Post 1001267078

I don't understand why Russell Morse is so "Good to go". He says "For the first time I feel like an American, willing to fight for my country". I do fear Russel isn't looking at the big picture. He isn't learning from the past.

"Even if the Americans penetrated Afghanistan, their shells would only plough over the ruins. The Russians tried to destroy the Taliban's predecessors with 10 years of bombing, destroying whole villages, with their people, farm animals, fields, trees and mud huts. And still they could not get rid of the mujahedin, still they could not - to use Mr Bush's inappropriately folksy phrase - 'smoke them out of their holes'." » Robert Fisk on the costs of invasion.

"If the Americans go to war, I pity those boys," Yuri Shamanov, a former Soviet colonel, said last week. "I pity their mothers and sisters and brothers. It will be 10 times worse than Vietnam. Vietnam will be a picnic by comparison. Here they will get it in the teeth." » The war that has never been won.

Chinese proverb: if you seek vengeance, prepare two graves. (Most of the above via Randomwalks.com.)