Andy gets excited...

What commander are you talking about??? I would like to see a name and a direct quote from that commander you are talking about.

"It seems pretty obvious to me that what we have been doing has not been working," he said, adding that the US could not hope to win "militarily". Admiral William Fallon.

Do you believe Bush or any president would appoint a commander who believes that a certain mission can't be carried out and won???

Oh please, Andy. This is the poor schlub who tried to appoint his secretary to the Supreme Court, congratulated the moron who completely blew FEMA's handling of Katrina, and tried to hand over management of our deep water ports to Arabs while we are supposedly neck deep in a conflict with Islam. There is no stupid thing Bush could do that would surprise me in the least.

You sound like your fellow Navy vet, John Kerry.

OK. So what? Is that supposed to be a rebuttal? If so, it's pretty juvenile. You might as well tell me I'm ugly or I smell bad. It would be just as pointless.

I'm sure our men & women who serve in Iraq and believe in their mission likes to hear that they are a bunch of failures.

I don't imagine they do. I know I certainly wouldn't have appreciated that when I was in the military. So who is saying they are a failure? Not me.

I daresay you could hear exactly what I said from more members of the military serving in Iraq than would make you comfortable.

Actually, you can lose wars at home, with Vietnam as a perfect example.

Horse manure. Once again, you're just swallowing the Krauthammer-Podhoretz-Krystol line of BS without critical examination. We lost Viet Nam because we didn't commit the resources and engage the strategy necessary to win. We tried to fight Viet Nam as a political exercise. In fact the reasons we lost in Viet Nam are almost identical to the reasons we will lose in Iraq. Our leaders don't have the stomach to commit to a strategy to win because it would cost them political points. The politicians restrain the dogs of war on leashes of bureaucracy.

Rhetoric like you are saying only enables the enemy.

More nonsense. That's nothing but blame transfer. If the politicians fold because of rhetoric and pull back on the commanders' chains, it is not the fault of the rhetoric or whoever offered it, it is the fault of the weakling politicians. Furthermore, that kind of garbage is just more jingoism.

I do consider them a plausible threat...

All right. Describe, in detail, just exactly how they are a threat. How are a bunch of half-organized guerrillas, who can't even get out of the small enclaves they control, going to get over here and wreak mayhem? If you consider them a plausible threat, then you better start considering the plausible threat from Fijan natives and German nihilists.

They killed approx. 3,000 people on one sunny day in September on our own soil.

No, "they" didn't. You don't even know who you're afraid of. On 9/11, some very well financed and well organized Saudis pulled off a plan they had been hatching for over a year. There wasn't a single Iraqi "insurgent" among them. But even partially granting your argument, I don't seem to recall experiencing the collapse of the United States on 9/12. In no way would I trivialize the deaths of those people, but more people than that are killed every year on the highways. Why hasn't Bush declared a "war on traffic?" And don't tell me that's silly. It is no sillier than a "war" on any other abstract noun.

In any case, you neglected to address the point that Bush's "war on terror" rings pretty hollow when he is enabling a situation that makes it more easily possible for terrorists to get at us. You chose instead to get your drawers in a twist over the use of "my boy." All of this rah-rah cheerleading has become so very tiresome in the face of the obvious evidence that not even the head cheerleader has the stomach for "winning," however that is defined.

Failure may not be an option, but short of some drastic change of philosophy on the part of our leaders, it is most certainly unavoidable.