[Grovenet] Cheap shots -[was] first wood-stove heat ofthe season

[Ron D'Eau Claire]

You may be quite right Katie. My thinking is based on the following:

1) A career military officer can achieve more increase in rank, pay, status
and opportunities in one year in Iraq than he/she might see in a decade in
peacetime, if ever. We need more senior officers in times of conflict and so
the opportunities open up for advance from the top to the bottom of the
Officer's corps. In times of peace, we promote most those officers with
wartime experience, so getting that experience is very important. That's the
true value of all those campaign ribbons they wear on their dress uniforms.
It's their resume.  

2) I never met a career military officer who felt we did enough to protect
our country in peacetime. They live in fear of another Pearl Harbor (or
9/11). They know better than most Americans how perilously close we came to
suffering enemy occupation and the relentless bombing of our cities simply
because we weren't prepared.  

3) From all that I see in the press, most people in the USA are swinging
back toward an isolationist, non-involvement attitude toward the world again
thanks in no small part to the debacle President Bush has orchestrated. From
a military perspective, a side effect of that is to increase the danger of
another major attack on our country. We've not done much to protect
ourselves other than to distract the radical Muslims with the war in Iraq.
Take that away and it's 2001 all over again. I wonder how many people
realize that we were extremely lucky that as many as a dozen airliners
didn't find their targets on 9/11? The rest of the attacks were thwarted by
quick action to ground aircraft and from sloppy planning on the part of the
terrorist organization. From the terrorists' perspective, 9/11 was a little
tap on our shoulder compared to what they had planned for us.

The military knows fear to be a positive force to be managed. Any soldier or
commander who doesn't know what to fear and openly recognize their own fear
is soon a dead soldier. I believe many commanders fear the next President
because they know that person will try to appease the anger of a frustrated
and fearful voting public by doing exactly what they believe will encourage
another attack on our soil. 

Ron D'Eau Claire 


-----Original Message-----
From: grovenet-bounces at rdrop.com [mailto:grovenet-bounces at rdrop.com] On
Behalf Of Katie Allnutt
Sent: Friday, September 28, 2007 11:08 AM
To: Forest Grove local interests list
Subject: Re: [Grovenet] Cheap shots -[was] first wood-stove heat ofthe
season


Ron,
    I doubt that any military leaders are truly afraid of a Democrat  
being a president. Unless they have their own political ambitions and  
they don't want the corruption infested underbelly of this nice  
little war in Iraq to become public lest they be branded as  
supporting Bush or worse making military decision based on political  
calculations.
     Maybe those folks who you see as scared or at least concerned  
are not so much scared of democrats as much as they are scared of a  
few ugly ghosts in their own closet.

Katie