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Originally Posted by W7HW
Very well said Sir, I agree with you completely!!!! I support the military ....completely. Anyone who never served cannot grasp to what has been provided in our freedom.
73 to our troops.......Duane
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I wholeheartedly agree. I take my hat off to the brave men and women who are serving in the military on our behalf.
I don't however support the politicians who have first got us into so many of these conflicts and then tied the hands of the military behind their backs. The way that the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are being pursued is rendering them unwinable.
Firstly, for some reason in the West we seem to think that our culture of personal freedom and democracy (and I'll admit that I write this from a country run by an unelected Prime Minister who daily signs away our hard-won freedoms to unelected Brussels EU bureaucrats and destroying rights enshrined by Magna Carta in 1215) can somehow be imposed in parts of the world that have no such traditions and where people are unprepared for them.
Secondly, we seem to think that war should have rules like some Old Etonian game of rugby, played in a fair and gentlemanly fashion. The enemy have no such conscience. They have no such rules or such squeamishness. The politicians seem to think that a damage-limitation, limited deployment will keep the situation under control because they don't want to be seen to take the brutal staps that would be necessary to defeat those whose aim is to kick all Western influence out of their country and beyond. Our "leaders" fear uninformed and squeamish public opinion.
Time and again I see evidence that the current conflicts in the Middle East will go the same way as Vietnam and the same way as the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.
IMHO what we should really be defending there are our interests - in this case natural resources. We seem to have gone down the route of either pretending or really believing that we can make free democracies of those countries. It's either one driver or the other and we're getting caught between the two.
The politicians have never in recent years done what it takes to win a guerilla war in someone else's country despite what the military tell them. They shy away from putting their names next to the distasteful actions they'd have to take - and the poor old troops get caught in the middle, putting their lives on the line but unable to do their jobs. They tread the fine line between risk and action - and if they get it wrong they get killed or if they go OTT they end up on a murder charge. A murder charge in a war zone. Can you believe it? - like the proverbial handing out of speeding tickets at the Indy 500.
If you want to defeat an enemy in an anti-guerilla operation you have to use all means necessary - look at how the British fought the Boer war 1899-1902 as an example. It was dirty, brutal, inhuman, monstrous and controversial even at the time. Boer civilians suffered apallingly and were deliberately starved and abused in concentration camps, something that historians believe broke the morale of the guerillas. I don't think that anyone with a shred of humanity would be proud of such tactics - but they did the job. The war was won. Our politicians don't have the stomach for this but take us into the conflicts anyway.
Guerillas win wars by not losing and my fear that the current conflicts will be won by the army that stays in the field for the longest ... and that won't be our side.
Thirdly, you may hear reports about British troops
having to buy their own kit because what is supplied is inadequate. It's true.
Despite the bravery of our folks in the military they will as ever be let down by power-seeking politicians - save your vitriol for them.
Dave G0OIL
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