Baldimo wrote:blacksmithn wrote:Yes, yes. It's all another plot by the liberal media. And we're actually winning the war in Iraq, too.
[I've heard it's best to humor the terminally delusional, as they can become abusive when distressed]
You might say delusional but there really is something going on with the media and the war right now. They don't like it, so they don't report it in a fair way. There is no talk about how well the troops have been doing and very little in the way of the media being in places where troops are doing well. All we hear is doom and gloom and that doesn't do much to provide a balance view of what is going on in the different war zones.
What do you mean, 'how well they have been doing?'
We all understand that the troops are doing their job well. But noone, not even the troops, really understand what their job
is.
What metrics can we look at for 2006 that you could say were very positive for the American soldier? Well, we didn't lose any pitched battles and we've protected American interests well enough in Iraq during this time. I'm quite sure that we've caught insurgents and AQ members out the wazoo over the course of the year.
You see reporting on the bad stuff, however, because the bad stuff got much, much worse last year. Violence was way up in Iraq.
So it really depends on how you look at it - if the 'job' of the troops is to engage the enemy in low-level ways, and protect the US bases and Green Zone in Iraq, then they did an amazingly good job. If the job was to quell violence, to settle Iraq down, then they performed amazingly poorly.
The truth is somewhat in the middle, so I would say that they performed somwhere in the middle. I don't blame line troops for failures in command, which is where many of the problems stem from...
Cycloptichorn