Keeping it short

[unixronin]

Two good articles in Iraq, by Tony Blankley and by Thomas Friedman.

Best quote (from Blankley):

"Fighting and winning always impress.  Even merely fighting and persisting impress.  Shortly after the fall of Soviet Communism, I had dinner with a then-recently former senior Red army general.  He told me that the Soviets were astounded and impressed by the fact that we were prepared to fight and lose 50,000 men in Vietnam, when the Soviets never thought we even had a strategic interest there.  They thus calculated that they'd better be careful with the United States.  What might we do, they thought, if our interests really were threatened?"

Comments

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

We could have nuked Afghanistan on 9/12. I'm pretty sure we could have named a dozen really solid, actual, AQ training camps. And using The Bomb would have shown that we were Really Serious. Small tactical yield nuclear weapons are even pretty clean, these days. (Yes, it's comparing old diesel busses to new diesel busses, but still.)

The message would have been "Do not fuck with America, because when she gets punch drunk, she pulls out the straight razor."

If we were so desperate to spread democracy and overthrow a crusty, tyrannical dictator, we could have just invaded Cuba. They probably would have actually "greeted us as liberators" and thrown flowers instead of grenades.