Levels of Commitment and Newsweek

On the cover of Newsweek, last week, were two Iraqi insurgents. Reading the letters to the editor this week I found a kind of blindness that is very dangerous. Most letters were angry that Newsweek showed insurgents on the cover. One writer had a son in the Army and wanted know why NW was glorifying the insurgents instead of her son.

I think NW is right on the money with their cover and coverage. As the Super Power we tend to think that we corner the market on commitment to cause, ability to fight, and we can overcome anything.

The truth is that "American" thoughts on hegemony, power, and belief in manifest destiny are shared by every other culture on Earth. With the insurgents we have utterly failed to accurately understand our enemy. Until recently we have continued to belittle them, and believe that their vanquishing is just around the corner. Because of this lack of ability to read our enemy, the greatest army to be fielded in the history of the world is stalemated against a rag tag band 17,000 under supplied, overworked, poor people.

Newsweek does not glorify the insurgents. They only try to show us what we are facing.

In 1415, king Charles of France, ordered the largest army in Europe to crush a much smaller English force that had terroized the coast. The flower of French Chivalry, believing in the honor of knighthood, the glory of France, using the most technologically advanced battle systems, were destroyed by a bunch of vagabond archers commaded by Henry V. They failed to understand their enemy.

In 1941 Japan launched a pre-emptive strike on the US Pacific fleet and won an instant, painless, and great victory. For a year they devastated the allies in the Pacific. By 1945 their nation was in ruins and millions of Japanese were dead. They failed to understand their enemy.

In 1942 the German army was poised to conquer Russia. Moscow was only miles away. The mongloid Russian, cavemen to the Germans, were running. By 1945 the cavemen sat in their tanks ontop of Hitlers bunker while he put a bullet in his own head. He failed to understand his enemy.

The same could be said about Vietnam etc.

Does our enemy know us better than we know them? We have spent 80 billion dollars to defeat them and there are just as many insurgents now as their were in 2003. We crushed Fahlluja and made 200,000 people refugees, and general Richard Meyers has stated that we still face the same number of insurgents.

Fox News and the other non-news services have continuosly overestimated the number of "forign fighters" in Iraq. Meyers says that there are less than 1000 foreign figters facing our troops.

Media outlets serve no one by simply cheerleading. There have been lots of cheers go out to doomed armys from Darius' force that got slaughtered by Alexander, to the Warmach marchinig out to Russia, to the 7th Cavelry going after Sitting Bull, to the 7th Cavelry landinig in Vietnam.

General G.S. Patton, spent years reading what German tankers, cavelrymen, and soldiers wrote. By the time we unleashed his 3rd Army into Europe, Patton understood his enemy, greatly admired them, and destroyed them.