Fair fights ...

Let me tell you something right now. I never had a fight in which I fought fairly. Fuck that, I want to win. Anybody who wants 'to fight like a gentleman' is gonna get his ass kicked. This is not to say I'm a fighter, in fact I don't like violence in any form, but sometimes you have to defend yourself.

That said, it seems as if the generals running the Iraq mess believe the al Qaeda clowns over there should fight us 'like men'.

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Let me see if I have this straight? We go after a supposed concentration of Al Qaeda. We encircle a city filled with civilians. We blow the living shit out of the place. And guess what? The terrorists aka insurgents beat feet and melt away. The so-called cowards won't "stand and fight". Well, looks to me like those cowards are much faster learners then we are.

General Odierno ought to go back and read some good old fashioned American History. There was this guy, General Francis Marion, who got the nickname "Swamp Fox" from a fussy British Colonel (Tarleton) who complained that Marion did not fight fair:

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The current U.S. offensive will fail. We will punch ourselves out on an enemy that is smart enough to retreat in the face of overwhelming force. We will go house to house rousting able bodied men from their sleep and humiliating them in front of their wives. We will detain some of these folks but eventually let them return home. When they return home they will be fully prepared to support whatever insurgent group will help them reclaim the honor we took from them.

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Iraq was doomed to failure before the first pair of U.S. boots hit the ground. The longer we stay, the worse it will get.

There are ways to fight an insurgency, none of which the American people have the stomach for. It's why we lost in Vietnam and why Iraq won't turn out any better.