I know!…

Lee illustrates this by example.

You’re right about these issues being neither liberal or conservative and that these are indeed serious issues. The few more insightful individuals who like that exchange of ideas are drowned out by those who really have nothing intelligent to add, but rather who only choose to tear down.

The labels that get thrown around, such as Nazi girl, just show me how childish these people really are. In a world of their own, one only hopes that their influence is found only in these hollow chambers, each backing the other like a bottom-dwelling fish.

But there are those also who offer positive exchange without labels. Thanks for your post.

I feel no similar need to assign you definitions, nor lump you with others for simplistic proonouncements of what all of youse are like. I consider global terrorism to be a matter requiring the talents and skills of serious folks, liberals and conservatives alike.

Lampooning them via caricature does not offer a constructive nor effective way forward. And I don’t get what the caricaturing of me has to do with anything beyond the thrill of taunting and one-upmanship.

I still don’t see the point of waging war with one sovereign nation that was not connected to attacks on Americans and whose imminent threat proved nil, while ignoring those with terror training schools or funding ties to the network that has attacked us several times.

None have defined the purpose of that except to provide illogical assurance that the current plan’s working and must be maintained. And so I’ll keep seeking someone at leastbetter suited to explanation.

About as important as remembering that the reinforcements Hannibal needed weren’t going to come from Italy.

AQI only has one popular foreign fighter model and that’s the foreign suicide bomber slash dupe. Cannon fodder. The leadership of AQI became increasingly foreign as operations were conducted and reprisals taken by AQI on Sunnis and Shia.

Now these things are important to remember. If only because European armies cannot stand up against such in the long term, alone.

NATO has done a remarkable job trying to stabilize the country

When you said before that your opponents were saying “yeah, that’s right, we’re winning rah rah”, were you really talking your opponents and people who disagreed with you or were you talking about your own position. Not my position to cheerlead for Iraq, but perhaps yours for your own issues and goals.

How can the US accomplish all of it’s national security objectives while maintaining troop strength and morale without a clear and definitive message to the population that more people are needed to achieve these goals? How hard is that?

And you somehow don’t think the Petraeus Surge is why your basic argument is wrong?

Why, logically, then do you not support Petraeus against MoveOn and his other attackers, if you believe in his clear and definitive message that more people are needed to achieve his goals in Iraq… unless you really do not believe that Petraeus has the right plan. That would still prove the foundation of your argument wrong, since clear and definitive message would not just be a general message but a specific message that you would have to approve of. Given that there are always going to be disagreements on the “message”, this becomes a useless argument.

“While NATO has improved, if only because they have had years to figure out that most of the fighters are going to Iraq, not Afghanistan, it’s not nearly enough to replace American forces in the degree wanted and wished for.”

The foreign fighters in Iraq Yarm aren’t coming from this area. That’s an important thing to remember. And, furthermore, the war in Afghanistan is fought on a much more cyclical basis and is determined in large part by the weather and growing season. Soldiers deployed to this part of the world often say that the Talibs sort of pack up and go to Pakistan for the Fall and Winter and pick up and resume the Jihad in the Spring and Summer. NATO has done a remarkable job trying to stabilize the country, but fighting in the North and South are fierce. More US troops can’t deply there in large numbers because they are in Iraq. This brings me full circle to all of my positions in this blog.

How can the US accomplish all of it’s national security objectives while maintaining troop strength and morale without a clear and definitive message to the population that more people are needed to achieve these goals? How hard is that?

Senator Kerry aside, there are huge problems when you are going to rely on nations that have more in common with the Elector of Bavaria at Blenheim that the Thin Red Line in the Crimea.

Salamander has a map of where NATO forces are where. Maybe if NATO was considered an alliance composing of only English speaking Anglo-Saxons, Laura, this would make NATO look good. Since NATO isn’t, it doesn’t make NATO look good. It makes Stephen Harper’s administration look good and the British look good and America’s superior force allocation anywhere in the world, look good, but that is about it.

While NATO has improved, if only because they have had years to figure out that most of the fighters are going to Iraq, not Afghanistan, it’s not nearly enough to replace American forces in the degree wanted and wished for.

Nato takes too long to build forces for its missions and needs to be able to respond more rapidly to requests for troops, Des Browne, the UK’s defence minister, said on Wednesday.

He said Nato was rising to the challenge in Afghanistan, where it has more than 20,000 troops in place, but has struggled to find extra forces to meet unexpectedly fierce resistance from the Taliban militia. But he said there were lessons to be learnt from the deployment and he would tell the other ministers that Nato needed to modernise the way it generated its forces.

The fact that US forces tie up most of the resources, funding, and attention of global AL Qaeda in Iraq, means that those in Afghanistan gets some breathing space after and during attacks. NATO has needed that time to become even partially effective; whatever problems exist now, will be magnified should resistance increase.

Recent developmens in Europe aren’t that optimistic either

CDR Salamander’s take on things from an active service naval perspective