FleaFlickr02,

Some very good posts in this thread. Maybe we should bundle them together and send to Obama and Congress.

Thanks Salmonella. Didn't realize IEDs had gotten so big!

Here's my take: We already lost the war on terror. We lost this war when the US passed the Patriot Act. We lost it when Bush did away with the Constitutional Writ of Habeus Corpus. We lost it when we created the Dept. of Homeland Security and the TSA. We lost it when so many Americans decided to prefer security (or the lip service embellishments of it) to liberty. We lost the war on terror before the first American serviceman fatality or the first billion dollars was spent on the war effort.

War has always been profitable for some. And those who profit from it are highly motivated to keep on keepin' on. I agree with Salmonella that Bush isn't evil enough to plan an eternal war for profit, but he's very probably dumb enough to. But I differ in regards to Cheney. Well, he's one of the few people on the planet that is actually evil enough, sort of like Saddam H.

There are similarities between Vietnam and the Iraq and Afghan wars that don't seem to get the required attention. We aren't fighting an identifiable army in an identifiable country. We are fighting an idea. The idea of Islamic extremists appears to be that the U.S. and western religion and Christianity in particular are totally at odds with their ideals and must be eliminated. A lesser but significant tangent to this is that the U.S. is seen as intolerably evil for supporting Israel and thereby supporting Muslim Palestinian oppression. You cannot defeat an idea. You might be able to suppress it temporarily. And the idea may change over time, which is what happened in the case of Vietnam, since Communism eventually collapsed internally, and now most Communist or former Communist nations are our allies or trading partners. It's a strange world for sure.

Sg