I'm pretty sure Brian will agree with me that lack of equipment doesn't justify walking off the battlefield. I don't think it is "my kind" that would hang him out to dry if he quits now. I don't think he'd get through the R primary, because it would tarnish the only known positive he currently has (his military cred). barfo
How was he wrong? Last time I looked we were still in Iraq, still getting killed, still afraid to leave lest the country fall back into the arms of it's citizenry to decide it's fate. Surge smurge.
War is the continuation of politics by other means. You've heard that phrase before? This is a political issue. Or maybe, more properly stated, a diplomatic issue. In a nutshell, the way to win a war is to get the other guys to stop fighting. This is especially true when it's much easier for you to go home and stop than it is for them. Because we're far from home and they either live there or are a bunch of homeless nutcases (the various foreign fighters). So to win, we kill who we need to, but really we need to convince the local population to not put up with a bunch of extremist nutcases in their midst and leave them strong enough to fight back. Sounds easy, doesn't it? Anyway, a basic way to look at things is that our diplomatic efforts are failing terribly. Gen. McChrystal perhaps ran afoul of this because he and his staff came across as very undiplomatic (in the literal sense), but that really just emphasized the point that in the strategic sense we weren't doing a good job of selling the politics and diplomacy of our strategy. Yes, part of that falls on Gen. McChrystal, but a big part of it falls on the diplomats (Eikenberry, et al) he apparently couldn't work with. So I do see room for optimism in that Gen. Petraeus seems to have very good grasp of the political and diplomatic requirements of a strategic command. My big question is whether the guys who are actually supposed to be doing that job are willing and capable enough to productively work with him. If not, can he push for guys who are?
