We've lost in Iraq, haven't we?

[EddyTeddyFreddy]

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
[snip]

Even assuming that, I think that we lost, at the latest, back in 2003 when we tore down many of their institutions, and stood by as they helped, in that initial wave of vandalism.

[snip]

You can’t just go around tearing down a society’s institutions, even if they’re not very good institutions, and expect people to know how to keep on functioning as a society in their absence. Even bad institutions have some predictability to them, can at least be expected to behave in certain ways. The military, the bureaucracy, the courts - they all had some continuity to them, and could at least be relied on in some ways. Now, there’s very little that the Iraqi people can rely on for anything.

[snip]

At any rate, that’s where I believe we lost any hope of an effective reconstruction. We got rid of their military and a good deal of their bureaucracy; we let the Iraqis loot the government offices we’d later desperately need to function; we spurned the idea of getting state-run businesses, businesses that employed many Iraqis, back in working order. And to add insult to injury, the Bushies imported a bunch of ideologically correct kids who didn’t know jack-shit to rebuild the societal institutions from scratch.

All that happened back in 2003. IMHO, that pretty much killed our hope of leaving behind a stable Iraq in a reasonably finite amount of time.
[/QUOTE]
Excellent analysis. In essence, we lost the war by bungling the planning for what to do when we’d militarily won it.

[madmonk28]

I believe that the United States has lost the war in Iraq and that in so doing, has begun the long decline of the US in the world. I think there might be a chance to stabilize Iraq, but it would require more than 50k additional troops, a ten year commitment and thousands upon thousands of casaulties.

Troops would have to get out of their armored humvees and patrol the streets on foot, many many of them would die. The Green Zone would have to be broken up and contractors forced to live out in Baghdad. Many of them would be killed.

I think in order to win, the US would have to get accustomed to seeing an American beheaded every other day on cable news. It would have to become so commonplace that it wouldn’t even warrant comment.

Of course the will for that kind of fight isn’t there, so we can’t win. Iraq has become Somalia on the Tigris thanks to Bush’s invasion which is exactly what bin Laden wanted. We have created a failed Arab state that radical fundamentalists will use as a base. We will have to return again and again. We have destabilized the region, we will draw Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia into the conflict. I’d call that a loss.

I’m a rarity, someone who was opposed to the invasion, who now would support an escalation. I don’t support the 20k increase Bush is talking about, but a large-scale commitment of troops. I feel we have a moral obligation to fix what we so carelessly destroyed, but I know we won’t.

[ElvisL1ves]

Those troops just don’t exist, madmonk. Bush picked 21,500 for his escalation because that’s all there are.

From Kipling’s “Epitaphs of the War”:

A Dead Statesman

I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

[madmonk28]

[QUOTE=ElvisL1ves]
Those troops just don’t exist, madmonk. Bush picked 21,500 for his escalation because that’s all there are.

From Kipling’s “Epitaphs of the War”:

A Dead Statesman

I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
[/QUOTE]

They do exist. There are 20k in Okinawa, 50k in Korea, still some left in Germany. I also would support a draft, although that would of course be political suicide. Simply put, we don’t have the will. Also, it will be two years before we have the chance for any kind of competency in the White House, so essentially we are forced to muddle through the butchery until Bush is out of office, by then it will be far, far too late.

Ironically, Bush falsified a link between al Qaeda and Iraq in order to invade and by invading, created a link between Iraq and al Qaeda.

[elucidator]

[QUOTE=madmonk28]
…I’m a rarity, someone who was opposed to the invasion, who now would support an escalation. I don’t support the 20k increase Bush is talking about, but a large-scale commitment of troops. I feel we have a moral obligation to fix what we so carelessly destroyed, but I know we won’t.
[/QUOTE]

Respectfully, no.

I agree that we incurred a moral obligation, but it is a moral obligation we cannot meet. Suppose you had your 50,000 men, or twice that. Would that be sufficient to impose peace and order by force of arms? Keeping in mind that the stress of such combat conditions grinds men to powder toot damn sweet. They will need constant rotation to rear echelons to keep them from turning into stress buckets.

Massive support, of course. Vehicles we don’t have and can’t make in time. Etc., etc., ad infinitum. From here, it looks like little more than a futile sacrifice. While we are certainly obligated to the Iraqi people but I would need some solid reason to believe that it will be effective, and not merely a sacrifice of our best towards penance.

Abraham was wrong, he should have said “No”. And I would much prefer Cheney commits *seppuku * in the Rose Garden.

[Squink]

[QUOTE=elucidator]
I agree that we incurred a moral obligation, but it is a moral obligation we cannot meet.
[/QUOTE]
Yup, senator McCain said back in 2003:

If we do not meaningfully improve services and security in Iraq over the next few months, it may be too late. We will risk an irreversible loss of Iraqi confidence and reinforce the efforts of extremists who seek our defeat and threaten Iraq’s democratic future.

We risked it.
We lost it.
There’s nothing we can do about it, because it’s irreversible.
We can throw all the troops and money in the world at the problem now, and it won’t be fixed.

[casdave]

The US top brass said that it would take over 400k men to make the initial invasion and hold it down in the immediate aftermath.

Rumsfeld overruled them, he claimed this should be a travel light and punch above your weight strategy.

So he reduced the number to less than 200k.

What he was too stupid to understand was the the US top brass have decades upon decades of experience, how many years did Rumsfeld do in the army ??

So there simply were not the boots on the ground to do the boring stuff like man roadblocks, or any of the other millions and one things that needs to happen if you want effective martial law.

Without effective martial law, there was no law whatsoever.

The war was lost before the US invaded, it was lost by Rumsfeld, it was lost by the US electorate that put Bush there, it was lost by the Republican appointements, among those being Rumsfeld, it was lost by the greedy little corporate piggies too busy ensuring their own people got in positions of power so they could deliver the uncontested contracts.

It was lost by the insane notion that to bring ‘freedom’ to Iraq, then Iraqis had the resources to pay for it, all those resources carefully tended by the Bushite industrialists. Transparent criminal greed.

The war was unwinnable as soon as the false accustations of WMD were rolled out, it was lost during the prewar propaganda campaign to justify it. As soon as these lies became apparent, the international support for the US war turned from suspicion, to none whatsoever. It means that the populations of the US and UK would not be prepared to put in unlimited resources. The moral arguments were lost.

It was probably lost after the coalition that retook Kuwait turned around, because that was when there was a reasonably coherant Saddam Hussain resistance, it was when the the international community had their one chance of internal Iraqi support, it was befoe Al Qaeda was sufficiently organised.

There were plenty of reasons for turning around after retaking Kuwait, but the result is that this war is now lost.

Bush, Rumsfeld etc will never have to worry about their children dying, nor worry about their futrue income, they and their families are set up for generations to come, same cannot be said of the mid east.

[komb]

We lost the day we caught Sadam and didn’t kill him. Where was the Abu Grabe team then?

[elucidator]

A special insight.

[Merijeek]

[QUOTE=elucidator]
A special insight.
[/QUOTE]

See, because he was obviously masterminding the Baathist Deadender Insurgency from his spider hole and then from prison.

Now that Saddam is dead the war has turned a corner. The next six months will be crucial.

-Joe

[elucidator]

Oh. 'Cause I was think that he meant sending Saddam to Abu Ghraib, where Lynde Englund would break him in interrogation, and he would spill where all the bioweapons were hidden. (I’m betting on Syria). And then kill him.

[Merijeek]

[QUOTE=elucidator]
Oh. 'Cause I was think that he meant sending Saddam to Abu Ghraib, where Lynde Englund would break him in interrogation, and he would spill where all the bioweapons were hidden. (I’m betting on Syria). And then kill him.
[/QUOTE]

Maybe…say what you want, but I’ll bet that bitch is good with a rope. She would have been able to do it without popping his head off.

-Joe, yes I know…

[Squink]

Whatever happens, it’ll Backfire on the Democrats

If Iraq is stabilized this side of chaos, the congressional Democrats will be remembered as the people who fought to prevent it, who tried to kneecap the commander and demoralize the armed forces, and all in all make the mission more difficult. If, on the other hand, the surge is seen to fail, they will be the ones who made it more difficult, demoralized the armed forces, kneecapped the commander, and telegraphed to the enemy that our will was cracking, and we would shortly be leaving.

[Merijeek]

[QUOTE=Squink]
Whatever happens, it’ll Backfire on the Democrats
[/QUOTE]

The GOP spent two decades building a very impressive noise machine - spin spin spin. The loudest voice gets heard - not the most accurate one.

-Joe

[Evil_Captor]

[QUOTE=ElvisL1ves]
But the same is true of almost any occupying power in any country.
[/QUOTE]

You mean, like China in Tibet?

[elucidator]

A stinging rejoinder, and one that undoubtedly proves something very, very important. Perhaps you’d tell us what, exactly?

[tagos]

I’ve just watched an excellent doc on UK’s Channel 4. All about the death squads openly operating in the Iraqi Govt. Particularly the Ministry of Interior police who are just the Badr Militia incorporated wholesale.

Thousands of civilians are being deliberately killed every month in Iraq - more than were killed in the final years of Saddam’s regime. Working with local Iraqi journalists, reporter Deborah Davies shows how night after night death squads rampage through Baghdad’s previously mixed neighbourhoods. Up to a hundred bodies a day are dumped on the streets, often showing signs of torture with electric drills. Whole areas of Baghdad have now been ethnically cleansed.

While the US and UK governments have been blaming Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda for the deaths, Dispatches reveals how the majority of these murders have been carried out by the Shia militia which have systematically infiltrated and taken over police units and entire government ministries. And it highlights how the killers act with impunity - there’s little investigation into their activities.

Dispatches has obtained disturbing video footage showing how the Shia-controlled Interior Ministry has run a network of secret prisons where Sunnis are imprisoned, horrifically tortured and killed. Mohammed Al Daini, a Sunni Iraqi MP describes to Davies how he recently discovered such a jail and found hundreds of terribly tortured prisoners. The men had been imprisoned when the current finance minister Bayan Jabr was interior minister and in charge of the police.

Two of Jabr’s former US advisors tell Davies that they repeatedly warned the US government about Jabr and their concerns that money was being siphoned off to fund a Shia militia called the Badr brigade, which was taking over the Housing ministry, and that the militias were growing in number and power to such an extent that today’s slaughter was inevitable. The US authorities fired both of them.

Dispatches also reveals evidence linking sectarian killings to the special police commando units. Davies speaks to Gerry Burke, a senior US advisor in Iraq for most of 2005. He reveals that he saw entire units of the Badr Brigade enrolled in the police and special commando units.

Iraq’s Death Squads

It’s theEl Salvadore Option being put into effect.

What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called “the Salvador option”—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is.

NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported “nationalist” forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers.

[Evil_Captor]

[QUOTE=elucidator]
A stinging rejoinder, and one that undoubtedly proves something very, very important. Perhaps you’d tell us what, exactly?
[/QUOTE]

That you CAN occupy and hold another country if you are willing to act with sufficient brutality toward its populace. I’m not advocating the brutailty, just recognizing the facts.

[FRDE]

The thing that worries me is that the ‘insurgents’ are just getting better at giving invaders and each other a hard time.

However many troops one piles in, if they (the locals) think that one day they will go, then the most they will do is bury their arms.

If faced with a totally domestic solution, and one that looks as if it might work, then they could behave differently.

[Lemur866]

Well, occupation is one of those situations where success breeds success and failure breeds failure.

If it looks like the occupation is going to continue for decades at least, and the occupation troops can’t be touched, then the locals figure there’s no percentage in continuing to fight, and they give up. It’s not like they give up the idea of independence, it’s just that they put them on hold. People cooperate with the occupation government, which marginalizes the insurgents further. Every success of the occupying force shows the people that the occupiers can’t be beat. The occupiers have patronage jobs to hand out, they open schools to educate the young in the new ways, every aqueduct built means another group of people who have gained through the occupation and who would lose if the occupiers leave. And decades later their children might make the same choice, and eventually the conquered land becomes a province of the empire.

But when it looks like the occupiers could leave any time, and combat operations against the occupying troops achieve some success, then no one wants to risk cooperation, even if you want the occupiers to win. What if they leave behind police files when they leave that show you provided them with information? When the insurgents take over they’re going to purge the collaborators, and you don’t want to be on that list. So prudent people wait out the occupation. Failure breeds failure.

At this point, it would take a nearly superhuman effort to turn things around to the point where the average Iraqi thinks the US-backed government is going to last very long. Except our current administration is the one that implemented the failed policies, so the idea that they’ll turn around, figure out what really needs to be done, and commit the US to the new course is fantasy. If they were the kind of people who could turn around the Iraq situation they would have done so 2 years ago. And even if we had a plan that could turn it around, the American people aren’t going to be willing to pay the price it would take. Every previous failure needs a success to make up for the previous failure itself, plus a half-dozen successes to make up for the failures caused by the failure. I don’t see that kind of deftness emerging any time soon.