Monday, October 24, 2005
Colonel Sassaman. Jesus can Americans be dumb. From the New York Times Sunday edition magazine we learn that Col. Nathan Sassaman is a good-looking military guy with a pre-Iraq-war stellar record: top West Point guy, star quarterback, father to beautiful children and husband to beautiful wife. So he goes to Iraq and tries to make a difference. And for a while he does. But then he gets tangled up into the Shiite/Sunnis 'thang and everything starts to get murky. The nineteen-year-olds who report to him and don't know quite what the f*** they are doing in Iraq in the first place (let alone where it is) start getting a little rough with the populace. Long story short, Sassaman gets booted out of the military because some of his guys throw two Iraqis into the Tigris river to 'teach them a lesson.' All in good fun of course. Well apparently one of the men died. Da-di-dah and Sassaman gets reprimanded and leaves the army. Granted had his men shot the two Iraqis we wouldn't even have a blog here. But I digress.
We learn from Sassaman and others that no, repeat no, courses are offered at West Point or anywhere else on insurgency warfare. All courses are run-of-the-mill conventional scenarios; Kick-Ass visible Army America kicks Country B's Conventional Army's Ass. And this is where American's dumbness comes into play. How, pray tell, was the American Revolutionary war won? Yes my friends. The colonies most surely didn't line up their men 'conventionally' to be slaughtered by the well-trained, well-equipped Brits. No siree. Those guys hid behind trees and employed the same kind of guerilla tactics the insurgents in Iraq are employing. And by the way, were no lessons learned from Vietnam?
We learn from Sassaman and others that no, repeat no, courses are offered at West Point or anywhere else on insurgency warfare. All courses are run-of-the-mill conventional scenarios; Kick-Ass visible Army America kicks Country B's Conventional Army's Ass. And this is where American's dumbness comes into play. How, pray tell, was the American Revolutionary war won? Yes my friends. The colonies most surely didn't line up their men 'conventionally' to be slaughtered by the well-trained, well-equipped Brits. No siree. Those guys hid behind trees and employed the same kind of guerilla tactics the insurgents in Iraq are employing. And by the way, were no lessons learned from Vietnam?
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