Your critique of Giuliani would be laudable if you had researched your own criticisms. What stood out most glaringly are your arguments regarding Giuliani's statements on the military.

"Terrorists and insurgents." Are they the same? Sometimes. Terrorists kill civilians. Insurgents usually fight against our military. They can be the same, depending on what they're doing. An insurgent who switches sides? Not really an insurgent anymore, eh?

Vietnam. Giuliani is essentially correct. We did beat the insurgency. The consequences of pull-out were dire. Ask the South Vietnamese what happened. Do you think the Khmer Rouge would have taken over Cambodia if we had stayed in Vietnam?

Military. C-141s, C-130s, and C-17s are not in-flight refueling tankers. They're cargo transports. Also, he didn't say we needed more submarines, but rather that we need to look at our requirements for them. Finally, long-range bombers have been used quite extensively in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Gee, Fred, for a guy writing a 'blistering critique,' you sure come off sounding like a fool.

"Constellations of satellites." Um, this is not science fiction. It's certainly possible to build more satellites. And yes, there are satellite-mounted radars that can penetrate underground. It's understandable that the average person wouldn't know that, but you're a freaking reporter on defense issues!

Frankly, the rest of your critique is even more sophomoric than Giuliani's vague platitudes. You sound more like a teenager in a high-school debate than a seasoned analyst. "Nuh-uh. Wouldn't work because the world hates us because Bush is stupid!"

I like, respect and am "for" Rudy more than not. Though he worries me a lot. However, you and he miss the point about Vietnam and how it relates to Iraq:

"Vietnam. Giuliani is essentially correct. We did beat the insurgency. The consequences of pull-out were dire. Ask the South Vietnamese what happened. Do you think the Khmer Rouge would have taken over Cambodia if we had stayed in Vietnam?"

We beat them militarily as long as we fought them. But we never defeated the communist movement. We never did win the battle of ideas, for hearts and minds in South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese never coalesced around their US-supported government, which was incompetent and corrupt. At some point, if you can't make the political/social progress you need, military effectiveness just becomes military effectiveness for no real purpose.

I guess it's always a good thing to kill Islamic psychopaths, but there must be some political progress and stability to replace the killing eventually. We have seen less than progress in this regard in Iraq. We have seen the opposite. And we're not the same military size-wise that we were back in Vietnam. We can not sustain this level of mobilization too much longer without breaking our military.

Again, the idea that we had won the Vietnam War in 1972 is simply incorrect no matter how many times it has been repeated. This "Stabbed in the Back" argument was no more true when the Germans used it in WW I to justify their loss. The North Vietnamese Army fought more intensely than our side and the style of war neutralized our huge technological advantages. Why does anyone give up a war they have won? The bottom line is they don't.

Read more closely. We had beaten the insurgency in South Vietnam by 1969. The war after that was a more conventional war against uniformed North Vietnamese forces. As for the "stabbed in the back" argument, we did betray the South Vietnamese. We withdrew combat forces with a promise that we would back their military with aid and air power. They managed to do just fine with that support (in light of the enormous amounts of aid that North Vietnam was receiving from the Soviets). It's when Congress shut off all aid that South Vietnam was lost.

The North Vietnamese didn't fight more intensely--they were fully backed with the arms and materiel aid of the Soviet Union, whereas our allies were left dangling on unkept promises. Oh yeah, and the North Vietnamese also broke their treaty promises too (you know, the one that said they wouldn't invade the south)--with no repercussions from the US, again contrary to our promises.

You misunderstand. There is no argument that we didn't have superior military forces in Viet-Nam. We could have stayed indefinitely and bombed rice patties into oblivion and forced security onto the region. The problem with the Viet-Nam military intervention (It was not a war) was with the motivation and the intent of the action.

We were not defending our security and we were not answering the call of an ally in distress. We were playing a political game in which the people of Viet-Nam merely enduring the intervention from all sides.

We couldn't win the war because there was no real war to win. We were simply meddling where we really had no business. That is the parallel to the current military action in Iraq. If we had an enemy to attack there, we could annihilate them pretty effectively. Instead, we are stuck in the middle of someone else's fight.

I understand the patriotic desire to have noble and honorable outcomes to all of our military actions. If we are going to ask our kids to sacrifice themselves for war, then they should at least know that they are fighting for a noble cause. They don't get much else in the way of compensation. The people who got us out of Viet-Nam didn't dishonor our soldiers, the people who took us into Viet-Nam are responsible for that.

You can't get a noble outcome from an ignoble cause. You might get away with creating your own reality for a while, but the real reality will overtake it eventually. When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. We stepped into a hole in Viet-Nam and we did it again in Iraq. It doesn't matter much whether you want that to be the truth. It is what it is.

You misunderstand the "Stabbed in the Back" argument. It applies to the US Mission in Vietnam; the idea that AMERICA would have won if not betrayed by weak willed politicians, venal media, commie left. Is that the argument HR McMasters has made? Or any serious student of the Vietnam War? As for the Vietnamese being backed by the Russians, did the NVA have planes supporting them? Or the US Navy?

The revisionism has all came from what I refer to as Neo-Colonialists. And the 20th Century proved, for better or worse, colonialism is dead. People would rather be ruled by their own asshole than a foreign entity; no matter how well intentioned. Iraq is essentially a colonial war and I am afraid it will end no differently than the other colonial enterprises which proceeded it.

"We couldn't win the war because there was no real war to win. We were simply meddling where we really had no business. That is the parallel to the current military action in Iraq. If we had an enemy to attack there, we could annihilate them pretty effectively. Instead, we are stuck in the middle of someone else's fight."

I disagree. The enemy was North Vietnam. There was, however, no political will to attack them. Why is that, exactly? The Soviet Union and China had no issue providing massive aid to North Vietnam in its quest to conquer the South. Remember that after 1969 there was a more or less conventional war. Tanks, artillery, all of that.

People keep referring to the bad regime in South Vietnam and how it wasn't sustainable without US aid, but what about the fact that North Vietnam wasn't sustainable without Soviet aid? Or the fact that their regime was even worse? Why was South Vietnam not worthy of our help, whereas North Vietnam was worthy of victory? Does anyone seriously contend that what befell South Vietnam in 1975 was a good thing? Can you tell me that the consequences would have been the same for North Vietnam if the South had won? You can't objectively say that it was all the same no matter who won, because the fact is that the South wasn't fighting in order to enslave and impoverish the North. You know what noble cause our soldiers were fighting for in that war? It was to prevent the awful calamity that actually did befall South Vietnam after Congress cut off funding in 1974-75 and betrayed an entire nation of allies.

Finally, would you contend the same about the Korean War? One could say that post- WWII South Korea was almost more authoritarian than the North. And it couldn't survive without Western aid. Should we have abandoned them too on the same pretense that they were all the same, communist or no? As a Korean-American, I'm rather glad the peace movement wasn't around in 1951.