Here's my trade-off: We stick to the timeline, in exchange, drop ALL rules for engagement. If it's armed or storing weapons, it's a target now.:D

And especially not a good idea to be saying it around a loose-lipped journalist. :-?

Also there is the little fact that in one case we are talking about officers "following orders" that were illegal.

I do not believe anyone is claiming that McChrystal was fired for "only following orders" that were illegal.

But than my position is that it was unnecessary to fire McChrystal.

My trade off is to get the hell out of AF!

What exactly is the mission in AF?

Kill UBL?
Exterminate the Taliban?
Contain the Taliban?
Convert the Taliban?
Bring "Democracy" to AF?
Drive Al Qaeda out of AF?
Destroy Al Qaeda?
Bring "peace" to AF?
Secure the Southern Pipeline?

What exactly is "victory" in AF? I wanted to ask Bush this question and I would like to ask Obama this question.

Get it straight... he was not fired... he turned in his resignation :nope:

Honestly.

That journalist is pretty perceptive:

Pretty much sums it up, doncha think?

Yeah, sums it up pretty well indeed. That little snippet from the article joggled me a bit: pretty good evidence that politicians have no business conducting warfare... as if the conflict in SEA wasn't proof enough already. :doh:

Funny you should mention that because I was just thinking of how as the civil war got going Abraham Lincoln spent hours pouring over military texts and studying maps in an attempt to understand the situation as best that he could. Then again he didn't have the heavy fund raiser event schedule that President Obama has.

It should be law that any presidential nominee has to have served in the US military as an officer to be considered for the presidency. I'm sick of all these bleeding heart hippies running the show.

It was never McChrystal's strategy in Afghanistan. It was Obama's. Obama seriously limited McChrystal from being able to have an effective strategy. Any military officer will agree that McChrystal had a solid plan for Afganistan but Obama was only giving him half the tools needed to be successful. Obama set the man up for failure and then relieved him when he got frustrated and told the press the truth about why he was having difficulty doing his job.

He told Obama what he needed to do the job and Obama turned him down by only giving him half of what he needed. So what was he supposed to do? Suck it up? We're talking life and death situations here. No General wants to see his men get killed off. I think he just couldn't stomach it anymore and got fed up with Obama.

In a way it serves him right. He supposedly voted for Obama and look where that got him. You reap what you sew!

Heh. I didn't know that about Abe. Or maybe I did and simply forgot. How big of a role did Lincoln play in the Civil War, as far as deciding where and how to employ the military?


Isn't it already a requirement that a candidate must have served in the military at some point? Or did that all change?

He left most of it to the Generals and his secretary of war just like every other successful wartime president.

Rgr :up:

There is a VAST VAST VAST difference between whistleblowing and mocking a superior.

First of all whistle blowing is usually done with name off the record. And evidence slowly provided to blow the cover once and for all. Whistleblowers want the activity stopped and not articles in a paper glorifying them.

Mocking a superior openly is arrogant and serves no real purpose other than to create a firestorm and destroy morale. Well that and try to end up an "adviser" to Fox or MSNBC...

The "Fired for speaking his mind" argument is completely bunk.

They have no special business in war indeed, for them it is just like any other part of the daily routine of theirs. The fundamental difference between a state of peace and a state of war is something that they are not really aware of, since they tend to translate everything into terms that they could grasp with their schemes of political, bureaucratic, PR daily work. That leads next to so serious distortions like trying to judge military needs by standards of peacetime, since war for them is just another aggregate phase of "peace".

That necessarily must end in foul compromises that then get sold as "success" by the PR experts that excel in spelling failure as victory and explain that by adding that precious special chnage of perspective to the story that before was sold as unshakable determination and non-negotiable demands. I totally object to that. Peace has it'S set of moral values and categories, and war has a cojmpeltely different one, dicated by very different needs and demands. messing both sets up means to mess up either "peace" (it'S possible freedom gets turned into a dictatorship), or "war " (by fighting it in an undetemrined, half-hearted way that makes sure that the objectives do not get acchieved while the enemy, if he does not make the same mistake, enforces his own objectives instead).

Platapus asked the right questions about Afghanistan. If you try to find answers to them, you realise soon how very much confused and disconnected from reality Western thinking about Afghanistan is.

Trapped in the Afghan maze.

The thing is, they still don't think they have to define the goal of the war. The war IS the goal. After a decade of war it is kind of strange that there really is no clear goal outside the war itself, isn't it?

There has never been a requirement for a candidate for the office of President to have served in the military. Nothing has changed.

Article II, Section 1, paragraph 5 of the Constitution lists all the qualifications to be President. No mention of any military service.

As far as I knew, before I gave up really caring about the war, the goal was to kill Bin Laden. At the time I think that was what a lot of Americans wanted (correct me if I'm wrong here, mates). He managed to slip away and since then there has been absolutely no goal that we can understand. What the Washington boneheads want out of the whole ordeal is certainly not being reported to us, and we are left with little more than to debate the possibilities.

Ah great, thank you for clearing that up, Platapus. For some reason I thought there was a requirement. I should read up more. :up:

Now the goal seems to be (from what I gather) mostly cleaning up and trying to get things running before we leave. :hmmm: But that's just from what I know, which is even less than what I know about nuclear reactors. :shifty: Maybe someone more knowledgeable and with more experience can correct me...

Whatever the goal is (which is sad that they dont have a clear cut goal) things are not going well.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100624...20100624111912

Time to get more drones in there then...