.