Blogs For Victory

And President Obama doesn’t seem to understand this – from Blackfive:

There are reasons that military people use words like “victory” to describe winning…

President Obama has put securing Afghanistan near the top of his foreign policy agenda, but “victory” in the war-torn country isn’t necessarily the United States’ goal, he said Thursday in a TV interview.

“I’m always worried about using the word ‘victory,’ because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur,” Obama told ABC News…

WTF Over? We don’t want to “win” now? Well, I have news for the President, every one of the men and women in uniform that is sweating, shooting, bleeding and dying to accomplish our mission there is looking for “victory.” They know what is measurable and what isn’t. And they definitely know what it looks like at the end.

Now, I know that in the COIN battle-space that it is difficult to get hard measurements for the Powerpoint Rangers to put in briefing slides, but I do know that one of the many “measurable goals” of war-fighting (thereby leading to “victory”) is the surrender/capture/death of the enemy. Economic development and stabilizing the government are all legs of the stool, but the the rock solid base of the stool, the thing that “contracts the ability of Al-Qaeda to operate” is killing or capturing (although capturing now has a greatly lessened effect) the enemy. That is what makes all of the other things possible.

But our CINC, having never been at the point of anything except petitions drives and organized protests, may not understand what I am getting at…

As I’ve said before, President Obama has my backing for whatever efforts he makes in the pursuit of victory. He must, to retain my support, pursue victory – relentlessly and regardless of how difficult it proves. I will not support military actions I perceive as being designed to merely prevent defeat or, worse, merely prevent bad news from hitting a President’s polling in the United States. In spite of Obama’s foolish statement quoted above, I will currently suspend judgment and consider it just a bad use of words – the sort of words a liberal would use, because liberals simply dislike any word which might indicate a bit of manly resolve.

Let us not have a real repeat of Vietnam – the continual effusion of blood without the clear cut goal of American victory at the end of it. We owe it to the magnificent men and women of our Armed Forces – we must back them to victory, because that is what they want. They’ve shed their blood, and they didn’t do it to merely prevent a loss but to secure a victory. If we break faith with them – as we broke faith with our soldiers and allies in Vietnam – then we will deserve whatever calamity befalls us.

Please, Mr. President, win.