Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone carves Tom Friedman a new one. Enjoy. You may even learn something. (I didn’t know till now that Friedman is not just comfortably off like any New York Times columnist, but obscenely rich.)
In other words, both Vietnam and Iraq failed not because they were stupid, vicious occupations of culturally alien populations that despised our very presence and were willing to sacrifice scads of their own lives to send us home. No, the problem was that we didn’t make an effort to “re-evaluate tax and spending policies” and “shift resources” into an “all-out” war effort.
The notion that our problem in Iraq is a resource deficit is pure, unadulterated madness. Our enemies don’t have airplanes or armor. They are fighting us with garage-door openers and fifty year-old artillery shells, sneaking around barefoot in the middle of the night to plant roadside bombs. Anytime anyone dares oppose us in the daylight, we vaporize them practically from space using weapons that cost more than the annual budgets of most Arab countries to design.
We outnumber the active combatants on the other side by at least five to one. This year, we will spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined — more than six hundred billion dollars. And yet Tom Friedman thinks the problem in Iraq is that we ordinary Americans didn’t tighten our belts enough to support the war effort.
In all the talk about how the media or the politicians or the hippies lost the Vietnam war for us, you never hear the suggestion that it just might have been the US Army. As we see today, the army isn't even fighting the last war. It just goes right back to its unending war, the budget war for bureaucratic growth and survival.
Suppose you asked your average military expert or military historian whether an army could win a war when it had total superiority in the air, massive numerical superiority on the ground, and essentially endless and bottomless supply chain, fortified bases all over the battlefield country, total naval superiority, and massive superiority in weapons, firepower, equipment and ammunition replacement, arms technology, destructive power, medical care, and transport. Just to name a few.
What would you think if that army should lose under those circumstances? Who would you blame?
Well, does that sound like any war you could mention? Vietnam, say? Iraq?
Are we nuts, when we talk over and over again about the finest army ever to take the field in the whole history of the world? How does that Kool-Aid taste, folks?
Posted by: CCRyder on March 8, 2007 4:53 PMNot quite fair, CC. Look at the terrific job the army did in crushing Grenada. And how 'bout that Operation Just Cause in Panama! Our boys cleaned up the floor pretty good with those greasers! Teach them to mess with the good old US of A, right? And let's not forget when the 82nd airborne crushed the commie hordes in the Dominican Republic for LBJ. The trouble with you America-haters is you persist in seeing the glass as ninety percent empty instead of ten percent full.
Posted by: Furber on March 8, 2007 10:38 PMBring back universal military training (or, as it is commonly known, the draft. Only this time make it universal). A year or so in the military would cut down significantly on our national soldier-worship.
Posted by: Aitch Jay on March 9, 2007 10:06 AM