![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
don_fitch replied to my entry yesterday regarding the "surge" in Iraq. He mentioned that "We didn't break it (Iraq) in the sense one breaks a machine, we broke it in the sense of dropping the eggs on a stone floor, so 'repair' is not an applicable word." An apt comparison, I think. But it got me thinking that, gee, maybe the problem for King George is that he's just chosen the wrong definition and is stubbornly keeping to it.
Here's what I replied to Don (cleaned up a little):
We can "win" nearly any war we start -- if we define "win" as "pound on them until their infrastructure breaks and their government collapses." We have military technology and power that is second to none. We can rain missiles on a country from hundreds of miles away or precision-bomb them from planes they won't be able to touch. We can bring in ground troops, tanks, and support vehicles that few countries can match.
What we can't do is march in with enough troops and money to occupy and rebuild afterward (and impose a democracy on them whether they want it or not) -- not with our current troop levels and economy. You need WWII troop levels to do that.
Maybe we're just defining "win" the wrong way. As soon as we toppled the Saddam regime, we should have said "OK, we won! Have fun putting putting your new government together, and make sure it's one we like or we'll be back!" Then we should have immediately declared victory and left.
That wouldn't be right, but we would have 'won' then. Mission accomplished.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
The addition of 21,500 troops being sent to Iraq is not, I repeat, not an escalation. So said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her testimony today in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
"Hagel: Putting 22,000 new troops, more troops in, is not an escalation? Would you call it a decrease? And billions of dollars more?
Rice: I would call it, Senator, an augmentation that allows the Iraqis to deal with this very serious problem that they have in Baghdad."
Its not a surge, its not an esclation, its not a correction of path. Its an augmentation!!
From:
no subject
Because if you're just doing a little 'augmenting' then you didn't make a mistake in the first place, I suppose.
From:
no subject
"The augmented fifth is a context-dependent dissonance. That is, when heard in certain contexts, such as that described above, the interval will sound dissonant. In other contexts, however, the same eight-semitone interval will simply be heard (and notated) as its consonant enharmonic equivalent, the minor sixth."
This makes sense. The augmentation is a context-dependent dissonance. And maybe it's time for a fifth.
From:
no subject
"Context-dependent dissonance..." Now there's a great explanation!
From:
Augmentation....
Anne
From:
Re: Augmentation....