The whole affair is the same thing all over again. It's Lebanon. It's Vietnam.

Ho-chi-men said that the only thing that they had to do to defeat us was to outlast us and he was correct. Oh and be willing to spend more blood than we would. As a consequence the US has proved that they cannot be relied upon to be there for the long haul. The long haul being one cycle on the American political calendar...8 years... 4 if things get really tough.

I know how that sounds.

It sounds as though I'm advocating that we should stay with whoever we align ourselves with come 'hell or high water', I'm not. I understand that we tend to get into bed with despots and dictators. That does seem to be the price of doing business in the anti-democratic world.  No argument there. That has been SOP since the 'Monroe Doctrine'...before,  if you count the French assistance during the revolution.

I also understand that the game on the ground changes. This makes for an even better argument against inserting ourselves into millennia long struggles that we don't understand, in societies that we don't understand, when the consciousness of the American public is about the length of a YouTube video.

W made a mistake by using the C word referring to war with the Islamic world after the 911 attacks. He or his advisors should have known better, didn't he have a sense of history? He also made the mistake of defining an open ended struggle. A generational struggle, I think he said. McCain gave it a time frame "80 years". 80 Years? Was he kidding? I think he lost the election when he said it out loud... no lie. If our society is stuck in a war mindset for even 10 years, that will become the psychological norm. We are treading very close right now and I don't know about you I don't want to live on a war footing for the rest of my life.

So now we are faced with confirming what the rest of the world suspected all along. That the US will come here with their bombs and jets and helicopters and guns and money and they will blow a bunch of stuff up and kill a bunch of people. But if you wait...all you have to do is wait...they will go away.

And in 30 years they will come back and they can vacation here and we can sell them cotton...