Here's another "ever so slight", BUT very significant change in the message from Washington!
REMEMBER that message that the ONLY people affected by the tax changes would be those with income levels OVER $250,000/year.
NOW LISTEN to the latest message. It's affects those whose ADJUSTED GROSS INCOME" is over $250,000.
More Orwellian conniving!
If war were simply force-on-force there is little doubt that we would not prevail. Notable exceptions (subject to differing opinions, of course) would include the US engagement in Vietnam. The nature of the US military involvement in that region of the world brought us to an uneasy recognition that we needed to leave. We abandoned our friends when we left (e. g., the Hmong people). Our reputation was tarnished. The forces on the other side had a strategy and that strategy, in essence, never wavered. On our side however, our strategy was subject to political winds and resistance by the people...
It was General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur who spoke so eloquently about commitment to war. A soldier must, to remain fully human, hate war. But, when his nation calls him to service that nation owes it to the men and women who fight the war to not hamstring them by political issues, artificial constraints, and impossible rules of engagement and so forth. Put bluntly there is no substitute for victory, total victory!
Successful war should never be engaged in without the support of the people. Yet, the Congress of the United States has declared war only rarely- after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, The War of 1812, our war with Spain and perhaps WWI come to mind.
Our engagement in Korea was done under the auspices of the United Nations. Interestingly, the Soviety Union was absent the day the Security Council voted to support the people of South Korea. Commitment of US forces into Korea was under the authority of the President as Commander in Chief - there was no Congressional Declaration of War (which is a Constitutional requirement).
In every military engagement since Korea it has always been the President acting under his role as Commander in Chief to commit to this or that military engagement. Usually, the President "informed" the Congress of the decision he made and the Congress followed through with some form of "resolution" (e. g., The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in the case of Vietnam - a resolution that later proved to be based on less-than-accurate information).
So, now we are engaged in a war with locations where battles are fought and where people die but there is no "front." The War on Terror is not just "one" war - it quite literally consists of many locations. We know it included Iraq, we continue to see that it includes Afghanistan. But we can see that it also involves other locations (examples miight certainly include the recent coordinated attacks on our embassies). We also see that the War on Terror is quickly developing yet another dynamic that many want to ignore and that is the nuclear threat posed by Iran to the region and to the US. To-date, only Israel has raised attention to this very real threat.
We can pretend that our current war (fought on different levels and in different locations) is "not our business" and lay blame on a Commander in Chief. I think we need to recognize that the world is not the same as it was when we fought in Korea. Our strategy has not kept pace with the realities of the world. Too many want to ignore the threat to Isreal and say "that is not our business..." For me, such thinking was a major contributor to the realities of World War II. That war, by the way, was not limited to one front or to the traditional view of war (that is "force on force" configuration). If we fail to learn the lessons of history and apply them to the world (the dangerous world!) that we live in today we do so at our peril.
War is a reality for human-kind and while we may think that we are so advanced and sophisticated that it does not apply to us we, again, delude ourselves into a make-believe world that does not exist.
The War on Terror is THE war we are engaged in and it was in direct response to the attack on the US in 2001. At that time the Congress was united in support of the Commander in Chief. What we have experienced since, albeit in new locations, is the same War. We may be tired, but we are talking about survival and security. The issues surrounding war are so important to mankind that the decision to engage in war should not be limited to just the Commander in Chief - it should be through the Congress and in so doing, with the support of the people.