Am I the only one getting tired of these threads?
It is your choice to keep coming back into them to argue. And if by "these" you mean the three or four that are active on this board right now, I propose you are exaggerating.
Vietnam was lost thanks to media coverage, and the anti-war movement. We were mere months from victory there, the NVA had their back broken. Yet we pulled out thanks to the anti-war movement, rendering all the deaths suffered there in vain.
In Iraq, I don't feel the war has been lost. And if you are content with allowing us to loose, and your a US citizen, you should feel ashamed of yourself.
There is one way for us to still win. You might have heard in the news that some eighty percent of soldiers in Iraq think the war is now unwinnable. But what the news report probably did not include is that this statement was provisional: Those soldiers also agreed that increasing our troop levels in Iraq would
make it winnable.
From the beginning we have had to few troops in Iraq. This was the fatal error of the Department of Defense, not the media. And we could still salvage it if we wanted--by doubling or tripling the number of American troops in Iraq, and keeping them there for many years to come. We would, of course, have to institute a draft and reawaken the military-industrial complex, but it could be done.
Ironically, this was the administration's main reasoning for going into Iraq with such a light force in the first place. Fewer troops for a shorter period would supposedly result in a cheaper, easier war--id est, a war the public could more easily rally behind.
But the administration's reasoning backfired. We sent in too few troops, and the only solution would be to inrease troops--something everyone in the administration had explicitly gone out of their way to avoid talking about.
The media have reported, more or less, that what we've got in Iraq right now isn't cutting it. We are losing. More honestly,
Iraq is losing--to itself. This is the truth. And because of the administration's original strategy--and, presumably, its current strategy--the media have not widely reported that more troops would possibly solve our problems. It just isn't on the table. It isn't a Republican talking point. No one is talking about more troops. As a result, it isn't in the public scope of awareness that adding more troops is a viable solution. Pullout is the only solution of which they are aware. And because the war is going badly, public opinion has logically shifted in the direction of pullout.
Is Sentenal right, then? Are the media costing us the war? No. We literally are losing the war there, because the administration went to war with a faulty game plan. The media just happen to be reporting this fact.
Let's face it: The Republicans lost big, and reamed everyone else on their way down. At this point the only reasonable options are to call for a pullout, call for a draft, or continue on the road of delusion with President Bush. But on an individual level, I propose we let justice and irony win the day: Anyone who still wants us to win this war should enlist in the military. That means you, Sentenal.
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