Unless there are some serious violations of the Forum Rules, only the OP Khun Chanchao can legimately request the closure of a thread.

And, being a super-mod himself... Chanchao can have "The Last Word" whenever he likes....

Is "boring" and "irritating" grounds for closure?

If so... what sort of percentage of Bedlam threads do you think would be closed?

Most of 'em?? 'Specially Boonie's.

Unless there are some serious violations of the Forum Rules, only the OP Khun Chanchao can legimately request the closure of a thread.

And, being a super-mod himself... Chanchao can have "The Last Word" whenever he likes....

Is "boring" and "irritating" grounds for closure?

If so... what sort of percentage of Bedlam threads do you think would be closed?

Most of 'em?? 'Specially Boonie's.

...only in bedlam??

WHOA!!!

Don't close the thread just yet.

Last night I had a dream that gave me the secret to having last words.

I'll tell you all the secret but I want your undivided attention. So STOP posting and I'll reveal the secret to you.

Finally, "The Final Word" !

(this reply has been automatically generated by the Scriptmaster, ver 2.006)

Is this thread ever going to end?

Get back over to Rain you ! That thread almost dropped off the first page because of you !

Finally, "The Final Word" !

(this reply has been automatically generated by the Scriptmaster, ver 2.006)

Dont want to post too early on the rain thread, as the weather might change and i wouldnt want to be accused of upping my post count by posting loads of times in the same thread

Dont want to post too early on the rain thread, as the weather might change and i wouldnt want to be accused of upping my post count by posting loads of times in the same thread

Oh come now, you've only posted 118 of the 1,941 replies, barely over 6% of the total !

Here you've posted 12 of the 247 (a little under 5 %).

Unlike me, who has posted 45 here (18.2%)

Even poor Glauka has only tried (in vain) to get the last word 40 times (16.2%)

So, in the meantime, it could be raining right outside your window right now, better go check !

Finally, "The Final Word" !

(this reply has been automatically generated by the Scriptmaster, ver 2.006)

About time someone give that little turd something worthwile to read. That should change him from his daily "Iran is a threat" report

Another story from the liberal pinko-commie bastards, the WSJ

btw, GW Bush is not popular with WSJ readers, you should see the comments left on their "feedback" board.

As Iraq War Rages, Army Re-Examines Lessons of Vietnam

Recent Books Pan Doctrine

Of Overwhelming Power

When Fighting Guerrillas

A Gift for Donald Rumsfeld

By GREG JAFFE

March 20, 2006; Page A1

The last time Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Baghdad, back in December, the top U.S. military commander there gave him an unusual gift.

Gen. George Casey passed him a copy of "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam," written by Lt. Col. John Nagl. Initially published in 2002, the book is brutal in its criticism of the Vietnam-era Army as an organization that failed to learn from its mistakes and tried vainly to fight guerrilla insurgents the same way it fought World War II.

In the book, Col. Nagl, who served a year in Iraq, contrasts the U.S. Army's failure with the British experience in Malaya in the 1950s. The difference: The British, who eventually prevailed, quickly saw the folly of using massive force to annihilate a shadowy communist enemy.

"The British Army was a learning institution, and the U.S. Army was not," Col. Nagl writes.

Col. Nagl's book is one of a half dozen Vietnam histories -- most of them highly critical of the U.S. military in Vietnam -- that are changing the military's views on how to fight guerrilla wars. Two other books that have also become must-reading among senior Army officers are retired Col. Lewis Sorley's "A Better War," which chronicles the last years of the Vietnam War, and Col. H.R. McMaster's "Dereliction of Duty," which focuses on the early years.

The embrace of these Vietnam histories reflects an emerging consensus in the Army that in order to move forward in Iraq, it must better understand the mistakes of Vietnam.

In the past, it was commonly held in military circles that the Army failed in Vietnam because civilian leaders forced it to fight a limited war instead of the all-out assault it longed to wage. That belief helped shape the doctrine espoused in the 1980s by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Colin Powell. They argued that the military should fight only wars in which it could apply quick, overwhelming force to destroy the enemy.

The newer analyses of Vietnam are now supplanting that theory -- and changing the way the Army fights. The argument that the military must exercise restraint is a central point of the Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine. The doctrine, which runs about 120 pages and is still in draft form, is a handbook on how to wage guerrilla wars.

It offers Army and Marine Corps officers advice on everything from strategy development to intelligence gathering. Col. Nagl is among the four primary authors of the doctrine. Conrad Crane, a historian at the U.S. Army War College, is overseeing the effort.

One of the doctrine's primary goals is to shatter the conventional wisdom that defined the post-Vietnam Army. "We are at a turning point in the Army's institutional history," Col. Nagl and his co-authors write in a forthcoming essay in "Military Review," an Army journal.

The doctrine's biggest emphasis is on the need to curb the military's use of firepower, which created thousands of refugees and horrific collateral damage in Vietnam. "The more force you use when battling insurgents, the less effective you are," the draft states.

The Army is also using its Vietnam experience to highlight the importance and difficulty of building local security forces that can carry on independently after U.S. forces go home. For most of the Vietnam War, the U.S. gave spotty attention to South Vietnamese forces. Without U.S. air support and artillery they quickly crumbled.

Drawing on its frustrating struggle to prop up a corrupt government in Saigon, the Army in its new blueprint counsels soldiers that anti-guerrilla operations must be focused on building a government that is seen as legitimate in the eyes of the locals. "Military actions conducted without analysis of their political effectiveness will be at best ineffective and at worst help the enemy," the draft doctrine states.

Within the Bush administration, there's broad support for the Army's new direction. It matches President Bush's own shift away from a pre-9/11 aversion to nation-building and guerrilla wars. The current national-security strategy seeks to spread freedom and democracy -- even if it means committing troops to guerrilla fights in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

For most of the 1980s and 1990s the Army's understanding of what went wrong in Vietnam was dominated by retired Col. Harry Summers's history "On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War." That account argued Viet Cong guerrillas were used by the communist regime to distract the U.S. from the real threat -- the conventional North Vietnamese Army. The U.S. didn't lose because it fought a guerrilla war badly, Col. Summers asserted, but rather because it was prohibited by the civilian leadership from launching a conventional attack on North Vietnam.

"Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam," written by Lt. Col. John Nagl.

His book, commissioned by the Army and published in 1981, gave Army officers reason to ignore guerrilla warfare for the two decades that followed. It quickly became part of the curriculum at the Army's war colleges and remained on reading lists until a few years ago. "The timing was perfect," says George Herring, a Vietnam scholar at the University of Kentucky who also taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point. "Summers was selling a message a lot of top people in the army wanted to hear."

Army histories that challenged Col. Summers's narrative were rebuked. In 1986, Andrew Krepinevich, then an Army major, published "The Army and Vietnam," an alternative account of the Army's failings in the war. Instead of fighting a classic guerrilla war, the Army fought a large-scale conventional war and alienated potential allies in Vietnam, Mr. Krepinevich wrote. One four-star general blasted the book in a review as "a long rambling, one-sided discourse." It wasn't widely read.

By the 1990s Army officers interested in successful careers didn't study counterinsurgency. A few, however, were drawn to it. One of those officers was Col. Nagl, who graduated from West Point and went on to study international relations at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. After the first Gulf War, where he served as a platoon leader, Col. Nagl went back to Oxford to get his doctorate.

The first Gulf War seemed to vindicate the Army's big-war approach. The Army had finally been allowed to fight the conventional, firepower-intensive war it wanted to mount in Vietnam. It prevailed quickly and with few casualties. "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all," the President George H.W. Bush gushed in 1991.

To Col. Nagl, the Army's quick, low-casualty win wasn't necessarily a good news story. "The lesson of the Gulf War was: Don't fight the U.S. conventionally," Col. Nagl says. "The way to defeat the U.S. Army is to use guerrilla warfare and exhaust the will of the U.S. At least you have a chance to win."

Col. Nagl reread Mr. Krepinevich's account of the Army in Vietnam, which he says had a big influence on his doctoral thesis. "I stole from it shamelessly," he says today, although he fully credited the work in his own. He also immersed himself in the papers of Sir Gerald Templer, who led British counterinsurgency efforts in Malaya in the 1950s. "I wanted to figure out why the British Army was able to learn how to defeat an insurgency after starting out badly and why the American Army was not able to learn as well in Vietnam," Col. Nagl says.

He concluded that the Army did learn in Vietnam, but far too slowly. By 1969 the military had shifted away from large-scale search-and-destroy missions and was putting a far greater emphasis on building indigenous security forces, safeguarding villagers and developing the local economy. However, "at that point the American people had already lost their faith," he says.

Col. Nagl's book was released in October of 2002 by Praeger Publishers, on the eve of the Iraq invasion. (It was later published in paperback by the University of Chicago Press.) He took the "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife" title from a famous aphorism of T.E. Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia: "To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife."

A few months later, Col. Nagl was dispatched to Iraq to serve as the third-highest-ranking officer in a 700-soldier battalion based outside Fallujah. "I thought I knew something about counterinsurgency until I tried to do it," he says today. He quickly discovered the challenge to be even more difficult than he'd expected. His unit took heavy casualties and his battalion's efforts to build an Iraqi police and Army force sputtered in the face of insurgent attacks, poor equipment and a lack of funds.

While Col. Nagl was in Iraq, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army's top officer, picked up his book and was taken by its argument that the Army's big-war culture in Vietnam often overpowered innovative ideas from inside the service and out.

The general ordered his fellow four-star generals to read it. Before he went to Iraq to take over as the top commander, Gen. Casey read Col. Nagl's book as well. "The thesis that the U.S. military was too prone to [big offensive strikes] to be good at counterinsurgency was something I noted to watch for when I got here," says Gen. Casey in an email from Baghdad.

The tome has already had an influence on the ground in Iraq. Last winter, Gen. Casey opened a school for U.S. commanders in Iraq to help officers adjust to the demands of a guerrilla-style conflict in which the enemy hides among the people and tries to provoke an overreaction. The idea for the training center, says Gen. Casey, came in part from Col. Nagl's book, which chronicles how the British in Malaya used a similar school to educate British officers coming into the country.

"Pretty much everyone on Gen. Casey's staff had read Nagl's book," says Lt. Col. Nathan Freier, who spent a year in Iraq as a strategist. A British brigadier general says that "Gen. Casey carried the book with him everywhere." Both Col. Nagl's and Mr. Krepinevich's books are included on a recommended counterinsurgency reading list included in the draft doctrine.

Other Vietnam histories have also drawn the interest of senior Army officers. Lt. Gen. John Vines, who was until recently the No. 2 commander in Iraq, recommended his staff read Col. McMaster's "Dereliction of Duty." The book portrays the military's senior Vietnam-era generals as a feckless lot, unwilling to confront President Lyndon Johnson over what they believed to be a bankrupt strategy. Its message: Military commanders must always speak the truth to their civilian bosses.

Similarly, Mr. Sorley's "A Better War" in recent months has become popular among senior Iraq and Afghanistan strategists. Mr. Sorley's book argues that the military, in the latter years of the war under the leadership of Gen. Creighton Abrams, radically shifted its approach. Instead of just hunting North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerrillas in the jungle, commanders in 1969 began focusing far more on providing security to Vietnamese villagers, a strategy dubbed "clear and hold."

Mr. Sorley posits that in the early 1970s, Gen. Abrams's "clear and hold" approach was winning the war. Congress's precipitous withdrawal of support for the South Vietnam government and a fickle American public turned that victory into defeat, he writes. Most historians consider Mr. Sorley's account to be far too sanguine on the war's latter years. (Of late, the Bush administration has adopted Gen. Abrams's language. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has described the American strategy in Iraq as "clear, hold and build.")

Going forward, the big question is whether the Army's newly popular Vietnam views survive after the war in Iraq. If things go badly, there is likely to be intense pressure from within the Army to blame the political leadership for not sending enough troops, the news media for negative coverage, or the American public for its unwillingness to stick it out. None of those analyses, however, recognize the Army's own failings -- particularly in the first years of the war, say experts.

"The problem with blaming a fickle American public or the political leadership is that it gives you no tools to do better the next time," says Sarah Sewall, a former Clinton administration defense official [another Clintonite who hates America] who now oversees Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights. "That is what happened after Vietnam."

Boon Mee, as a veteran, what's your take on the matter

Ohh dear now with the political invaders, no one will ever get the last word

Ohh dear now with the political invaders, no one will ever get the last word

And just when I thought it was safe to come back to Bedlam........

Good morning all

I agree this is going out of hand...and people is becoming a bit crazy...eg: Kerryd and his statics, tippaporn and his emoticons...Gazza and his dreams...I had a great fun, So lets this threat be remembered as a nice one...

If you let me win i will pm pictures of my friends naked...

Ohh dear now with the political invaders, no one will ever get the last word

And just when I thought it was safe to come back to Bedlam........

Like getting the last word was going to happen anyway

Think Butterfly has wandered onto the wrong thread.

"Time for bed" said zebedee. "boing"

If you let me win i will pm pictures of my friends naked...

And these friends are girls ? right ?

I'm willing to let you win, however please send a sample before I make my final decision.

If you let me win i will pm pictures of my friends naked...

You mean you'll pm pictures of your friends when YOU'RE naked?

If you let me win i will pm pictures of my friends naked...

You mean you'll pm pictures of your friends when YOU'RE naked?

Whatever Gazza WHATEVER! Just let me have the last word please!

Look, they are beutiful girls and they are naked in the pictures...

Do you understand boys, THE GIRLS ARE NAKED!!!!

Think Butterfly has wandered onto the wrong thread.

"Time for bed" said zebedee. "boing"

I always have the last word in political threads, hence the need to turn this one into "another" political thread

Your popularity just took a major nosedive.

If you let me win i will pm pictures of my friends naked...

You mean you'll pm pictures of your friends when YOU'RE naked?

Whatever Gazza WHATEVER! Just let me have the last word please!

ooo...I just lurv it when you get angry. It gets me HOT!

Think Butterfly has wandered onto the wrong thread.

"Time for bed" said zebedee. "boing"

I always have the last word in political threads, hence the need to turn this one into "another" political thread

FO... go and feltch Boon Mee somewhere else !

totster

If you let me win i will pm pictures of my friends naked...

You mean you'll pm pictures of your friends when YOU'RE naked?

Whatever Gazza WHATEVER! Just let me have the last word please!

ooo...I just lurv it when you get angry. It gets me HOT!

Watch out for that fiery Spanish temper Gazza.....she gets mean when she is riled....

You are imposible guys...

Please let me have the last word...Buaaaa!! I have never won anything...buahhhhhh! I am single. Buaaaahhh!..

Sniff, Sniff! Pleaaaaaseee guys?

The answer is inevitable, as is the outcome.

Finally, "The Final Word" !

(this reply has been automatically generated by the Scriptmaster, ver 2.006)

Your popularity just took a major nosedive.

It's OK, I only love my ennemies

It won't work on this thread.

Thus far, bribes and offers of naked pics (not of me) haven't been enough to get the Final word, neither will hijacking the thread with politics.

The end is inevitable.

Finally, "The Final Word" !

(this reply has been automatically generated by the Scriptmaster, ver 2.006)

Your popularity just took a major nosedive.

It's OK, I only love my ennemies

Are they a bit like jellyfish ?

totster

You are imposible guys...

Please let me have the last word...Buaaaa!! I have never won anything...buahhhhhh! I am single. Buaaaahhh!..

Sniff, Sniff! Pleaaaaaseee guys?

Not even the Spanish Lottery !

You promise a lot but deliver nothing. No last words for you !! Come back in one year.

NEXT !

.. .go and feltch Boon Mee somewhere else !

As they say in Chinese - 'Rots a Ruck'!

.. .go and feltch Boon Mee somewhere else !

As they say in Chinese - 'Rots a Ruck'!

It appears that Boon Mee is providing his own hamster.