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Originally posted by SociallyAutistic:
I thought all Iraqis were terrorists, who have one way airline tickets to America for the express purpose of killing us. Yes, I'm sure thats it ... I've heard it several thousand times from Scrounge.

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Originally posted by Hooligan1790:

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Gee... When is the time right to send a clear message to terrorists?

When you know who they are and where they are and the terrain is in your favor. We have taken the most advanced military machine in human history and sent it to a rock fight.

Your analysis is brilliant. The terrorists are in Iraq because we are there and we are exposed. That way they can kill us at little expense to themselves compared to trying ops in America. Now I understand that anyone killed by our military are terrorists. Like in Vietnam if they were dead they were VC. However, who are terrorists, who are insurgents and who are separatists? I guess it doesn't matter when your house of cards only stands by mixing and matching them at convenient times.

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I'ver said countless times that we did not attack Iraq, we removed their dictator

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Originally posted by SociallyAutistic:
Foreign policy according to Scrounge ... "Feed the lives of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians into the Giant Dollar Slots'O'War"

PAYOUT - FREE ELECTIONS!!!

(Note - House odds ... Greater than 4000 to 1)

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Originally posted by SociallyAutistic:
Successful diplomacy according to Scrounge:

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Originally posted by disagreed:
Back to the original topic:

I wish that Matthews treated the left as harshly as he does the right. Remember, this is the same guy that stated if you do not come to tears listening to Obama then you are not an American! Unbiased… you bet.

That said, the guy he was interviewing had NO FRIGGING IDEA what the hell he was talking about. It was funny

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Your analysis is brilliant. The terrorists are in Iraq because we are there and we are exposed. That way they can kill us at little expense to themselves compared to trying ops in America. Now I understand that anyone killed by our military are terrorists. Like in Vietnam if they were dead they were VC. However, who are terrorists, who are insurgents and who are separatists? I guess it doesn't matter when your house of cards only stands by mixing and matching them at convenient times.

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That way they can kill us at little expense to themselves compared to trying ops in America.

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Originally posted by SociallyAutistic:
Yes, you certainly did skid right off the road ... why you want to drag dead soldiers into a discussion of a well-known policy determination is beyond me. I can't find any reason for it.

It appears to be historically correct that ground forces counted all vietnamese dead as "VC" for purposes of inflating the body count. And that is what he is referring to. Deny it if you want to ... doesn't make it any less true. And what that has to do with dead soldiers is beyond me.

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Vietnam War Myths


I have put together a compendium of the most virulent myths to come out of the Vietnam War. Some of these myths, because they have been repeated so many times, and have been showcased in some deplorable books and movies about the war, have taken on the status of "fact" in the minds of an alarming number of people. While some of these myths can be exposed as apocryphal tales by examining the statistics compiled during and after the war by independent sources, others are impossible to disprove (You can not "prove" a negative hypothesis. All that one can do is examine the evidence and determine if there is any susbstance to the allegations.

Statistical data was obtained from analysis of the Combat Area Casualty File of 11/93 (CACF1193), and The Adjutant General's Center (TAGCEN) file of 1981. Additional sources for factual data are listed below in the bibliography.

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Myth: Body Counts Were Falsified

This is another one of those enduring myths that actually had its roots with the South Vietnamese Army. During the period when Americans were strictly advisors to the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) the South Vietnamese were courting favor with the Kennedy Administration. In order to make it appear that they were doing more to fight the insurgents then they were actually doing, and therefore be eligible for more military assistance, they faked the number of VC they claimed to have killed in most operations.
Reporters covering the war from Saigon assumed that the Americans would do the same thing and that is basically what they reported. They took the position that any casualty estimate, or as they put it, body count, must be inflated.

Personally, I never heard the term "body count" until I returned to the United States after my tour. They were called "enemy casualtiy reports" in Vietnam just as they were in Germany. In actuality, every enemy casualtiy report made by every unit I was attached to had to be verified by a senior officer before it was accepted. More than once we had to haul dead NVA/VC out from remote battlesites on the back decks of our tanks to a place where a battalion or brigade officer could see them in person before they were counted. On several occasions my crew and I, along with an infantry rifle squad, sat in the sun babysitting bloated corpses until they could be officially counted. Only then did we get the unpleasant job of burying the bodies.

The NVA and VC took great pains to remove their dead from the battalefield in order to conceal their true losses. More than once we found wooden "body hooks" the NVA used to haul their dead from the field of battle. This led to a practice of adding estimates of the number of "probables" (i.e., "probably killed, no body recovered") to the count of "confirmed" killed. While it is certainly possible that some commanders choose to report the sum of these two numbers rather than separate figures, I doubt whether this was a systemic practice based on personal experience. There was a standard formula for estimating enemy wounded, based on statistics gathered from World Wars One and Two that basically said that two men were wounded for every one killed.

The irony of this whole affair is that on April 3rd, 1995, on the 20th anniversary of the end of the Second Indochina War, the North Vietnamese Communists finally admited their true casualties. While the U.S. Command had officially stated that we killed about 750,000 NVA and VC, the Communists declared, in an official press release to Agence France, that we had actually killed 1.1 million NVA soldiers.

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Still using the I don't have an answer...but I know that I can find fault in whatever I want...type of debate tactic...

Brilliant!

If we wait until everything is just hunky dory, something tells me you'd point out the errors, instead of standing behind your nation...I know you find nobility in that, I just don't understand it.

General speaking to the CIC...."Sorry sir the terrain is a little tough, and the troops aren't supported at home enough, there might be sand and well...the accomodations leave a bit little to be desired, So I suggest we bail and wait until it looks like a better time to fight those that wish to cause our civilians great harm."

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Are you saying that you'd rather have them on our soil to fight? Among our general population, our women and children?

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Nothing in your profile shows you served in Vietnam so what do you base the above statement on?
I don't appreciate such statements and I am sure the families of 58,000 plus U.S. Servicemen who died there do not either. Just because people like Fonda, Clark and Kerry made such claims doesn't make it true!

Sorry about getting off the subject of this post.

Dave

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Originally posted by Hooligan1790:
Grasshopper,

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Still using the I don't have an answer...but I know that I can find fault in whatever I want...type of debate tactic...

Brilliant!

If we wait until everything is just hunky dory, something tells me you'd point out the errors, instead of standing behind your nation...I know you find nobility in that, I just don't understand it.

General speaking to the CIC...."Sorry sir the terrain is a little tough, and the troops aren't supported at home enough, there might be sand and well...the accomodations leave a bit little to be desired, So I suggest we bail and wait until it looks like a better time to fight those that wish to cause our civilians great harm."

It saddens me that your blindness is so stubborn. It is truly difficult for one who avoids the truth so deftly until he can no longer recognize it. Funny....I think the same in regards to your politically inspired position.

We have already picked better tactics and terrain to successfully counter terrorism. It is not as flashy as a 500 pounder on a wedding or a smart bomb on a mosque but it works. Yeah...It worked so well, we lost two very large towers in the middle of NY

If you weren't so blinded by having your head so far up GWB's butt I'm not all about following Bush, I'm all about understanding the terrorists take this so serious they are doing everything they can to stop us in Iraq...I'm all about understanding this war on terror is as important as it gets...But you... for deflection purposes....like to say (and probably believe it) it's about following Bush you could see how economic sanctions have actually crippled many AQ ops in the past and continue to do so. We should continue...No reason to stop doing either. Intercepting currency instead of martyrs is a very effective way of combating terrorists. Yep...We should continue that as well.... Alas, you cannot see the folly of military action and the effectiveness of using our technological superiority. Not a folly...The folly is the fact that we won't unite as a nation, some refuse to understand that taking the offensive is sometimes the best defense...but It's not pretty, it's not soft and it's not cuddly
I think you should suit up and go kill a Jihadist for George. I agree...If I was a younger man, like my sons....I would go and fight for my nation (I wouldn't be killing the enemy for George, I would be doing it so that people like you can continue to voice their opinions without fear of government reprisal), but I did my time and I did it proudly. I always felt I owed this nation my service, for the freedom I enjoy. I just happened to join when we were not at war, so instead of playing war games, I chose to enter a branch of the military that was not playing games waiting for war, but doing it's mission (saving lives)