Thunder and Lightening?

[lsanderson]

It's thundering out there, so I assume there's lightening. Rain is falling. Come on, it's almost the end o' November. I want the snow to cover all the rotting things on the ground. Nice, white, and sterile, that's what I want for Xmas.

An Epidemic No One Understands

And for all you pundits of war out there

The Wars of Perception
By DOMINIC JOHNSON and DOMINIC TIERNEY

IN January 1968, Americans turned on their televisions to find scenes of chaos and carnage as Vietnamese communists unleashed their surprise Tet offensive. It would go down in history as the greatest American battlefield defeat of the cold war.

Twenty-five years later, in December 1992, the United States began a humanitarian intervention in Somalia that would be viewed as the most striking failure of the post-cold-war era. Then, in March 2003, American tanks charged across the dunes into Iraq, beginning, in the eyes of many Americans, the worst foreign policy debacle of the post-9/11 world. Tet, Somalia and Iraq: the three great post-World War II American defeats.

Except that, remarkably, Tet and Somalia were not defeats. They were successes perceived as failures. Such stark divergence between perception and reality is common in wartime, when people’s beliefs about which side wins and which loses are often driven by psychological factors that have nothing to do with events on the battlefield. Tet and Somalia may, therefore, hold important lessons for Iraq. More

May you be given a sum of money, then placed on the streets of Baghdad with no papers, and allowed to live the short span of days that should be allotted to false prophets.