Are Alligators Green?

I haven't really blogged much about a book I referenced in a couple of comments on other blogs going back a few months ago called "Stolen Valor" by BG Burkett. The author, a Vietnam vet himself, documents the history of misconception regarding Vietnam vets, the war they fought, and what the world has come to know them as. It is a well written, thoroughly researched, and carefully footnoted tome. Needless to say, what you read will shock you. Why? Because we are all conditioned thinkers, myself included, and conditioned thought is a tough nut to crack. Think you’re not a conditioned thinker? Ask yourself this, before I created the context, did you believe alligators to be green?

Michael Yon writes about this in his most recent post from Afghanistan. Yon grew up in Florida and in addition to being a student of all of nature’s creatures, he lived amongst gators all his life. Yon’s been in Afghanistan for a month now and his experience so far contradicts what we see in the MSM. He is very concerned about plans to begin drawing down US troops in the fall and having them replaced by UN forces. He points to a bumper crop of opium about to harvest as a big part of what he sees as a potential backslide into chaos there. This concerns me to no end because I place a great deal of faith in what Michael writes, and what he writes contradicts my perceptions up to this point. I must wrestle with my preconceptions and accept the reality. I think Donald Rumsfeld and the American people ought to do so as well. Yon is calling for the MSM to pay attention and asks them to dig deeper about the goings on in Afghanistan and I echo his thoughts. We have facilitated big positive changes there, but it will be all for not if we don’t pay attention to this “Forgotten War”.

We can ill afford to claim victory prematurely in Afghanistan and pull our troops out too early without giving the new government a chance to secure the country for themselves in both Iraq or Afghanistan. As Michael quotes Gen. Galloway as saying in an earlier post, “When U.N. troops start taking casualties, U.N. Troops go home…”. This is, after all, where the 9/11 bombing plot was hatched. Even the most dove minded amongst us should be behind this train of thought. Let’s not NOT learn something from the “Mission Accomplished” fiasco. Letting Afghanistan degenerate would simply be disastrous.

I’ll leave you with Yon’s final thoughts:

"Misunderstanding the nature of the beast is the root cause of a lot bad decisions. This “Green Gator Phenomena” applies to a lot current situations. For example, no matter what the press says, we are making tremendous progress in Iraq. And no matter what the press says, Afghanistan is a growing problem. Getting a lot of people to say otherwise won’t change the facts, but it might cause some to make bad decisions based on a totally wrong commonly held 'truth'.”

P.S. For those who don't read the linked post, alligators are actually black when they are wet, and gray when dry. Don't feel bad, I thought they were green too.