So you're willing to let another 1000 or so Americans and who knows how many Iraqis (we don't do body counts) die before you deem it a success or failure? Sorry, no thanks
Boy for someone who's such a staunch believer in right to life, you sure are cavalier with the lives of young American servicemen and women.
i don't measure the success or failure by the number of people killed. would you agree WW2 was a success for the soviets, whereas Afghanistan wasn't?
stupid. i've read many of your posts basso -- i thought you would be better than this. to equate the sacrifice of american troops in iraq, an adventure with very little political, economic or social benefits (CONSIDERING THE COSTS) for the USA to WW2 -- a literal life & death struggle -- is absurd. thesaurus word association fun time: stupid, absurd, illogical, loony, silly, crrraazy? this post. not to mention your cavalier attitude towards the "number of people killed".
had you actually read the post, you would see i was comparing the soviet experience in ww2, where 20M died, to its experience in afghanistan, where some 50k died. the point was casualties are a poor indicator of success. more like a wild pitch, i'd say.
Casualty numbers aren't always an indicator of success. The Union lost far more troops than the Confederacy yet overwhelmingly won the Civil War. They are an important factor though and one that can't be ignored. One of the biggest problems with Iraq is that the terms of success though have never been defined clearly. If overthrowing Saddam and self-rule are the factors then the Iraq war has been won already and we should go home. The problem though is that now it is about defeating the insurgents, first it was the Sunnis and now its the Shia insurgents too. Then we move on to saying until the Iraqi military can stand up on its own. What does that mean exactly? What's going on in Iraq isn't comparable to WWII or other conflicts because the goal posts for success are nebulous. If there was a tangible goal and a clear understanding of the costs and benefits of that goal that would be a different matter in saying that troops are dying to achieve that goal and we would know when they have achieved it. The problem is that we don't really know what goal the troops are there for anymore other than to say that if they aren't things will be bad. Well things are bad already with them there.
ok.. i'll bite. what is your indicator(s) of success then.. specifically, for this american adventure in iraq. it's surely not body count, like you said. what is it then? actually, you can even provide the parameters/paradigm for success in iraq, if you want.
I would suggest that the main reason why one is a success and the other is a failure is that WWII is still often referred to in Russia as 'The Great Patriotic War' defending the 'Rodina', or motherland while Afghanistan was only slightly viewed as a war in defense of the USSR's interests (propping up the pro-Soviet government), and more of a foreign policy adventure which sucked resources out of proportion to national interests. The same holds true in the American public perception for Vietnam. Keep in mind that the Administrations at the time were trying to portray the war as the most important front of the Cold War for defense against Soviet Communist expansion, when that was not the end result of our 'loss' at all. We pulled out, Vietnam became their own state, and eventually Big Ronald Reagan redirected the resources to more effective fronts in winning the cold war. We would never have out spent the Russians as we did if we were still throwing lives and money in Vietnam for another 10 years. I would say that most people currently view Iraq as a diversion from the War on Terror which is our defense of the motherland. I'm sure you probably don't view it that way, but many do. Personally, I think we need to pull back and refocus our efforts in the War on Terror. I'm sure others feel the same way.
are people even aware of Operations,like "operation:Just Cause"(panama) and the Hypocrisy of them? We can't escape history as the thread reads;but why are some people so easily misguided?Why can't we learn from history?
Good post. Don't entirely agree about Ronnie's role in the Fall of the Soviet Union, but dead on regarding the other stuff. Not that the rabid Bush supporters here will agree. D&D. Woof!
Like I said, I thought you would believe this. I think you also have to realize, at this point, that more people disagree with you than agree with you. From my perspective it is central to the War on Terror like Vietnam was central to the Cold War. In one sense it was important because that was the place that we chose for the batleground. But in choosing Vietnam as the field of battle, we ended up fighting large numbers of people who would never have been adversarial to the US. It created more adversaries than it removed. After we pulled out, many of the people who were our enemy, and who were friends of the Soviet Union, opted out of the game and just became Vietnamese. I will agree that Iraq is central to the war on terror because that is where the US Army and the Terrorists have congregated, but I believe there is no intrinsic reason that it need to be central, and in fact it is a bad elective choice for the battleground for the War on Terror because there are so many other issues and conflicts that are inflamed by our presence which have nothing to do with al-Qaeda. We are creating adversaries that would not otherwise oppose us. It is like the archetypical ‘bar fight’ in the movies where two guys start out smacking each other, but bump into other patrons who are already slightly drunk and upset and suddenly our ‘mano a mano’ duel devolves into a whole room full of people breaking chairs and whiskey bottles over each other’s heads for no good reason at all. We decided to start throwing punches in a room full of drunken upset people.
The analogy and explanation about Iraq as the choice for War on Terror doesn't require any mention of Vietnam to be complete and valid. I hate the word 'strawman' that gets thrown all the time, with the false intimacy with which one refers to one named celebrities like 'Cher', but it seems to me that you are either not understanding what I am saying or intentionally altering my argument by bringing up tangental references which I made to Vietnam in order to obscure my real point and avoid having to address it.
