Snodgrass for president

My post title may be juveline, but it gives some sense of how impressed I am with two articles on our war situation by Colonel Tom Snodgrass (found via PrairiePundit).

The first article begins with a quote of Clausewitz -- so you know where this is going. What follows is dispassionate analysis of the steps the West would have to take to win in Iraq and the wider Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). His identification of the cardinal errors of both the Left (we can't win!) and the Right (we are winning!) during Vietnam obviously applies just as well today.

Not to claim this summarizes the article, I can't resist quoting this pearl: "political negotiation has a Crusader's chance in Mecca of succeeding."

The second article gives a sketch of how US leaders became epistemologically resistant to the concept of victory after WW2, most notably in 1961, and we are still in that dark valley -- thus our current operations are fundamentally police actions premised on socio-political fantasy, and destined to fail. The critical issue raised in this essay is whether or not a modern democracy can sustain and win a war. I think: obviously it can, if it wants to -- but we will not want to without a lot more of this type of thinking.