CharlieP wrote:
As stated above, I know whilst I was serving, in Iraq there was a suicide bomber who was unfortunately very sucessfull and the reason being it was a woman wearing a Burkha stood on the edge of the road looking like she was going to cross the road holding the hand of her three young children. She blew her and her family up and many soldiers in a convoy.
This is why we need to get our fighting men and women out of the ME. You can't win against guerrilla troops fighting with the support of the local populace, you also can't win against fanatics. Traditional armies aren't built to fight those kinds of threats. You waste thousands of lives and in the end accomplish relatively little... any student of military history can tell you that.
It's how Robin Hood beat the Sheriff, it's how an upstart band of American militia routed the Redcoats, it's why Truman decided to nuke Japan, it's why we lost Vietnam, it's why the Russians lost Afghanistan and why we are losing now.