Who Lost Iraq?

My 2 cents Blatham...

This war was lost before it bagan due to 2 main reasons.

1. Political Correctness and maintaing a proper image.
2. 24 hour news and media coverage

War is a brutal, violent, bloody mess. It's that way by design so as to avoid it if at all possible. Once it was decided that war was going to be waged, it should have been waged at 100% levels. Instead, the US has been at about the 20% level because we must maintain the proper global image. We couldn't level Sadr City 2 years ago when we should have because the media was all over the place and it would have hurt our image. We couldn't carpet bomb Falluja and flatten the entire city because it would have damaged our image and the media was everywhere.

I am very proud of the way our military forces have behaved and acted throughout this campaign. I have the luxury of staying home and watching and waiting for them to come home to give me the real scoop on what's happening. They are highly trained professionals that excel at their jobs.

So, I guess you can put me in the the first group, the Bush dead-enders. Though I do not blame anyone but the terrorists and insurgents for the war not being over. I do blame the media for limiting our ability to strike and for not providing a balanced perspective.

McG

Thanks for the honest comment. I confess I had guessed you in the category where you've placed yourself. I also confess that one of the main reasons I posted this piece was because of how entranced I am with the turn of phrase, "Bush dead-ender".

I also agree that this is a necessary debate, the more and the deeper, the better.

As you'll surmise, we don't agree. Exempting civilian leadership is an untenable position. Take, for a simple instance, Franks' comment describing Doug Feith as "the stupidest motherphucker in the world" (or words to that effect). If you get around to reading Fiasco, you'll find that senior military folks held and hold such opinions with depressing regularity. They don't lay the blame on the press.

But even if your notion had merit, it would have been the responsibility of the civilian administration who set to this war to account for such factors.

I partially agree with McG:



(Of course, I would have spelled it began, but that's something I only point out to make fun of McG in this sentence alone and really has no bearing on the rest of my post.)

I also think this war was lost before it even begin for two reasons:

first, we didn't ever attack/invade with the overwhelming force that was neccessary to keep a lid on the population of Iraq.

second, we had no clear moral objective in this war - our rationales have evolved with the conflict, which is never a recipie for victory.

Those who failed to plan the conflict out ahead of time - past the initial asskicking of Saddam's army - lost the war for us. Those who assumed Iraqis would be overjoyed to see us there lost the war for us. Those who assumed we could win with a very small force on the ground lost the war for us. And those who made these assumptions, almost to a man, had zero experience in the armed forces themselves. I doubt that was a coincidence.

I do disagree with McG in a couple of ways -



Wrong; we couldn't level Sadr City because hundreds of thousands of people live there, and it is categorically wrong to do something like this. It isn't that we would have 'looked bad,' we would have been bad for doing so.

You think all those people living there can just up and move? What about their jobs, lives, families, etc? You are completely unrealistic to say such a thing, McG. How would it have made us safer? How would it have settled the country down to do such a thing? Why would there be less terrorism because we did so? Ridiculousness.

Second,



Once again, it isn't the media keeping us from doing this, it is the fact that killing thousands of civilians doesn't help the war and demolishing the city doesn't gain us anything at all. There would have been zero gain from doing what you propose.

You don't have a clue about military strategy, you know that, McG? You see the media limiting us, but the truth is that reality itself limits us from using barbaric techniques to get at our enemies.

Cycloptichorn

Obviously we differ on how to win wars.

The terrorists and insurgents use barbaric, brutal means to keep Iraq unstable. A massive strike, early in the insurgency, would have eliminated much of the strife that we are seeing now. We should have cut the head off every snake that popped it's head up, when it popped up.

How do you think Saddam kept a handle on the populace of Iraq?

Now, I am not suggesting that we use the same tactics as he did, which I am sure you are now formulating a reply suggesting that I am. However, without offering the civilian population a better alternative to supporting the local insurgency, by killing the leaders and troops of that insurgency, they will not support the central government.

Look at al Sadr for example. Had he been killed 2 or 3 years ago, how many of the people his militia has killed would be alive now? Al Sistani has not stepped up to support the central government because of a$$wipes like al Sadr running the show through terror. Now, he is a political force that has too much clout. Had the military been allowed to do their jobs, instead of trying to be diplomatic before the world stage, Sadr city could possibly be a much safer area in which to live.

It's easy to lay claim to the moral high ground. But, past wars have shown that without the use of superior firepower and the willingness to use it, you may as well pack up as the high ground really isn't all that high whne your troops are not allowed to act. Our military is not a police force. They are killers.

As an aside, it saddens me to see you just couldn't, for once, stay to the topic of a thread without throwing in the gratuitous slurs and ad hominems. Is it so hard to argue a topic without throwing around the typical insults? Are the issues and positions that difficult?

It saddens me to hear that you are saddened. Truly saddening.

Maybe you should think about how you feel right now before going around tossing in asinine comments in every other thread, McG. Or maybe not. Makes no difference to me at all.

The major problem with your reasoning is:

We don't know who the leaders of the insurgency and terrorists are, and we can't find them, and we can't go around killing people who haven't been convicted of a crime and who aren't currently hurting anyone, and we can't throw them in jail because of the massive uprising it would cause amongst their supporters.

You are right; our troops aren't police. Yet it is the Bush admin, and those who planned this unilateral war, who insist on making them act like police, and those who say that we can't leave who insist on making them continue to act as police.

I don't think you have the ability to look past the most immediate consequences of actions you propose, McG. You would have us kill anyone who we don't like, yet you say that this is different than how Saddam ran things. Interesting. I'd like to know how it is different.

Cycloptichorn

Wait a minute. As far as I remember the events about the Iraq war, the rest of the world was not too happy about the US-led invasion of Iraq. The Security Council didn't approve. Millions of people around the world demonstrated against it. Bush and Rummy alienated lots of traditional allies by stubbornly insisting that Iraq had to be invaded, world opinion be damned.

Now what you seem to be saying is that world opinion, which was unable to stop a unilateral invasion, was nevertheless able to prevent the US military, once in Iraq, from carrying out their job?

Nope. Not what I am saying at all. That's what you think you are reading though, not much I can do about that.

Sure you can do something about it. You can say that that's not what you meant (as you just did), or even explain what you meant instead.

Let me give you an example...

Israel has the capacity to completely eradicate every Palestinian off the map. They don't use that capacity though. Despite already having almost every nation in the Middle East and the rest of the world already pissed at them, despite daily attacks from terrorists and suicide bombers and car bombs and cross border raids and whatever else the neighbors decide to do. They have limited themselves because they do not want to ruin their image. They also do not want to solve militarily what they can solve diplomatically.

That is sort of the situation the US has been in in Iraq. We have the capacity to go in and destroy the terrorists where they live, but because of the civilian population, we haven't. We have restrained ourselves in hopes of a diplomatic answer. That's the reality of the situation.

Now, MY OPINION differs from that. I have stated MY OPINION on what we should have done. We should have killed Sadr a long time ago before he became the nuissance he is today, but due to image problems, we didn't. To me, that means we have limited our capacity to win this war as a direct result of trying to maintain the moral high ground, media coverage and the effort to preserve our image. Civilian casualties have happened and continue to happen despite our efforts to curtail them. They are the result of insurgent terrorist activity that we should have halted years ago by hunting down and killing those responsible. BUT, the peaceniks have thwarted those efforts.

If you go to war, you go to win.

You don't advocate 'hunting down and killing those responsible,' McG. That's what we are trying to do right now, in fact; hunt down and kill those responsible for killing many innocents without killing other innocents in the process.

You were advocating flattening entire cities, if I recall; to you, this is 'letting the military loose.' How exactly would this lead to less casualties?

The devil is in the details...

Cycloptichorn

This isn't about the details, but about Blatham's initial post. Go back and read it again and relate it to my response.

Allright... I guess that makes you a dead-ender and me a buck-stopper.

With the big difference being that there are no real facts, figures, or really any evidence at all that the media has affected the war effort in any way. No empirical data. Just a conveinent excuse.

Cycloptichorn

McGentrix



Wouldn't that be doing something as bad as what they'd suffered during Hitlers Germany ?

Or does the 'holocaust' justify these actions ?

McG's remarks about Israel are not to the point, and beyond that, they are naive. In the recent unwarranted war against the Lebanon, the Israelis demonstrated that they no longer possess the oft vaunted military excellence about which their supporters in years gone by crowed, without regard for the consequences. Israel whipped the Egyptians in 1948, in 1956 and in 1967. The outcome was, however, that the Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal in 1973, and although pushed back from their early gains, maintained their position in the bridgehead across the canal, a direct consequence of which was the strong bargaining position which Sadat brought to Camp David when Carter forced both sides to the bargaining table. The Israelis, before beginning their idiotic venture against the Lebanon, responded to a kidnapping in the Gaza Strip by attacking homes, apartment buildings, the electrical generation station and the waste-water treatment plant. I seriously doubt that the Israelis could exterminate the Palestinians without making a resolution to commit national suicide, and even then, it is doubtful that they could accomplish such an insane end.

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Such unrealistic attitudes are characteristic of the hag-ridden surreality of the neo-cons in their Iraq venture. Advice that more force would be needed than was planned was ignored; advice that civilian administration professionals and military police professionals was ignored would be needed--and it was Rummy who ignored such advice arrogantly and hubristically, and for three years, the Shrub has refused to acknowledge that Rummy was not competent for the job, and refused to acknowledge that any mistakes have been made.

When Balfour and Churchill re-wrote the Sykes-Picot agreement to divide the middle east after the great war, the obvious objective was to put the petroleum producing regions in English hands. Incredibly, Clemenceau agreed to the settlement. That settlement violated the agreement known as the Hussein-McMahon agreement in 1916, which had lead Arab nationalists to believe that a Pan-Arabic state would be created. Attempting to cobble together something which would allow them to keep their engagements to the Arabs, and to retain control of petroleum producing regions, the English put a Hashemite king on a Jordanian throne (and that dynasty survives to that day), and pute a Hashemite king on an Iraqi throne. The Hashemite claimaint to an Arabian throne was deposed by the Ibn Saud clan, the English aquiesced to secure petroleum rights, and Saudi Arabia was created.

Prior to the Great War, the Turks had never attempted to govern the three regions which now make up Iraq--Mosul, Baghdad and Basra--as a single entity, because they knew better. The decision to create a nation of Iraq, and to put a Hashemite king on the Iraqi throne meant that the minority Arab Sunnis would have to be propped up. The most significant direct consequence of this was the rise of the Pan-Arabist Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party, which, in a highly unstable Iraq, eventually assassinated the King, the Crown Prince and the Prime Minister, leading to the Ba'athist regime which a minority tribal leader, Saddam Hussein al-Takriti, eventually dominated.

In the 1920's, the English troops in "Mesopotamia" were the target of a largely Pan-Arabist insurgency, and which was largely centered in Baghdad. The contemporary insurrgency has the same ancestry, although now it is the Arab Sunni minority fighting becaus they've lost power, lost nearly everything else, and have nothing more to lose, other than their lives, which they reasonably expect to lose if the Shi'ites take power in Iraq. That the Shi'ites will take power is the only logical consequence of the situation today in Iraq. Under the Ba'athists, the Shi'ites were increasingly marginalized, and especially as a result of the failed uprising after the Gulf War, Shi'ites--who previously had been largely restricted to the Basra region in the south--ended up scattered through central and southern Iraq, and especially in the huge, shanty-town ghetto in Baghdad, Sadr City. Hussein unwittingly set the stage for the civil war which now rages between an Arab Sunni insurgency, and Shi'ite militias, and an increasingly Shi'ite dominated police and military.

The neo-cons,
who first publicly advocated taking Iraq in a 1998 letter to President Clinton, were either ignorant of that history and the conditions in Iraq, or arrogantly chose to ignore it. Among the signatories of that letter are William Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. It is amazing that so many conservatives continue to ignore that this stupid, stupid war was planned, and badly planned in a pipe-dream, by the neo-cons before the Shrub even ran for office.

The current administration began a stupid war, attempted to do it on a shoe string, ignored well-informed professional advice on how to conduct the invasion, ignored well-informed professional advice on how to conduct the occupation (and apparently went in with no plan for the occupation), and are entirely and solely responsible for a horrible, bloody, murderous mess of gargantuan proportions. (The historical description can be verified online; the PNAC letter to Clinton is linked; the last paragraph is, of course, my never humble opinion.)

Do you really think Israel used even half there military force against Lebanon? DO you honestly think that the war in Lebanon is a true testament to the military power Israel has at it's disposal?

I don't. I think you use it as an example to flaunt your opinion and nothing more.

Iraq is not lost. It is a bloody mess, an abomination before God and man and the watershed event that truly hailed the beginiing of the end for the USA as THE respected world power, but it is not lost. It's right where it's always been.

I wish we could lose it somewhere.

When was Iraq lost?

The citizens of the good old U.S.A. lost the 'invasion' of Iraq the very moment we let a bunch of lawyers stop the counting of the votes in Florida. Then we all stood by and watched while our 'democracy' was torn again from the hands of the voters in Ohio.
We lost it .....

We did? Gosh, I'm sorry to hear that.