Reply #111: "Boots on the ground" [View All]

[pinboy3niner]

This is a term that refers to combat forces.

When I served in Vietnam, I fought against Norh Vietmese Army combat units that had military advisors from the Chinese Army. I still remember one battle at the DMZ in which the NVA regiment's Chinese advisor was killed, his body and encrypted radio and codes recovered. Yet we never took that to mean China had "boots on the ground." in Vietnam.

The notion that the mere presence of a relatively small number of foreign military support personnel constitutes "boots on the ground" is laughable. This kind of thing goes back a long time, and it has always been distinguished from the introduction of actual combat forces. Until now, at least.

Now we've seen even the display of a Qatari flag taken to mean an incursion of Qatari combat forces into the fighting in Libya (with the SIZE of the flag seized upon as the most incriminating evidence of Qatar's "invasion").

Both sides here seem to spend a lot of time 'spinning' inconsequential BS issues.

The real question is on the fundamental disagreements on the revolution and the intrvention--not the manufactured/inflated side issues.