Posted By: goodlife  on Tuesday, May 06, 2008

The whole thing goes back to two principals that the US seems to forget.

1.  The winner doesn't say when a war is over--The loser says when a war is over.

2.  Time is different in different cultures.  



"Mission Accomplished" showed that the US had no thought of what victory means.  As long as the defeated don't feel defeated, they are not defeated.  We aren't fighting in western culture where you enter the capital city and the enemy concedes.  War in much of the rest of the world means totally and utterly destroying the enemy.  This goes back to Old Testament times when God ordered that every person, every animal, every crop be destroyed.  That is defeat in the Middle East, nothing less.  Until that point the war goes on.

Which brings us to the second point.  Time is not the same. To the US five years is a long time. In the Middle East a hundred years is a short time.  For over 2000 years Israel did not admit defeat even though they did not possess one square foot of land.  They instead said every one of those years, "Next year in Jerusalem".  They did not admit defeat and time meant nothing.  The same is true of the Persian empire.  It hasn't been a factor in world news for a few thousand years, but it hasn't ad