Holding your own is not winning. Winning militarily would mean you were defeating the other side's military and reducing their ability to wage their war - that wasn't and isn't happening in either war. You may be killing more enemy forces than you're losing, but that has nothing to do with winning a military battle.
Exactly, because as you kill them, you create more enemies because their family is pissed off that you killed them. The bottom line is the people of Iraq don't want us there, so the war isn't winnable. Now if it was to the North in the Kurds area, completely different story..... If you need a base in Iraq, put it up North.......otherwise get the hell out. DD
You would need a corridor provided by treaty similar to the one to Berlin during the Cold War to do it. Look who surrounds the Kurdish North. Enemies of the Kurds who have no desire for a Kurdish state, out of fear that their own Kurds (there are millions in the region) will struggle to join it. Our base(s) would only last as long as Turkey allowed them to exist. I have no confidence at all that any future Iraqi government will allow us to have them and the other bordering countries are not friends and don't want us there. Jordan doesn't border the Kurdish region. They border the Sunni areas. D&D. Go Rockets! Scola with the Bucket and the Foul!!!
“Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the president to explain to us what the exit strategy is.” - George W. Bush, 4/9/99, Houston Chronicle “I think it’s also important for the president to lay out a timetable as to how long they will be involved and when they will be withdrawn.” - George W. Bush, 6/5/99, Scripps Howard/Seattle Post-Intelligencer "There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our overextended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today." - Tom Delay, April 1999 "You think Vietnam was bad? Vietnam is nothing next to Kosovo." - Tony Snow, March 24, 1999
man, 70% of the american people are douches who support al-qaeda. baghdad basso strikes again! or maybe we should start calling you 'schickelgruber' as you are reminding me more and more hitler, circa april 1945 - hiding in your proverbial bunker, hopped up on pills, shaking with parkinsons, frantically shuffling around non-existent panzer divisions on a map and screaming about how the german people have failed you. "its all their fault!"
Exactly, there are basically two sides that want power, and both could care less what the U.S wants, let them fight it out, the majority don't like us and see us as invaders, the only way to get peace is to let em fight. Eventually there will be another Saddam like figure. That's the only solution. Sadly we were told this before we went in...but Bush is too smart to listen to some A-rabs.
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts07162007.html July 16, 2007 Or Face the End of Constitutional Democracy Impeach Now By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran. Bush has put in place all the necessary measures for dictatorship in the form of "executive orders" that are triggered whenever Bush declares a national emergency. Recent statements by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, former Republican senator Rick Santorum and others suggest that Americans might expect a series of staged, or false flag, "terrorist" events in the near future. Many attentive people believe that the reason the Bush administration will not bow to expert advice and public opinion and begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq is that the administration intends to rescue its unpopular position with false flag operations that can be used to expand the war to Iran. Too much is going wrong for the Bush administration: the failure of its Middle East wars, Republican senators jumping ship, Turkish troops massed on northern Iraq's border poised for an invasion to deal with Kurds, and a majority of Americans favoring the impeachment of Cheney and a near-majority favoring Bush's impeachment. The Bush administration desperately needs dramatic events to scare the American people and the Congress back in line with the militarist-police state that Bush and Cheney have fostered. William Norman Grigg recently wrote that the GOP is "praying for a terrorist strike" to save the party from electoral wipeout in 2008. Chertoff, Cheney, the neocon nazis, and Mossad would have no qualms about saving the bacon for the Republicans, who have enabled Bush to start two unjustified wars, with Iran waiting in the wings to be attacked in a third war. The Bush administration has tried unsuccessfully to resurrect the terrorist fear factor by infiltrating some blowhard groups and encouraging them to talk about staging "terrorist" events. The talk, encouraged by federal agents, resulted in "terrorist" arrests hyped by the media, but even the captive media was unable to scare people with such transparent sting operations. If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the "unitary executive" at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush's declaration of "national emergency" and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance. A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconsevatives' Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel's complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel. Think about it. If another 9/11-type "security failure" were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has "a gut feeling" that America will soon be hit hard? Why would Republican warmonger Rick Santorum say on the Hugh Hewitt radio show that "between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public's (sic) going to have a very different view of this war." Throughout its existence the US government has staged incidents that the government then used in behalf of purposes that it could not otherwise have pursued. According to a number of writers, false flag operations have been routinely used by the Israeli state. During the Czarist era in Russia, the secret police would set off bombs in order to arrest those the secret police regarded as troublesome. Hitler was a dramatic orchestrator of false flag operations. False flag operations are a commonplace tool of governments. Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging "terrorist" attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda? Only a diehard minority believes in the honesty and integrity of the Bush-Cheney administration and in the truthfulness of the corporate media. Hitler, who never achieved majority support in a German election, used the Reichstag fire to fan hysteria and push through the Enabling Act, which made him dictator. Determined tyrants never require majority support in order to overthrow constitutional orders. The American constitutional system is near to being overthrown. Are coming "terrorist" events of which Chertoff warns and Santorum promises the means for overthrowing our constitutional democracy? Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
Not true. The Viet Cong could not hold territory, they were repeatedly pushed out of many areas. They could not bomb the enemy capital at will (especially if you consider the fact that the US was their enemy and they really couldn't attack on American soil), at best they could sneak small bombs into Saigon, but that is nothing like American bombing of Hanoi (when the politicians at home allowed it). Finally, the VC did not force the US military to leave. If any military force could be given credit for that (and I don't think they can) it was the NVA. The VC was crushed in the Tet offensive and was never again a viable military force. I'd say that certainly happened in Vietnam. As I posted before, the VC was basically destroyed after the Tet offensive, which would mean the other sides military was defeated and their ability to wage war was reduced. From that point, attention could be turned to the NVA. Given more time, the NVA could have been defeated as well. The goal of keeping the north out of the south could have been accomplished in Vietnam just as it was in Korea. I would suggest that (according to your definition) victory is also possible in Iraq - if not already achieved. Their military was destroyed quickly years ago, and they really have no ability now to wage war. They can set off bombs around the country, mostly just killing Iraqi civilians. That isn't war though, it is terrorism. Our casualty rates in Iraq are in the order of wars like the Gulf War, not wars like Vietnam, WWI and II, and the War Between the States. We have a few people dieing per day, on average. There were battles in other wars that had more KIA in one day that the US has had since the beginning of the war in Iraq.
There's a big problem to this reasoning though which is that the American public and Congress will go along with granting more power to this Admin in the event of another terrorists attack on US soil. I see it just as likely that more people will turn on this Admin since another terrorist attack proves that the claims that the Admin was effectively fighting terrorism and that "we are safer now than before 9/11" are completely hollow. Consider that the Madrid attacks rather than strengthen the hand of the ruling party guarenteed their defeat at the polls when most Spaniards realized that their strategy wasn't providing for their safety.
Depending on how you define victory I believe the war is winnable. If victory is a stable Iraqi state I still think that's possible but not militarily. Its a longshot but there still may be the possibly of a diplomatic solution. To achieve this I think it would require a commitment on the part of the US to withdraw and bordering states to come to an agreement in regard to respecting Iraqi soveriegnity. Given that a destabilized Iraq is probably not even in Iran's best interests I think this is still possible. What I don't think though is possible is for the current Administration to pull it off.
I agree with most of what you say but come to a different conclusion. I agree that the VC was largely spent as an effective fighting force after Tet but considering that they never were a force that could go toe to toe with the US that wasn't much of an issue. What they were still very capable of being was a terrorist force that could indefinately sap US and ARVN strength. The ARVN itself was weak, corrupt and didn't have the support of most South Vietnamese. A US propped up South Vietnamese government was likely to never gain the support of the people and even the remnant of the VC supported by NVA could've continued a guerilla war for decades to come. Victory in the sense of pacifying the country and maintaining stability was very likely impossible in Vietnam. South Korea was a different situation as many Koreans supported the South Korean government and there was also an international willingness to support the effort to keep South Korea independent. Even in Korea though the US couldn't achieve what was considered victory, defeat of the North, but had to settle for a stalemate that has persisted since then. Sure and more died from the plague in a single day in the Middle Ages than all of the people who have died from AIDS, does that mean we have won the war on AIDS? In the end these comparisons are largely affected by the context. For a battle overseas in another country its doubtful that Americans would be willing to consider the casualty numbers of Gettysburg. The problem with citing these numbers is that the context and cause is important. This is why victory is truly in terms of politics. You can say that we are winning because so many of the enemy has been killed but that doesn't matter when victory has by even the Administration been defined in political terms.
