I think you really hit it on the head there **Lemur866 **. We’ve shown them that they can hurt us, and they know we are going to leave, so they will keep on fighting and both the fighters and the general population are going to act under the assumption that we will lose and leave.
Personally I say we lost it on August 19th, 2003. That one truck bomb was the straw which broke the international camel’s back and there hasn’t been true international effort to rebuild Iraq, and the legitimacy it would bring, since that time.
Enjoy,
Steven
We lost the war in the Iraq because even before the war started we didn’t know what a victory looked like.
You can’t win wars without a clear set goal for victory.
Actually, this particular occupation is one of those rarer situations where failure breeds failure and success breeds failure.
Quite… From moment this fiasco started it was always going to be win for the terrorists. At this point its merely whether it will be huge win or just a monumental one…
As if any more evidence was needed for this fact look at the headline on CNN.com:
“U.S.: Iraqi lawmaker is embassy bomber”
The law maker in question is a MP for, Dawa the largest party in the pro-Shia majority coalition. The most revealing point is hidden half way down the page:
This was the inevitable outcome of deposing Saddam (a secular dictator with NO ties to Islamic extremism). The people how are meant to be “standing up as we stand down”, and serving as beacon of freedom and democracy in the middle east, are ahem ‘reformed’ islamic terrorists.
The insanity of the whole thing is anyone with half a brain could have predicted this back in 2002…
al-Malaki, the Iraqi PM is of the same ilk.
I missed the part where Bush warned us, going in, that we would probably have to be there for decades in order to re-establish a civil society. The attitude on the Right was more along the lines of, three months after the war, MickeyD’s and Starbucks would be opening up stores in Baghdad.
But . . . but . . . the idea was for the death squads to be on our side!
The absolutely most frightening thing about that article is that all the indications are that the idiots proposing it are still fighting the wrong enemy.
The utter moral bankruptcy of the proposal is to be expected from this bunch of idiots, but to say up front that they are going to explicitly target the Sunnis means that they are going to be supporting the bad guys from the outset. The Sunnis are no angels and they certainly enjoyed their ride at the top under Hussein, but the overwhelming majority of the current atrocities are being carried out by the majority Shia. There is a very definite grim irony in naming this the El Salvador option: “Let’s go kill the victims so that we can ‘win’.”
(emphasis mine)
Casdave has hit the nail on the head. Even if there were some plausible combination of goals, strategies, and tactics that theoretically could have resulted in “victory” (as defined by those goals), it never would have happened with Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld in charge, because they were not operating in good faith with respect to the American public, the international community, the Iraqi populace, or with respect to their own goals and intentions. They were, and still are, operating in a deep vat of self-delusion and denial of reality.
They ARE on ‘our’ side in Iraq. If we consider the Govt ‘our’ side. I’m certain that dark elements of the US state have decided to just let one side crush the other. The Ministry of the Interior is running secret prisons where rape and torture are commonplace. It defies belief that this is going on without US knowledge and connivance.
We saw the same Secret War shit in Vietnam with Operation Phoenix et al.
It’s to the credit of the US Army that elements have intervened on occasion.
We could also lose by fighting stupidly. As Rumsfeld pointed out re the global Salafist jihad agin US- “we’re spending billions to their millions.”
Some of our tactics employed have actually further the causes and aims of the Salafist jihadis. So over spending on tactics that help the enemy could also cause us to end up in a situation where we don’t have the resources to overcome the problems we created.
What I mean is, the death squads were supposed to kill people like Muqtada al-Sadr – not kill for people like Muqtada al-Sadr.
Sadly, I’ve had the same sorts of premonitions. We’ve totally screwed the powerful image of what America is. That’s exceptionally sad because that image was so helpful to our national interests and was a very expensive and hard won asset.
Where these tactics have been tried (eg Petraeus earlier in the war) their success outshone that of the crews that rode around in their humvees.
This is also some preferred COIN tactics. Maybe this sort of approach became the preferred approach because of its effectiveness?
The global salfist jihadi movement shares some of the same aspects with more “traditional” insurgencies. One of which is the desire to provoke harsh reactions from the govt they’re insurgent against.
9-11 Commission Report
To him, **Saddam Hussein was an American stooge set up to give Washington an excuse to intervene in the Middle East**. Within his circle, Atta advocated violent jihad. He reportedly asked one individual close to the group if he was "ready to fight for [his] belief" and dismissed him as too weak for jihad when the person declined. On a visit home to Egypt in 1998, Atta met one of his college friends. According to this friend, Atta had changed a great deal, had grown a beard, and had "obviously adopted fundamentalism" by that time.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable to guess that these thoughts occurred to others within al Qaeda.