A lot of that was a matter not picking the best hills to die on. Or, to say another way, picking the hills we're truly willing to kill the enemy on.Since then we have fought with bizarre rules about killing only certain people and what is considered "immoral" in warfare. We bomb enemies...give them band aids....and tell them we're friends. They smile, pretend to agree, and continue killing us. Eventually we realize they aren't giving up and go home...and why would they??? We aren't going to take their land or stuff...nor will we kill the women and children. As long as they keep fighting...we will eventually leave...something our enemies have known since Vietnam. We haven't learned much since then....except that we are terrible at nation building.
This reminds me of a discussion I was in on a gun forum over this question: If you were carrying a concealed weapon while in a convenience store and suddenly someone pulled a gun and began robbing the cashier...what would you do?
Virtually all of us would do nothing more than let a simple robbery take its course. It would take a severe raising of the stakes, such as someone else being shot first, or being absolutely convinced that was about to happen. And even then...there would be conditional factors involved. One factor was whether our intervention would cause more death than it would prevent. Why the reticence? Because we were armed for the protection of ourselves and our own loved ones primarily...we were not the police and we didn't have the protection from fatality errors that police have.
The police get to kill the wrong people without repercussion. They get to shoot too soon without repercussion. The police have to be 'way, 'way wrong before they suffer repercussion. As armed civilians, we don't get to be wrong. We don't even get to look wrong at first glance. So, intervention becomes a matter of being very careful choosing the hills we die--or kill--on.
The US hasn't been that careful in recent years. That was something Colin Powell and other generals who were "graduates of Vietnam Academy" talked about in various ways.
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