“Thats how you teach our enemies not to mess!”
Jul 26, 2008 Politics and Poker, Sisyphus, Stragety
So, Iraq turns out to be kind of a non-loss, kind of thing, after all, huh? Well, it’s never too late to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory, is it? Or… too early:
Senator Failure
Message to Michael Yon: Once in awhile you should step away from the field where the action is actually taking place and into the far rear echelons of politics back home, where facts and first-hand observations cant get in the way of popular memes and biases, and if you had done so you might have been able to learn that the war has long since been over, dood. We LOST it by congressional fiat.
Also worth stating is that while the senator who declared the surge in Iraq a failure received some criticism for doing so, the pronouncement was, if anything, too late. The proper time to declare a war effort a failure should be the moment when the first American body bag is filled. Thats how you teach our enemies not to mess.
Almost perfect (link added). If only Robert had mentioned The Children…
July 27th, 2008 at 7:15 am
A classic example of this refusal to face facts is the webpage of Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) whose thinking on Iraq became fossilized about 2-3 years ago: http://holt.house.gov/Iraq.shtml.
July 27th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
“…kind of a non-loss?” The families of 35 thousand American casualties would disagree.
P.S. I think it was Henry Kissinger who said that the enemy wins by not losing and the allies lose by not winning.
July 27th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Anon,
By your reasoning World War II was a terrible defeat for the USA, since over 400,000 Americans were killed in the war and hundreds of thousands more wounded. Sorry, you are deluded.
The jihadists are making war on us. After cleaning our Afghanistan Iraq was the logical place to fight them. Geographically it let us fight them in the Middle East, not New York. Tactically it allowed us to fight them with skilled soldiers and Marines, not airline stewardesses and unarmed passengers. Strategically it allowed us to seize the initiative from the jihadists, to make them react to our moves rather than we react to theirs. This is an essential requirement for winning any war. Ideologically it allows us to pit our big idea against their big idea. The jihadists propose a new caliphate, in which Muslims will swagger about lording it over the wretched dhimmis, all ruled by the jihadists. This si a seductive and tempting vision for many Muslims. Our counterproposal is liberty and prosperity in the modern world. This is also very attractive to many Muslims. We’ll see which is more attaractive. So far it seems to be our vision.
In additiion the jihadists in Iraq gave Muslims a preview, in Fallujah and Ramadi and elsewhere, about how they would rule if they did establish the new caliphate. That sickened a lot of Muslims and turned them against the jihadists. Serendipity strikes hard.
The initial Iraq Campaign also took out Saddam and his Ba’athist thugocracy. That put an end to an inveterate enemy of the USA, whose survival made the US look weak to the jihadists and others. It also prevented him from resuming his nuke program once the disintegrating sanctions collapsed, as they were doing. Saddam was so reckless, so greedy for power and wealth that he started two wars to steal other peoples’ oil even without having nukes. What would he, or his psychopathic spawn, have done once they got nukes, buying the necessaries from the Khan network and North Korea? Well that is one problem we shall never have to worry about again.
The Iraq Campaign is the key campaign in the war against the jihadist terrorists (ask Osama and Zawahiri, they said so). To seek US defeat there is to seek it in the larger war too.
July 27th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Michael, I don’t recall seeing any “reasoning” in Anonymous’s post.
July 27th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Michael, I don’t recall seeing any “reasoning” in Anonymous’s post. It’s not even based on an empirically accurate statement, because there is no evidence for his assertion that even the 35,000 family members he refers to are as stupid as he is. Quite to the contrary.
July 27th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Casualties are the cost of a war, not the measure of its success or failure. By anon’s reasoning, we have lost the war on backyard swimming pools.
July 27th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
We’ve certainly lost the wars in our cities at home – 70,000+ murders over the same time period as the war. Anonymous – the families you’re talking about understand their loved one’s sacrifices completely – it’s the doofus ‘progressive’ mentality that doesn’t have a clue.
That’s the same doofus ‘progressive’ mentality that generates the public policies that are the root cause of those 70,000+ murders.
July 27th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Boss: Well put. Concordently, the 6000 16-19 yr olds that we “lose” every year to traffic accidents argue for Reid/Pelosi et al to craft legislation that requires all american high schools to be raised and rebuilt in Iraq and Afghanistan – since our adult volunteers are to the left “our children that we sacrifice in an illegal war”. Think of it, ‘anon’, a seven-fold decrease in teenage homicide.
July 27th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Boss: Well put. Concordently, the 6000 16-19 yr olds that we “lose” every year to traffic accidents argue for Reid/Pelosi et al to craft legislation that requires all american high schools to be raised and rebuilt in Iraq and Afghanistan – since our adult volunteers are to the left “our children that we sacrifice in an illegal war”. Think of it, ‘anon’, a seven-fold decrease in teenage homicide.
July 28th, 2008 at 10:44 am
OK, first things first: I’m the anonymous commenter. I screwed up and posted my comment without filling in the name block. I’m using a laptop without the requisite cookie on it. Sorry!
Those of you who read this blog (or mine) know me and should know by now that I have no particular desire to remain anonymous whenever I say what I have to say.
Now that we have that out of the way:
It was Lincoln, a real war president, who said this in the aftermath of a great battle in American history:
Until you can say that Iraq has experienced “a new birth of freedom” and not a government of the mullahs, by the mullahs and for the mullahs, then you’ll have to confront the horrible realization that this war has been a blunder and a waste from Day One.
July 28th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Gosh, actually, I’m kind of confused now, because Glenn just linked to TigerHawk saying yeah, we did win, and you can tell because casualties are down!
July 28th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Don’t know no Tigerhawk. All I know is what we got and what we gave up to get it — and it wasn’t worth it.
And that doesn’t even address what this administration might define as “victory.”
July 28th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Don’t know no Tigerhawk. All I know is what we got and what we gave up to get it — and it wasn’t worth it.
And that doesn’t even address what this administration might define as “victory.”