Posted on Dec 30, 2015
Why does our leadership not finish the current war(s) rather than leaving them for our children to fight?
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Military History
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Military History Politics
Posted 9 y ago
Responses: 22
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Our leadership can not end the current wars because they do not understand the dynamics of tribal wars based on honor and the influences imposed by a religion that we manipulated to help us fight the Soviets and until we recognize how we helped created this mess our children will suffer from the sins of their fathers and grandfathers.
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Because our leadership always fails to remember the lessons learned from Vietnam instead of those of Desert Storm. We are not fighting countries, we are fighting people that can easily hide within the very populations that they victimize. The very thought the we can carpet bomb them out of existence is ludicrous. Our policies have already killed far many more noncombatants in Iraq that Saddam had ever done and exponentially more than died in 9/11, something that Iraq had nothing to do with . . . . And we wonder why so many people over there hate us? If we had followed the lessons of the Powell Doctrine, crafted specifically to keep us out of situations like this, we wouldn't be in this mess. Saddam was not a threat to the US, nor our interests in that region. He kept his neighbor, Iran in check. ISIS would not exist today. We should have gone into Afghanistan full force, take out bin Laden, al Quida and any Taliban that got in the way and then got the hell out. Our military excels in braking things, nation building . . . Not so much. We as a nation have been around a short, by history's standards 240 years. The longest a democracy has survived and our goverment is a dysfunctional as any 1st World Country on the planet. We had to fight a Civil War 150 years ago to get back on track. And we expect people that have never experience that kind of government in thousands of years of existence to adapt our policies and succeed in a little over a decade. The hight of arrogance on our part. You break it, you bought it, and we have paid for it tenfold, experiencing two of the longest wars in our history. LTG Daniel Bolger, who spent considerable time in both Iraq and Afghanistan wrote a book as to why we failed in both and there is more than enough blame to go around for everybody, Republicans, Democrats, our Military leaders and the governments in both countries that we tried to install and support. Starting this mess was easy, ending it, not so much.
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CSM William Payne
While this quote has been credited to many sources and under a few variations I believe this is the original quote.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana.
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PV2 Glen Lewis
CSM William Payne - I was thinking of the same statement but couldn't remember exactly how it was put. Our leaders seem to have very short memories given what has occurred in the last 60 years.
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COL Ted Mc
CSM William Payne - Sergeant Major; Your Lawrence quote is 100% appropriate, but completely unacceptable to those who believe that no one except an American has ever done anything right at all.
Unfortunately, since there is a stratum of that belief being inculcated in every school child in America today, I don't see much chance for an improvement soon.
When the Special Forces went into Vietnam and assisted the Vietnamese to improve their lives but using "the Vietnamese Way", things worked well. As soon as the bureaucracy started insisting that the Vietnamese could ONLY "improve" their lives "the American way" things started falling apart again.
If you live in a society where "graft" is an acceptable part of the social matrix, then you are going to make more progress by encouraging actual efficient performance in return for the "graft" than you are by demanding that the "graft" be stopped AND that efficiency be improved. (After all, who would you rather give the "graft" to - someone who is actually going to get the job done for you or someone who isn't? That means that the inefficient "graft" recipients end up receiving less and the efficient ones end up receiving more and "self-interest" is one of the strongest motivators for human change.)
If you live in a society where "authority" flows from the local level, you are going to make more progress strengthening the local level than you are by strengthening some "regional" or "national" level that the vast majority of the people simply don't care about and doing so at the expense of the "local" authority figures that the vast majority of the people do care about.
Unfortunately, since there is a stratum of that belief being inculcated in every school child in America today, I don't see much chance for an improvement soon.
When the Special Forces went into Vietnam and assisted the Vietnamese to improve their lives but using "the Vietnamese Way", things worked well. As soon as the bureaucracy started insisting that the Vietnamese could ONLY "improve" their lives "the American way" things started falling apart again.
If you live in a society where "graft" is an acceptable part of the social matrix, then you are going to make more progress by encouraging actual efficient performance in return for the "graft" than you are by demanding that the "graft" be stopped AND that efficiency be improved. (After all, who would you rather give the "graft" to - someone who is actually going to get the job done for you or someone who isn't? That means that the inefficient "graft" recipients end up receiving less and the efficient ones end up receiving more and "self-interest" is one of the strongest motivators for human change.)
If you live in a society where "authority" flows from the local level, you are going to make more progress strengthening the local level than you are by strengthening some "regional" or "national" level that the vast majority of the people simply don't care about and doing so at the expense of the "local" authority figures that the vast majority of the people do care about.
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CSM William Payne
Good stuff Sir. We never learn, because the Americans can always do it better. I saw contractors build defacs with equipment like deep fryers that Iraqis would never use. We kept building bathrooms with western sit down toilets that they refuse to use or would squat on the toilet seats. We built water treatment plants that were in statue measurements were they have always used metric and had Iraqis with no idea what they were doing. And I could go on and on and on with similar examples not even including all of the graft, waste and fraud going on the were costing millions in wasted American taxpayer money.
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