So Iraq was poorly planned and didn't achieve its stated aims. It is just the latest in a long line stretching back to Gallipoli and beyond.

Yeah, I know, I know. But what are we going to do about it? When I lived in UK 40 years ago I used to come over all smug and patriotic on May Day. That was when the TV would show the Russians having a big parade with tanks rolling, serried ranks of high stepping soldiers, jets overhead and so forth and so on. I would remember the ANZAC day parade in those days with the old diggers, the boy scouts marching, the Police Pipe Band.... the two–up games going on and the beer drinking and bullsh**ing starting at midday, and I would think what a great country I belonged to and wasn't about time I returned to it. Today it is all for real with Grand Parades with real soldiers and real guns: ah the h*ll with it, I think it is high time that I moved on.

This war showed just how flimsy our "free" society is.
The media followed the money, and the cynics won the day.
Politicians lied and followed the line given by their corporate masters. This charade was so obviously BS that even the spin masters were embarrassed. Just as well the "GFC" came along to distract people from the criminal regimes that had been controlling the West...
War is very costly...have we forgotten that?
"Lest we forget". How sad that we use those lines now in a jingoistic way while we once again use blood to pay for international politics.
We can manage physical defence easily using modern technology if it were managed correctly. Had we learned from the ANZAC experience we would by now have an impressive missile based *defence* system and we would *never* kill overseas for politics.
Sadly we are programming a whole new generation of minds to dehumanise the "enemy" and once again go killing for glory...except it will be for profit and lies as usual.
The military has identified climate change as the *real* enemy. Starving people will not respect borders, nor give up. Helping countries stand on their own two feet, not bombing them back to poverty is the way to be more secure.
911 was caused by US bully boy and criminal behaviour. Worse is to come if they don't stop the CIA lawlessness, Echelon (illegal spying), fake intelligence (used to justify Iraq)...etc.

So Obama is going to send 30,000 young men and women to Afgahistan.At this moment Gen McCrystal is talking on Radio National saying that "We are there to enable the Afghani people to achieve good,government." I am listening to a member of the Taliban threatening that "if you send more soldiers, we will kill more soldiers. If America stops invading our country, we can negotiate
with the government ourselves".Sure , I know that it would be naieve to believe that but it would be naieve to believe that the United States is there to protect the Afghanis. And of course, nobody is counting the deaths of Afghani people or the number of people who lose their limbs and their sanity as a result of their time in these countries.