America has failed to win the war, but has it lost it?

[jaxx]

How can you win when the insurgents grow daily? And the adm doesnt' come clean on anything to do with Iraq? Quagmire.

"The battlefield is a great place for liars," Stonewall Jackson once said on viewing the aftermath of a battle in the American civil war.

The great general meant that the confusion of battle is such that anybody can claim anything during a war and hope to get away with it. But even by the standards of other conflicts, Iraq has been particularly fertile in lies. Going by the claims of President George Bush, the war should long be over since his infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech on 1 May 2003. In fact most of the 1,600 US dead and 12,000 wounded have become casualties in the following two years.

<snip> The greatest failure of the US in Iraq is not that mistakes were made but that its political system has proved incapable of redressing them. Neither Mr Rumsfeld nor his lieutenants have been sacked. Paul Wolfowitz, under-secretary of defence and architect of the war, has been promoted to the World Bank.

Almost exactly a century ago the Russian empire fought a war with Japan in the belief that a swift victory would strengthen the powers-that-be in St Petersburg. Instead the Tsar's armies met defeat. Russian generals, who said that their tactic of charging Japanese machine guns with sabre-wielding cavalry had failed only because their men had attacked with insufficient brio, held their jobs. In Iraq, American generals and their political masters of demonstrable incompetence are not fired. The US is turning out to be much less of a military and political superpower than the rest of the world had supposed.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=638525

[NightRainFalls]

1. It is a sad truth

It does not matter how great and terrible the army is, if the generals are terrible because they have been great too long.

Dave

[kenny blankenship]

2. But it's like Vietnam in that we HAVE to win it

or we lose, because the territory isn't ours but belongs more or less to our opponent. There's no middle ground: either we score a resounding victory the way the NeoCons thought it would go down with the population showering us with kisses and flowers, or we're forced to an eventual ignominious retreat. In order to win, we have to get the country back up on its feet, and pacify the anti-US and anti-Shia elements among the populace, and after that if we can concievably leave without the whole thing going up in flames behind us, only THEN can we declare victory. So all the other side have to do is hang on and keep taking shots at us and at other factions of Iraqi society. As long as they do that, we have to keep our best divisions there, and the longer we have to keep them there, the more the Iraq War Policy stinks. In the end we get disgusted with the whole thing, with ourselves, with them, and go home.

In short, they can win with a draw, we can only avoid a loss with a decisive win.

In order to win in Vietnam, we had to put down the internal sources of armed resistance to our client government in Saigon, we had to evict the NVA (after 1968) from positions inside RoVN (the south), we had to equip and train the ARVN to seal up the borders with Cambodia, Laos and the North, and then we could leave after being assured that the southern population was disarmed and pacified. We accomplished none of those things --but left under the excuse that we had. Mind you, any excuse would have been sufficient for me as long as it came sooner rather than later.

In Iraq we face almost the same set of problems to solve except that there's no uniformed regular military from neighboring states to evict. The local population hates our guts and seems to have an endless supply of small arms. Not quite as deep and endless as the supply entering South VN because there's no superpower on the other side sending arms to neighbor state by the shipload, mostly pledged to the resistance. But the supply that's there is enough. There's no jungle canopy to deal with yet we still seem unable to seal up the borders. As in Vietnam, the "friendly" local army appears to be incompetent, riddled with informants and sympathizers working for "the other side", and it dies in great numbers when confronted by the opposition.

We can't win. But a prolonged draw is almost as bad as losing a la Dien Bien Phu. It's like losing but without the release of being driven from the field and recognizing it's definitely over. The United States didn't lose tactically in Vietnam but it couldn't win strategically, and the long bloody drain eventually convinced enough people we shouldn't be there. The enemy had to give up for us to leave, and since our being there made enemies of the population all around us, the enemy would never--could never, maybe-- give up the resistance the way we wanted.

A majority of Americans also now believe the Iraq War to be "not worth it" whatever the hell that means in the unhelpful language of pollsters. Hopefully these same people will face up to the logical consequences of their attitudes and resolve to bring our troops home NOW from a war whose objective or course no longer make sense to them. It's homicidally negligent to leave them there to fight for their lives for no better reason than that we can't admit defeat.

[jaxx]

3. I agree......Bring them home now and alive

Everything points to another long war, with no end in sight. We went in there on lies, and we're still there on lies. But there's all that oil, and oil beats the hell out of the bible or the koran in the eyes of the preemptives in DC. Iran has oil too, ya know.

[glitch]

4. "We" lost the war with Abu Gharib. Nothing will change that. Ever.

Best get someone who still has credibility to help the Iraqis now, should they choose to receive help.

Oh, and the reparations will be horrific.

[Cocottelle]

5. Bring the troops HOME

NOW!!!