This is exactly right. Our soldiers win everything they are asked to win, but at the strategic level our politicians have no idea what they are doing...and frequently squander the hard won fight that our troops have waged.
No argument there, but I would have to add the Media in with the politicians. When our forces decisively beat back the simultaneous attacks on every provincial capital in South Vietnam during TET in '68, effectively destroying the Viet Cong, Walter Cronkite was on the tube telling us how the war could never be won. Hue City was a tough nut, but the ROE were part of that. Eventually, that, too was cleared, only to find the 3000 or so civilians slaughtered there--which only should have bolstered our resolve that what we were fighting against needed to be defeated. But America had already heard the words 'could not be won' stated with Cronkite's full gravitas, and the tube was covering the hippies and anti-war protesters every night (making them seem to be present in greater numbers and more universally distributed--a Delphi technique, done nationwide--than they actually were).
And that's the way it was...
The defeatist pap that turned even stellar military victories into 'defeat'.
Had the Democrats not pulled the support for the ARVNs late in the war, when NVA columns were overrunning the South, air and artillery would have been more effective than at any time during the conflict against those massed troops. Instead, we got evacuation from the Embassy roof, and sinking boats full of desperate refugees.
We still have the same enemy in America, we used to call them 'The New Left', only they are not so new any more. They have invaded the universities, the media, the arts, and have propagandized generations through alleged entertainment, books, movies, television, and day to day spin on events. We can generally spot them by their hypocritical stances on issues, their proclivity for demanding from others what they themselves will not do, and their inclinations toward Communism. So pervasive has the mindset become, we don't call it Communism, but Liberalism, because, after all, we were informed that "Communism is dead." Never before has if flourished so, and right here at home.
The only defense against that is the staunch support of our own Constitution, the principles and values of personal Liberty there enshrined, the concept of God-given fundamental and natural Rights, and of limited governmental power to do good or evil because all power will be used at some point to corrupt ends. Therein lies the fundamental premise of Conservatism, that the just powers of any Government are derived from the consent of the governed, but that should be an informed consent, one based on truth and not propaganda. When we demand any less than the truth from those we hire to serve us, we undermine the fundamental basis of our government, and of our Liberty. Note that in the expression "Truth, Justice, and the American Way, Truth comes first.
Without it, the other two cannot exist, at least, not as intended.
We won: Gulf War 1, the 'actions' in Panama and Grenada, we defeated Saddam Hussein in Gulf War 2, and removed him from power, permanently. We stopped any WMD programs Saddam had, including the British interdiction of the components of the mega cannon to shell Israel and the demise of the designer.
That those victories have been squandered by the actions of the politicians since then is not the fault of the military, nor necessarily the American people, but the fault of those who removed the power from the Congress to declare war, and those who lied in the press about the nature of that war and the factors surrounding it, right down to the
casus belli. It is difficult, if not impossible for Americans to make informed decisions about their servants in Government with faulty or falsified information, and that has been the media's stock in trade for the past fifty (plus) years. The same media which lost the war in Southeast Asia, partly in their lust to emplace a democrat in the office of POTUS, has compared the current action in the Gulf region with that same war, and done everything they can to make that comparison a reality, to be able to tout the "failure" of another Republican President for whom they reserved unprecedented levels of hatred and vitriol, the whole while they do everything in their power to promote decisions which have potential to reduce combat effectiveness of our fighting forces.
If you want an enemy, there it is.
In the meantime, I must commend you on your ability to get so many to write so much in response to so little, myself included.
Given the metric of honesty, of using the tactics the media has (noted above), of supporting positions which fly in the face of Constitutional limitations on government, of questionable values, there is no presumptive candidate from either major party I can support.
