Why can't we call it a victory?

Well, I do not think that EU has plans to wage war against the USA. They are afraid that the USA may respond to their behavior by decreasing its participation in the European security, so they want to build up some security forces of their own that will fill the vacuum in case of necessity. I am not sure that such Armed Forces can be compared to the American ones: cumulative nuclear potential of UK and France is much lower than this of the USA alone, other members of the EU do not have nukes at all.
Well, if the U.S. expenses on the European security decrease, this will, maybe, enable to accept the taxes cut plan without painful concessions in health protection field.
So, if the Europeans really want to carry the security burden, let them go on. I guess, these additional expenses will have negative effect on their living standard, and some of the politicians there will lose their offices in course of elections in their countries.

steissd--
I should always clarify that statement about competing militaries... I don't envision a military confrontation between the EU and the US, but I always seem to equate true political independance with a self-sufficient military.

It's almost like RISK, the board game. You are defined by your ability to protect yourself. I have believed the American taxpayer, when it comes down to it, is paying for the defense of all free countries. And, this enables them to spend on social programs... That is disputed in many quarters...

That is exactly what I mean. If they want complete independence from the USA (that is what they implicitly claim, at least the leaders of France), they should be ready to pay for it with their own tax money.

I sometimes suspect that many Europeans, eager to escape their ghastly history and caught in the grip of the so far very successful creation and expansion of a bureaucratic superstate, view the United States as an unruly and dangerous force, a nation with common values and roots but doing badly at "convergence" to the largely bureaucratic and administrative structures & values of the New Europe they are creating. They see us as an unsatisfactory candidate for EU membership.

At some point real political differences among the European nations may emerge. I find it remarkable that they have accomplished so much over such a long period without any truly serious political discord or polarization. Now they are beginning to grapple with basic constitutional issues. It will be interesting to see what emerges.

Actually, the reason we can't call it a "victory" can be blamed on the lawyers.

If we were, we would then be classified as an occupying force, legally bound to release POW's, etc. etc.

We may, someday, be in a position to declare it "official".

But not yet.

Yes, we can call it what it was a victory. Whether it was though military genius or much luck we can't be sure. IMO it was some of both. However, now we are faced with the pacification of Iraq, rebuilding it's infrastructure, repairing it's economy and attempting to form a stable government. In that area it would seem that we made some major miscalculation. Instead of hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. We hoped for the best and prepared for it. I suspect we didn't and still don't understand the nature of Iraqi society. The changing of the guard so soon after it's installation IMO attests to that.
Yes, it was a military victory. Will we also win the aftermath or will it be after all a hollow victory?

Garner was always touted as an interim administrator, with Bremmer as his successor. The media made a big deal out of what was a given .. Garner's job was to effect a transition from direct military control to an administration composed of Iraqis. The next phase has begun. The Bodine recall was a bit of a shakeup, and frankly, I see that as encouraging; results matter, and The Administration is to be complimented on quickly readjusting its appointments with that in mind. Its really damned if you do, damned if you don't; had The Team remained as originally constituted, delays and disruptions of transitioning to civilian control would have been laid at their feet, with The Media howling for their replacement. With the changes, The Media howls about "The Failure of the plan" ... much as The Media howled about The Failure of The War Plan. Militarily, the campaign was certainly a victory, but destroying the Ba'ath Regime in Iraq was no more than a single campaign in the overall War on Terrorism. Reconstructing Iraq is another campaign, as is The Roadmap, and there are many others, ongoing, past, and yet to come. That there remains chaos and resistance in Iraq barely weeks following the toppling of Saddam's Statue in Firdos Square is not to be unexpected. Berlin was a burnt-out shell, lacking vital civilian infrastructure and riddled with gangs and corruption a year beyond the official Surrender. Tokyo's telephones, electric grid, and water and sanitation systems were not "Up to speed" untill late 1947, fer chrissakes. We can call it a victory, but The Media won't, even if next month Iraqi teens with pierced eyebrows and purple-spiked hair are hanging out at The Baghdad Galleria, chatting on cellphones, and glued to satelliteprovided MTV, while their parents sip Starbucks, agonize over the performance of their stock portfolios, and drive Lincoln Navigators to their timeshare vacation chalets.

Timber.
Is the glass half filled or half empty? IMO the post war planing left much to be desired. I believe that part of it could be blamed or laid to the feet of our unexpectedly swift advance and victory. We did not have time to bring up the troops needed for control after victory. I believe the plan was to surround Baghdad and with enough troops attack. It never happened because the Iraqi's put up little resistance and fled. Leaving the city vulnerable to looting and chaos. At least that is what i would like to believe.

true



LOL

that's quite good, actually - it definitely made me smile, and it's not actually an unfair joke ... you got something there! ;-)

of course, there's a counter-metaphor there, considering the utter surprise and subsequent outright fury the US government (and many posters here) demonstrated when countries like France, Germany, even Belgium, actually dared to publicly oppose it ... as if these countries had no business opposing the US, somehow didnt have the right to ... that in turn suggested that, thus far, such countries were apparently perceived as a 57th or 63th state, be it without voting rights in congress.

Point; counterpoint, nimh.

Welcome, and glad to hear your voice here!!!

Thx - I posted here before noticing it was on the Roundtable! I just made my proper introd post on the "I Christen Thee" thread as well ...

nimh,

I agree, we do thoughtlessly tend to assume fault on the part of European nations which oppose our views.

However, in the case of France, I believe that, even after a thoughtful reconsideration of the facts, their behavior must be recognized as that of a country which cannot reasonably be viewed as an ally, or even as one that generally wishes us well. France is determined to lead a coalition of Lilliputians who will aid it in tying down the dangerous Gulliver which offends her anachronistic sense of grandeur. While that may be understandable at a subjective level, we must recognize that it in quite contrary to our long-term self-interest, given the position in which we find ourselves in the post Cold war world.

Worse the "logic" of the several positions France has taken with respect to the limits of our national sovereignty particularly threatens the United States which now finds itself the chief object of the attention, entreaties, resentment, and envy of a still very troubled world. Gulliver didn't get a fair shake from the Lilliputians and we won't from the UN General Assembly either.

The United States does not need the sanction of the Security Council to legitimize its war against distant, but real, thereats to its security any more than France did for its recent military intervention in the Ivory Coast to protect its commercial interests there.

Agree. There WAS a clear and present danger, and the US needed to address it.

I was very concerned about the diplomatic pussyfooting that was going on prior to the war. I realize that the Administration needed time to gather their forces together, and come up with a workable game plan.

I wonder how much the delay in the war gave Saddam and the Baath government time to cover their tracks? While the US and the UN were debating, Saddam was raiding the Iraqi banks, and probably cleaning up the evidence of WMD. Hate to be a Monday morning quarterback, but I think that the delays definitely were advantageous to Saddam.

edition

Whose chaos is it, anyway? Iraq's or America's?

By Dante Chinni

WASHINGTON – A month into watching the post-war reconstruction efforts in Iraq, there's one overwhelming feeling: Maybe all those tax cuts aren't such a bad idea after all. If this is how the United States plans to restore the nation it bombed and liberated, maybe we'd be better off taking away all the money the federal government is spending on Iraq and farming the whole process out to Halliburton. The private sector may be untested in nation building, but after the start we've seen in Iraq, it may be time to give it a try.
It's been more than a month since Saddam Hussein's statue fell to the cheers of dancing Iraqis. And while no one expected elementary school pupils to be taking field trips to the new and improved, free and democratic Iraq by mid-May, there's been a troubling lack of progress and professionalism in recent weeks.
The most basic task, finding the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration said existed in the hundreds of tons, has thus far proved fruitless. They may still turn up, but one of the principal groups searching for them is now set to go home without finding any evidence that they existed.
The harder part of the job, governing a population in chaos and cleaning up the mess created by the war, is also proving difficult.
The interim administration the US put in place in Iraq is turning out to be more interim than most of us thought - including, probably, the people serving in it. Ret. Gen. Jay Garner, the Iraqi administrator, will be heading home sooner than expected in the next few weeks. And Barbara Bodine, the US-installed temporary mayor of Baghdad, is being pulled out after only threeweeks on the job. News accounts indicate the changes are largely because some in the administration are unhappy with their work.
As bad as all that sounds, though, perhaps most surprising has been the US plan's deficiencies where the Iraqi media are concerned. If the Bush White House has a strong suit, it's in the development and selling of political messages. (If this administration had been placed in charge of marketing "New Coke," Pepsi might not even exist today.)
Yet, as of Monday, there was no organized US television system in Iraq - nothing fighting the messages coming in from Iran that are openly critical of the US military and what the Iranian broadcasts portray as the motives of the US. In fact, over the past month, the only US television in Iraq was a daily six-hour broadcast that was in large part translated versions of American network newscasts. The good news is that this is better than nothing. The bad news is that any Iraqi watching these broadcasts will not be allowed to serve on the jury of the Laci Peterson trial.
Even in the case of this temporary news, the group charged with putting the newscast together, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, says it wasn't called until after Iraq fell and was asked to throw something together as quickly as possible.
The question is why the administration wasn't better prepared to handle these problems.
There was never any real doubt about the outcome of the war in Iraq and senior administration officials made it clear that they thought it would be over quickly. Vice President Cheney said he expected an end in weeks, not months.
That being the case, one would imagine the people planning the efforts to "bring democracy to Iraq" - the last formulation of a rationale for the war - would have had a strategy to handle some of the most basic elements of making that dream a reality. Increasingly, it appears that was not the case.
There was much to be happy about with the "war" part of the war in Iraq - it ended quickly, with few US casualties and apparently without many civilian casualties either. But in the end, winning a war against Iraq is not something for this country to beat its chest about. The US spends more on defense than the next 10 largest defense spenders combined. That money pays for well-trained soldiers and high-tech weaponry designed not only to win wars, but to win them quickly and decisively. From the beginning, it was clear that the real issue in Iraq was going to be what would happen when the war was over.
The task before the Bush administration is undoubtedly immense. The war on terror is a horribly complicated endeavor. It is, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has notably said, full of knowns, unknowns, and unknown unknowns - things that you don't even know you don't know yet.
It's that third category, the "unknown unknowns," that is scariest, Mr. Rumsfeld says.
That's not good news. In Iraq anyway, the US so far seems ill- prepared to handle the first two.

Well, this was predictable. Nation building is neither easy nor fast process. But it is necessary in order to provide friendly and non-troublemaking Iraq in future.

Phoenix,

You are probably correct, however I suspect that after the furors over the Kyoto and ICC treaties, the Administration feared that more independent action would merely make them the issue, instead of the problem in Iraq.

The self-righteous and hypocritical near hysteria over both Kyoto and the ICC, so amply demonstrated by our allies, together with the uncritical acceptance of the half-baked arguments for both in the world media, made the sledding rather tough. It was fascinating to me to note that after Clinton sat on the ICC treaty for over a year without submitting it to a Senate that would surely have rejected it, and after hastily signing the Kyoto treaty days before he left office and following a Senate resolution denouncing it passed by a vote of 95 - 0, the world rose up in amazed approbation at the "unexpected" rejection of these flawed treaties by the new administration.

georgeob1,

Though I disagree both about there having been a clear and present danger to US security to justify this war and about France's motive being primarily an "anachronistic sense of grandeur" (aside: I never quite understood the inability to accept that European public opinion rejected the war also simply because it thought the case for its motivation, strategy and timing had not been convincingly made - why there should have been some presupposed emotional backlash jealousy resentment thing to explain it) -

<takes breath of air - this sentence is turning out too long>

you are spot on again with your metaphorical characterisation there. "France is determined to lead a coalition of Lilliputians who will aid it in tying down the dangerous Gulliver", indeed. I'm afraid that, apart from being funny and spot-on, the description also immediately conveys the hopelessness of the effort, for the moment ...

You are also right, of course, that should this or that country indeed opt to try building a counterforce to the US, this is plainly "contrary to your long-term self-interest", and there is no reason not to try to immunize oneself from it. That's politics. Something I don't quite understand, though, is why the US gvt needs to be so petty about it - I mean 'little' things such as Bush refusing to make a phonecall to German Chancellor Schroeder, Rumsfeld (I believe) demonstratively ignoring the German minister at the Warsaw meeting, etc. That kind of thing just reinforces the apprehension of what is perceived as a vindictive superpower elsewhere in the world.

Concerning the latter point, obviously I feel that the United States didn't need France to "find itself the chief object of the attention, entreaties, resentment, and envy of a still very troubled world" - just waging a major war deep into another continent will do that, usually, whether the war was justified or not, even without UN rejection. One could conceivably choose to use the resentment of various dictatorial regimes (Arab and otherwise) as a source of pride, though - as in "if Assad hates us for it, we must have been right". I doubt the same argument could be used about, say, Mandela, though ...

nimh,

Thanks for the thought-provoking response.

I believe that our government (at least) did understand the general trend of European public opinion in the months that preceded the war. I suspect their frustration was with the response of the various governments. The British and Spanish governments supported us in the face of generally opposing public opinion - as did others - and eventually that opposition was moderated.. Chancellor Schroeder chose to fan the flames and make it an issue in his hard-fought political campaign. I believe the Bush team feels he went too far in this. The U.S. did make a serious effort to acomodate the political needs of our key allies in the process.

Yes there was some pettiness in the response of our officials to the statements of their German counterparts. It is hard to figure out how to handle such situations with the right balance of gravitas, strength, and forbearance. I'm not sure that there were any better alternatives, all things considered. It does seem clear now that both sides are trying to mend fences.

France is another matter. I believe the attitudes of the American people and our government have undergone a profound change with respect to that traditional ally, and I believe it will last a long time. Too bad - I have long felt that Americans and the French have far more in common than we have with the British. In my Navy days I quite enjoyed our joint operations in the Mediterranean & the Indian Ocean with the French. We all looked forward to lunch in the Flag mess in Clemenceau and flight operations with their Naval Air Arm.

I don't believe the United States consciously sought its present role as the dominant power in the world - we were the last man standing at the end of the last struggle. Now we find ourselves in an historical role from which we cannot easily escape - riding the tiger so to speak. Clearly the current Administration has chosen to ride and not get off: the only safe course in my view. Will we do this with any less greed or greater wisdom than those who have preceded us? Probably better than most, but perhaps not the best.

Mandella's views have troubled me as well. However, even saints can be wrong, as he has already demonstrated in his all-too-human loyalty to the tyrant Castro.

In fact, Mandela surprised me positively, after his release. With his background, I thought he was going to be another Robert Mugabe. Thank God he wasn't.

I don't buy the Franch "reasons", but nevertheless I believe that, indeed, in the world of today, Lilliputians must put some restraint on Gulliver. For their sake, and the giant's.