Fields: Military Needs To Buy A Clue
BY SAM FIELDS
Guest Columnist
Consider the Air Force pilot who said that if they openly let gays in the military he will resign his commission and start flying for the airlines.
Like there is a shortage of gay flight attendants!
The Air Force pilot needs to buy a clue.
This story is important because it shows that career military personnel don’t have a grasp on the real world.
Lately we have been hearing that President Barack Obama should “listen to the generals.
Myself, I am a Clemenceau man. Georges Clemenceau was the French Prime Minister during WW I who wryly observed: “War is too important to be left to the generals.
He said it after four deadlocked years when governments had been following the advice of generals. Time after time, it was over the top with fifty thousand dead to gain fifty yards. It was endless trench warfare that pointlessly leads to the slaughter of over ten million soldiers.
I bring this up because I see Republicans are ready to pounce on Obama if he does not buy General Stanley McChrystal’s Afghanistan strategy lock, stock and gun barrel.
According to McChrystal his nation building strategy will take fifteen years.
That would be eight Congresses and at least one or two more Presidents.
Apparently he no concept about the need to sustain public support in a democracy.
His lack of reality can be traced to his career. He has not spent one adult day in the private sector.
He has never had to worry about healthcare for his family, making a mortgage, getting laid off when business is slow. The worst recession in seventy five years has meant nothing to him.
Most of all he has never had to function in a democratic environment. That’s for politicians.
In his world it is all about giving or getting orders. Soldiers don’t vote on strategy. Protest gets a soldier a court martial.
The public is already disenchanted with eight years of drifting in Afghanistan. There is absolutely no stomach to drag this out another 15 years.
The Afghanistan war started out as an operation to capture or kill the men behind 9/11. They numbered less than a thousand. It should have been over in two years
McChrystal wants a new mission that will mean we will be there for a total of 23 years.
Let me put 23 years in perspective. That’s more time than we spent in the Revolutionary War, The War of 1812, The Civil War, The Spanish-American War, WW I and WW II.combined.
Suicide bombers, I.E.D.s and heroin will guarantee that American impatience will never let fifteen more years of occupation happen.
I don’t know what they pay McChrystal. But he needs to take a substantial portion of his salary and buy a fucking clue.
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Don’t believe Fields? Try this from a Russian on the Soviet Union’s experience in Afganistan.
November 1st, 2009 at 7:42 am
Sam;
You missed one very important aspect of this argument and that is our national treasure (better known as how much we can borrow from the Chinese)…
$80 billion a year to fund this fiasco. Nearly a decade long. About the same cost of providing health care (in a fucked up form) to nearly every American citizen.
Do you feel safer? Is the world a better place? Are we advancing our national interests?
Side note: Heroin is cheaper on the street…
I was bitching at the top of my lungs about this when we marched over there is a big HOORAH. Back in 2001, it was almost treasonous to speak about GWB. Who’s doubting me now?
In the end, it’s more important to the cowardly GOP to bomb the living snot out of some poor brown colored SOB – all in the hopes of converting them to the ‘Publican beliefs of God, Gays, and Guns – than to provide affordable health care to the poor schlubs here in our Country.
Make sense? You betcha!