WHAT LOST IRAQ

[moghrabi]

WHAT LOST IRAQ

Tue Nov 22, 8:11 PM ET

How Ragtag Insurgents Beat the World's Sole Superpower

Most Americans were unaware that we had botched Afghanistan; most still are. I watched the Pentagon send in a miniscule 8,000-troop complement where, according to its top strategists, at least half a million occupation soldiers (stationed for at least 20 years) would have been needed to control the nation's roads, pacify the provinces and establish the security essential for building an economy and political system. Banditry and looting soon made the average Afghan nostalgic for the security that accompanies tyranny. On the other hand, since U.S. soldiers quickly gained a reputation for shoving, kidnapping, robbing and even torturing innocent Afghans, perhaps their small number was a good thing.

If Afghanistan was a dry run, I observed at the time, there was little reason to expect that Iraq would turn out less disastrously. But no one, especially not the newspaper editors who'd been conned into supporting the Fourth Afghan War, wanted to hear that argument.

Four years later, little has improved. Most Afghans, Peter Baker wrote recently in The Washington Post, "still grind out the subsistence lives they did under the Taliban." Women still wear the burqa. "Corruption is widespread," The Week reports. "Outside Kabul, the country functions like a group of independent fiefdoms from the Middle Ages." Ordinary Afghans "are angry at the continuing war, the widespread malnutrition, and the snail's pace of progress."

As I'd feared he would, Donald Rumsfeld deployed the same low-rent approach to Iraq. There were too few troops to secure the Iraqis or themselves. As inexperienced weekend warriors shot up carloads of civilians from rooftops above invisible checkpoints, it soon became apparent that our forces were undereducated, poorly trained and excessively preoccupied with their own safety. The Americans' cultural insensitivity, often beyond the point of brutality, transformed people grateful to be liberated into insurgents in a matter of months.

Now even the hawks say that Iraq is lost. "The U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily," admitted Representative John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), a Vietnam vet who sparked the serious debate Congress ought to have held back in 2002--when he voted for the war. "It is time to bring them home."

Thomas Edelman, whose letter to the editor appeared in the New York Times the same day Murtha's speech rocked the House of Representatives, articulates the last logical reason not to cut and run. "Regurgitating the notion of 'dancing Iraqis throwing flowers before American tanks' has no merit when the brutal enemy to be defeated assumes with good reason that it is bound to win. All it has to do is to wait us out," he wrote.

True, Iraqi resistance factions would wait for us to leave before turning on each other. Then again, isn't that what they're doing now?

Edelman again: "The rhetoric of aspersions cast on our leaders for having deliberately misled us; the repeated dangling of terrible mistakes; and the rumblings about the impatience of the American people not only give the terrorists hope but also convince them that what is in their minds a weak and contemptible society of 'infidels' lacks the fortitude to see its mission completed."

He's partly right: If the United States could prevail against its fearsome Axis foes in World War II, it could surely beat--even after countless errors of omission and commission--a rag-tag assortment of ad hoc cells of moonlighting jihadis. But if wealth, education and weaponry were the sole determining factors in war, we would have won Vietnam. What was missing was political will.

Edelman's plea for compartmentalization is appealing, but we can't separate the way we went into Iraq from the challenge we face now. Winning a war requires a politically unified society, something the United States hasn't enjoyed since 1945. Since then our fractured nation has been unable to summon the unity to issue a formal declaration of war, much less win one. Bush-era America is highly fractured. Because the Administration can't count on most citizens to help, it has had to fight its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on the cheap.

After 2000 most Americans told the CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll that Bush had not won "fair and square." After 2004, the pollsters found, "the nation seemed nearly as divided as it had been in Bush's first election." How can he convince the half of the country that considers him an illegitimate usurper to risk their lives, or those of their sons and daughters? How can he get them to tighten their belts for a real war effort--one with sufficient troop strength to win?

Bush might have earned Democrats' fealty after the disputed 2000 election by convening a sort of national unity government, one that recognized the deep and even ideological divide in the electorate, appointed Democrats to key cabinet posts and ruled from the center. Bush's radical-right policies and appointees, coupled with his habit of impugning his critics as traitors, instead increased the alienation of those who thought he'd cheated. "Not my president," the bumper-sticker read. And not their war.

The Republicans' decision to forego consensus made it easy to start their war. It also made it impossible to win.

http://tinyurl.com/bss3v

 

[gopher]

Neither Bush, his cronies, nor anyone else can win a war that has no morality, justification, reason, or rationality to serve as its basis. An unjust war simply cannot be won. Napoleon, Hirohito, Mussolini, Hitler, and a great many other war criminals have learned this lesson too late and lost their wars. Bush may scream, shout, cry, and recriminate from here to Kingdom come but he will never win an unjust war because such an act would require an alteration to the laws of God and Nature. Lame excuses, lies, manufactured evidence, and pretensions of every kind simply does NOTHING to legitimate what cannot be legitimated.

It is not a ragtag army that has cost Bush a victory. It is the laws of God and Nature that has.

 

[moghrabi]

Good reply my friend.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Neither Bush, his cronies, nor anyone else can win a war that has no morality, justification, reason, or rationality to serve as its basis. An unjust war simply cannot be won. Napoleon, Hirohito, Mussolini, Hitler, and a great many other war criminals have learned this lesson too late and lost their wars. Bush may scream, shout, cry, and recriminate from here to Kingdom come but he will never win an unjust war because such an act would require an alteration to the laws of God and Nature. Lame excuses, lies, manufactured evidence, and pretensions of every kind simply does NOTHING to legitimate what cannot be legitimated.

It is not a ragtag army that has cost Bush a victory. It is the laws of God and Nature that has.

Bravo Gopher. !! ........

seems that many have forgotten the Afganistan "war"......and are not even aware of the status there. For that matter it has left the media as a news item for some time now...... and yet.......it was that first self grandizing invasion that bush used to try to pave the way for the war he REALLY wanted. Two messy invasions for one US prez......... and that does not cover his other disastrous incompetancies.

What the US failed to comprehend in it's militant arrogance is that there is no "winning" in either of these 'wars'. ......as those supposed ragtag groups will win every time against the kind of military power the US uses............Unless the US simply bombs them to smitherines........and then the world would bomb the US. for it's inhumane stupidity. Not exactly a pleasant scenario........

How little the US values life. How much the US values POWER and WEALTH. .........and yet the "rag tags" hold their own against this criminal invader.

"Mission Accomplished" indeed. No one ever indicated which "mission" it was though. (discrediting the US has been accomplished and quite effectively)

 

[mrmom2]

You all seem to not get these wars 8O There not about winning there about money and fecking gobs of it :x Bush started these wars so he and his money backers could get even richer .They don't want them to end ever how else could they loot the US public purse.Look at who is making the money and you'll find out why these wars have happened :evil:

 

[Ocean Breeze]

You all seem to not get these wars 8O There not about winning there about money and fecking gobs of it :x Bush started these wars so he and his money backers could get even richer .They don't want them to end ever how else could they loot the US public purse.Look at who is making the money and you'll find out why these wars have happened :evil:

indeed. That would be the short term gain.- with some longer term benefits. Seems it is about power too......and the "display of power".

devestating that PEOPLE have to DIE in this grab of greed. Talk about a throwback of society into a previous primal era. Makes one wonder if the humanoid is even capable of evolving beyond the warrior mentality.......or greed mentality.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

What lost Iraq??

Over confidence. lousy planning./haste. Arrogance and blatant criminality.

a recipe for disaster at the best of times......but in this case.....a recipe for death and destruction. = war crimes..... :evil:

 

[moghrabi]

Well even with good planning/superoirity, the US would have lost Iraq and Afghanistan. They invaded both countries on false pretenses.

Iraq is now 100 years worse than it was before the invasion. Terrorism (as they call it) is plenty.

Afghanistan - What did they change? women are still wearing the burqa. Drug trade is at it's highest peak. and the country is more divided than ever.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Afghanistan - What did they change? women are still wearing the burqa. Drug trade is at it's highest peak. and the country is more divided than ever.

and it's US puppet gov't is so isolated due to all the extreme security in place now.....it has lost contact with the realities of the country.

both are unstable and unsafe. (which seems to be the USR trademark now.)

 

[gopher]

Note how the pro-war crowd is so strangely silent on this issue.

Obviously, it is because they cannot defend the indefensible.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Re: RE: WHAT LOST IRAQ

Note how the pro-war crowd is so strangely silent on this issue.

Obviously, it is because they cannot defend the indefensible.

or they are plotting a new diversoinary tactic. and then try to blindside :wink:

 

[moghrabi]

They can ignore it for now. But not for long. The stench is too much. Too much killing in the name of profits. There will come a day where they are going to regret their blind patriotism to a fake democracy.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Re: RE: WHAT LOST IRAQ

They can ignore it for now. But not for long. The stench is too much. Too much killing in the name of profits. There will come a day where they are going to regret their blind patriotism to a fake democracy.

"their " silence is interesting. It just might suggest how inhumane /cold they REALLY are. OR selfish......

wanna bet that if things had gone they way they had hoped......we could not get away from the bragging and crowing that would be taking place.???

such poor losers...... and don't have the fortitude/integrety to admit to their mistakes and greed.

Pathos....

 

[moghrabi]

The amazing thing is that their ship is sinking and they are refusing to leave. They know their cause is false. Their president is a crook, their country is the most hated country on Earth right now, yet they come to the defense of the indefensible.

They are somehow pathological liars. They live in a wonderland of hope that what is said about them and about the war is a dream.

Well wake up noecons. It s not a dream. It is reality and the US has lost another war.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Re: RE: WHAT LOST IRAQ

The amazing thing is that their ship is sinking and they are refusing to leave. They know their cause is false. Their president is a crook, their country is the most hated country on Earth right now, yet they come to the defense of the indefensible.

They are somehow pathological liars. They live in a wonderland of hope that what is said about them and about the war is a dream.

Well wake up noecons. It s not a dream. It is reality and the US has lost another war.

tell ya what I think...... They as a group/mob are not "normal" people.. Normal people don't lie to START WARS. Normal people don't keep lying or twisting the facts of a situation to suit their own delusions. Normal people would find peaceful resolutions to issues......no matter how complicated. and how long it took. This group /mob is a murderous criminal mentality without a conscience or humanitarian streak in them. They are cold, calculating and have no regard for human life. ......and will stop at nothing for power, and to hold power. In their "abnormal" minds war empowers them........ like a major testosterone trip.-and only whets the appetite for more power. ( greed for wealth and greed for power has blinded many a man throughout history and is doing it now.

and along with that they are not normal because they have not matured enough to admit to their lies, errors so that the proper corrections can be made. As long as they keep lying, making excuses or blaming everyone BUT them for their stupidity .....there can be no genuine progress or resolution.

and then there is the bush "mental " state to contend with.

How many RATIONAL societies WORSHIP their military as much as the US does?? How many CIVILIZED societies are addicted to the action of war???. THe US has now got a "history ".......and it ain't one to be respected.

 

[moghrabi]

Agree, OB. I just love to see these criminals being hauled in chains, put in torture rooms they created and not coming out of them alive.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

I just want them as far away from positions of influence and in line to be tried for the war crimes they committed.

I just cannot believe how powerless the US population is ........now or how fecking blind. They are KILLING another nations PEOPLE by choice ......out of greed....and other slimeball motives.

I want them all in fecking jail.......every single one that is the core of this regime.

but alas ........because the american society has lost its grounding and ethical standard......'fraid that is not to be. Or maybe in their arrogance they have become coldly indifferent..

 

[moghrabi]

They are too busy in the stock market. In scam deals. Drug trafficking. Too busy to worry about what they call "uncivilized people" being killed so their stocks go up.

Whatever happens to them, the blame on them. Another terrorist attack on the land or not, is their prime responsibility. They are creating more hatred and thus more terrorists (freedom fighters).