By Stan Goff, from Counterpunch, via BuzzFlash: A Special Forces Veteran reacts with horror to President Shrub's manly taunt of the non-existent Iraqi guerrilla. "Bring 'em on?" Some quotes:


In 1970, when I arrived at my unit, Company A, 4th Battalion/503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade, in what was then the Republic of Vietnam, I was charged up for a fight. ... So I was dismayed when one of my new colleagues--a veteran who'd been there ten months--told me, "We are losing this war." Not only that, he said, if I wanted to survive for my one year there, I had to understand one very basic thing. All Vietnamese were the enemy, and for us, the grunts on the ground, this was a race war. Within one month, it was apparent that everything he told me was true, and that every reason that was being given to the American public for the war was not true.


Now, exercising his one true talent--blundering--George W. Bush has begun the improbable process of alienating the very troops upon whom he depends to carry out the neo-con ambition of restructuring the world by arms. Somewhere in Balad, or Fallujah, or Baghdad, there is a soldier telling a new replacement, "We are losing this war."