A goodly part of the administration’s election blues IMHO can be traced to discontent with the course of the war on Islamofascism’s Iraq Front.
From the Chief’s perspective there were some basic truths of warfare that were overlooked, or ignored by the administration in their conduct of the war.
Firstly – it needed to be recognized that this REALLY is WAR – not a political game or police action of some kind. The objective of war is in essence to kill enough enemy and break enough of his things that he no longer is willing to fight you. The Islamofascists have no misunderstanding of this.
Our failure to aggressively use the military tools and troops at our disposal to do this, is our largest blunder. We have been trying to play a game on the cheap, without making the committment of force necessary to crush (did I really say CRUSH? YES!) the enemy in decisive warfare.
Going along with this is the failure to turn the professionals of the military loose, and let them do their job without bureaucratic micromanagement. There are two damaging forms of this micromanagement:
• One is the control of battlefield tactical decisions from a remote higher command echelon. This is exemplified in a number of ways, from rules for after-action reports justifying firing rounds at the enemy, legal second-guessing on the use of appropriate force in combat, and the simple fact that the Army’s overall MIDDLE-EAST command center is in (of all places) Tampa, Florida. I mean, talk about uber-rear echelon run amok! Sheeesh!
• The other big problem is the unwillingness to do what is necessary tactically to deny the enemy the opportunity for effective action. This CAN/COULD be done…but it would have higher cost. We need to get rid of the bean-counters and bureaucrats in this process. It’s criminally immoral to ask our military to put their lives on the line with restrictive rules of engagement that increase their risk just to satisfy some bureaucratic requirement dreamed up by D.C. suits that would have trouble finding their own posteriors with the help of GPS and a computer map system, to say nothing of making TACTICAL (not strategic, but on the ground tactical) decisions form 6,000 miles away.
Ultimately then, Rummie deserves to get the hook. One only can hope that some form of military sanity may be found, before we wake up one day to find out that the problem is fighting the terrs right here, instead of in Baghdad. Based on their record to date, and the lack of judgement in the disloyal Donk opposition,the Chief is not optimistic that anything short of truly total national security disaster can turn us around to face the realities of the War on Islamofascism, once and for all.