Kerry : Tora Bora reference

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Kerry criticism is that we relied too much on native troops in Afghanistan and too little on native troops in Iraq.  

Actually, we relied too much on native troops in Iraq.  Our war plans assumed that significant segments of the Iraqi Army would defect and that we could use those troops to keep the peace, much as the Allies relied upon Japanese Imperial trroops to keep the peace after the Japanese surrender in WWII until we could get Allied troops into Japanese occupied territory.  The problem is the two situations were completely different.  The Japanese Army had high morale and remained a cohesive force even after the surrender by the Emperor, whereas the Iraqis we were counting upon were supposed to be magically demoralized enough to surrender against their "Emperor's" wishes, while at the same time be motivated enough to keep the peace.  How credible an idea was this to be basing our war plans upon it?  The looting and chaos that followed the invasion was predictable given our lack of troops, and the failure of the Iraqi Army to do as we counted upon.  In both Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush has proven himself unable to wait until we had the necessary forces to do the job properly in place.  Had W been president in WW2, the Allied landing at Normandy in 1943 would have failed, because unlike FDR who was persuaded that we needed to wait, Bush has no patience.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Fact correction. FDR never put ANYONE in a concentration camp. That was Hitler. FDR interned (a little to extreme) every Japanese person. He would have actually been better to have just put military age Japanese males who were foreign born into confinement.

Actually, the internment was only for those Americans of Japanese descent who lived on the West Coast.  For historical reasons, nearly all Japanese-Americans lived on the West Coast or in Hawaii.  It certainly was one of the stupidest overreactions ever done by our government and was done because of racism than because of military value.  Had there been merit in such actions, the Japanese-Americans of Hawaii should have been interned, but they never were.

As for whether the internment camps were concentration camps, that is a matter of semantic subtlety.  The two terms are one and the same except that concentration camps are seen as being harsher than is needed to achieve the goal of seperating those assigned to them from society at large.

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