Reply #10: "you"

[tburnsten]

I am not just a "NATO guy", I'm a U.S. Servicemember. Army National Guard. Been in for three and a half years and it was a superb decision. Haven't regretted it one bit. I've met some of the best people I've ever known while in the service. I have grown by leaps and bounds, and learned three extremely worthwhile skills in the process.


And the modern world will ALWAYS be dominated by the Eagle and the Dragon and the Bear, until some truly world-changing events change things. I mean like European colonization of the New World+circumnavigation world changing.

And all of you non-NATO types have done less for humanity's progress over the last thousand years than the NATO nations have done over the last two centuries, whether you like it or not.

So spare the disparaging comments about NATO servicemembers, they are doing the best they can in a fucky situation in a fucky country that desparately needs stability so it can rebuild and establish some kind of future that doesn't depend on the opium poppy crop or never-ending open warfare among the dozen or more factions at play. Sometimes mistakes occur, sometimes innocent civilians wind up caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. It isn't called a "war" because it is a perfectly executed police action against a pair of hostage holders.

And al-Qaeda has been extremely successful in their information war. That's right, they have beaten us soundly at manipulating public opinion, it is their #1 strategy. They came up with that strategy when they saw what happened in Mogadishu in 1993, when we lost 18 U.S. Servicemembers and a single Malaysian soldier while killing anywhere from 700-5,000 Somali fighters and civilians (though all the fighters there are civilians, they have no military, and the line is very faint between the two anyway in that region), which inspired Bin Laden to lead the type of war we are engaged in right now. He knew that even a small number of losses to U.S.-led coalition forces would eventually turn public opinion against the action, though we may inflict many times that number of casualties on the enemy and complete many needed reconstruction projects in the process.