ameriKa's war mania from yet another devastating perspective

To be specific, via an examination of the endgame in Iraq, the full story on how stupid and vain our vaunted world ambitions really are.

The following article is brilliant, honest, and fatal to any conceits we may retain on that subject. The numbers cited in it alone are a crushing blow to the whole notion that ameriKa has "the right stuff" to run around reinventing other countries and heisting their valuables.

It hurts bad to see anew the full extent of our insanity -- and that's good:

http://www.nationofchange.org/lessons-lost-wars-2012-1325610678
Lessons from Lost Wars in 2012

This article links to another containing riches on parallels between present quagmires and Vietnam:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175114/nick_turse_what_the_u.s._military_can%27t_do
Tomgram: Nick Turse, What the U.S. Military Can't Do

'At the moment, Obama and his fellow Washington power-players are reportedly immersed in the literature of the Vietnam War in an attempt to use history as a divining rod for discovering a path forward in Afghanistan. At the Pentagon, many evidently still cling to the notion that the conflict was lost thanks to the weakness of public support in the U.S., pessimistic reporting by the media, and politicians without backbones.

'Obama would do well to ignore their revisionist reading list for a simple reason: bluntly put, the U.S.-funded French military effort to defeat Vietnamese nationalism in the early 1950s failed dismally; then, a U.S.-funded effort to set up and arm a viable government in South Vietnam failed dismally; and finally, the U.S. military's full-scale, years' long effort to destroy the Vietnamese forces arrayed against it failed even more dismally -- and not in the cities and towns of the United States, nor even in the halls of power in Washington, but in the hamlets of South Vietnam. U.S. efforts in neighboring Cambodia and Laos similarly crashed and burned.

'Victory aside, the U.S. military proved capable during the Vietnam War of accomplishing much. Its true achievement lay in the merciless pummeling it gave the people of Southeast Asia, leaving the region blood-soaked, heavily cratered, significantly poisoned, and littered with explosives, which kill and maim villagers to this day.

'In the wake of out-and-out defeat in Indochina, Americans diagnosed themselves as suffering from a "Vietnam Syndrome" (resulting in a less muscular foreign policy -- embarrassing for a global superpower) and in need of a victory cure. In the 1980s and 1990s, this led to "triumphs" over such powers as the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada and Panama, a country whose "defense forces," in total, numbered just 12,000 (about half the size of the U.S. ground troops in the invading force) -- and cut-and-run flops in Lebanon and Somalia.

'The "lessons" of Vietnam were declared officially buried forever in the scorching deserts of the Middle East in March 1991. "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!" President George H.W. Bush triumphantly exclaimed at the end of the First Gulf War -- and yet Saddam Hussein, the enemy autocrat, remained firmly ensconced in power in Baghdad and the conflict continued at a less than triumphant simmer for over a decade until his son, George W. Bush, again took the country to war against the same Iraqi leader his father had fought and again declared the mission accomplished.'

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