so how do you like the situation now? Are you enjoying unemployment, the flight of useful industries, the useless posturing of politicians, the porkbarrel spending on military industries?
I hope you're enjoying it a lot, because it's not going to stop. Russia actually understood what was happening, and after Afghanistan, and having to pay off the debt for it, they restructured. They rethought their military strategy, and the little war that they had in Georgia proved it.
We haven't yet learned. We haven't yet understood that the "home-court advantage" makes all the difference in conflict, and that there is absolutely no way to win militarily in Afghanistan.
I keep returning to this here on DKos, because people just don't get it. Everyone here, from the right to the left, gets stuck in arguments. It's really pathetic. I've said it before and I'll say it again, because it's still valid, and it's not going to go away.
There is no military solution to a social problem.
I don't know how many times I've said this here and in other places, and people just start arguing about meaningless things. There is almost nobody here who has really absorbed the lesson of Vietnam, and the lesson of armed conflict in general. War has changed so much in the last hundred years, that it's nothing like people think it is. The proof lies in many places including the recent attack on hotels in Bombay, where about a dozen people dominated the world news and basically won the engagement, showing again the incredible cost effectiveness of the tactics that we are facing with our billions and trillions spent pretty much uselessly. Here in the United States we have not understood the power of a determined opponent who is willing to give his life. We're still trying to save lives, and our military tries not to kill civilians, not having understood that the opposing army is civilians. Look at Afghanistan; do you see people in uniform fighting us? Not a one. They look like everybody else, until the explosion. There is no army opposing us, and yet we are brought to a standstill, with our huge, scientific, oh-so-well-researched, tactically advanced military machine brought to a complete stop by some guy with a rag on his head and a Kalashnikov in his hand.
And still we haven't gotten the lesson. We pay over $100 a gallon for gasoline delivered to the front lines, While freezing spending here in the United States for everything except the military, and of course those incredibly profitable industries that churn out some of the most expensive military hardware in the world, and some of the most sophisticated, to the higher profits of the stockholders of those companies and the politicians that they have bought.
And the citizens don't even look around. The sheep don't even look up. And that's because they're entertained; they're distracted; they're very well and easily managed. And meanwhile, while the industries that could make useful things have fled from the United States, the industries that churn out military hardware are doing great. Their stocks are soaring.
And on top of that, all of this is running on 19th century systems, if not earlier. We're still pushing pistons with expanding gases, but what's really pathetic is that using steam to power things is a technique almost 20 centuries old. And we flatter ourselves that we're so modern!
The other night I looked at the State of the Union address, and all the men were wearing suits. The same suits they've worn for a long time, with jackets vented in the back so that people can ride horses.
Yes, we're still stuck way back in the past, ideologically, militarily, economically, and spiritually. I look forward to this nation waking up; I can't wait until the "sleeping giant wakes up and is filled with a terrible resolve" to actually come into the 21st century. I'm not sure exactly what form it's good to take, or what it's take to do this, but I know that it will come. Kicking and screaming, or dancing and singing, we will learn the lesson. I hope it comes soon.