Quote Originally Posted by BanginJimmy
we still have bases in Japan and we spent hundreds of billions of dollars there in the late 40's thorugh the end of the 50's. In todays terms that would have been well into the trillions.

We didn't spend that money fighting a hard earned battle with Japanese nationalists fighting our occupation. We spent those dollars in Japan creating military infrastructure because the ability to stage our military assetts there was extremely valuable at the time. I'll let you be a big boy and figure out why!

Vietnam and Iraq have several things in common.
1. Interference from an enemy of the US. In Viet-Nam it was the Chinese and Russians. In Iraq it is the Iranians and foreign fighters.

2. Politics getting in the way of the military. Anytime you get politicians involved in military operations you only get bad things happening. Iraq is a glaring example of that. If the military was able to do their job without any political intervention we could get this job done.

Those pesky fools, always asking tough questions when we choose to sacrifice thosuands of American lives, billions (going on trillions) of American dollars and further destabilizing an already unstable region. We should let it go regardless of what it is or isn't accomplishing and who's lives it is wasting . Like in Vietnam... we were fighting to prevent the domino effect from taking hold... and we won and it didn't. Oh, wait, we lost and it didn't? And Communist Vietnam hasn't started anything with anyone since? Damn, tough break America.

3. Media embedded with military units. It became popular in Viet-Nam with the body counts and such, and it is happening again now. This only works to get in the way of the military units and to vilinize them.

Yes, because you know, the military is always faultless and we should always assume so. The My Lai massacre and that time those soldiers gang raped the teenage Iraqi girl and then killed her whole family, reporting on stuff like that definitely unjustly portrays those soldiers as villains. And we shouldn't know about it.
u r smrt