We Won in Iraq -- A Long Time Ago
I know this goes without saying, but it keeps coming up.
Remember when our troops marched into Baghdad, took the place over, drove Saddam into a hole and arrested or killed the government. Then we disbanded their army.
When you go to war that's what victory looks like.
Then came the occupation. There is no such thing as winning an occupation. You either continue to occupy or withdraw. It's semantic nonsense to apply the verb "win" to the noun "occupation."
Winning in war or sport is not vague or ill-defined. When the clock runs out in football the team that's ahead wins. When two runners are in a race the first to cross the finish line wins. When you fight a war, when you take the other guys' capital and disband their government and army, that's winning.
As I said it goes without saying, but it keeps coming up in the news, this weird idea that there is such a thing as winning an occupation, when there isn't.
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Too true.
I would have much more respected Bush if he had been honest from the beginning and simply said, "We are going to conquer this nation for its resources, take their oil, and further the march of our Empire and civilization."
Actions speak louder then words, by volumes. In the end, it is a man's actions that make hime what he is, not what is said. Although Bush has hidden behind many smart words and bluster that have hidden dishonesty and GREED, it is what is written above what his actions have stated, and because of his dishonesty and not making his case valiantly heard and understood, he has made himself into a failed leader who surrounded himself with men of high deception. And GREED.
Fellow Bloggers,
Can I take you folks down memory lane?
Do you remember those silly beer commercials, in which each side was yelling what they thought was the key attribute of their favorite suds?
One side would yell - "Great Taste!!!"
While the other was yelling - "Less Filling!!!"
Republicans, Democrats- ---ARE YOU KIDDING ME???!!!!!!
Honestly, its starting to get on my nerves...I'm a Democrat , but its enough to make me want to petition for a box on the ballot marked 'Neither'.
Isnt the important thing that fewer lives are currently being lost?
Furthermore, how can we seriously discuss the notion of ANY kind of a 'Win', when more lives have been lost in this struggle than were lost on 911? The audacity of ANYONE to proclaim a victory is tantamount to one saying - '"just start banging your head against the wall...the pain will go away when you stop!"
The notion of a win in Iraq reminds me of a comedy skit I heard on the radio when I was a child....they were interviewing 'Tonto'...the journalist asked Tonto how he met the Lone Ranger...
"I bandaged his wounds and saved his life"
"Wow - thats great Tonto! - I can see why you two are great friends"
"Well- its was the least I could do - it was me who shot him"
Hold up there Dave, you're confounding war with battle. Yes, we won what might be called the Battle of Iraq, but the war kept on going. The Iraqi Army was mauled, but it wasn't exactly destroyed. Its soldiers went home and they took what weapons & munitions they could carry with them. It wasn't too many days before they were dropping grenades from overpasses into Humvees. When Bremer disbanded what was left of the Iraqi Army he removed the only locally respected national institution capable of keeping the peace. Putting the better elements of the Iraqi Army and Police around but under tight management just might have kept the utilities on and the oil revenue flowing. Not to mention hundreds of thousands of young men payed and busy. Instead, US forces were left to discover how hard it is to occupy a country that has moved on to civil war.
Well, we're talking about two wars, really. The war was started to overthrow Saddam. And we won that war. But then a civil war erupted, and we got caught in the middle of that.
Also, we've been giving weapons to both Shiites and Sunnis, which are being used in the civil war.
Thanks for the post. I also remember a long time ago, when people were wondering why Bush didn't answer critics by saying when he intended to leave, that silence was an answer: he had no intention of leaving.
You can invade a country to take it over, as the Gemans did to France in WWII, or you can invade a country to free it from occupation and return it to its people, as the Allies did to France in the same war. You can't invade a country in some neutral way. Bush did the former, and has been trying to convince everyone that he really did the latter.
And don't forget that we had hand-picked Saddam as our strongman against Iran. Those things never work out well.
To bad you couldn 't tell the troops who occupied German, Italy & Japan after WWII that they could n't be successful.
"There is no such thing as winning an occupation"
We had 1.2 million troops in Germany right after the war ended. We kept up the occupation first to help Germany become a democracy and then, with the approval of the Germans, to stop the Communists from taking it over.
Go see the move "Berlin Airlift" to understand what occupation is.
This will go down in the stupid clichés of history with "War has never settled anything!"
Princeton Junction
Yes, but then we LEFT. Gave the country back to its people.
Bush has no intention of leaving. Neither does Exxonmobil, or BP, RoyalDutch-Shell. There is no outside force or country wanting Iraq. Like Bush said years ago, Iraq belongs to the Iraqis.
The bottom line is, we can't waste our lives or more money on this fiasco. It's NOT a war. It's an occupation.
jgfox,
Did you notice a little disparity in the numbers there? We were prepared to win the occupations after WWII. We are not prepared now, and we cannot afford to be. Not to mention that Germany had been a democracy before Hitler took over. Iraq never was.
Look at what you just wrote. We had 1.2 MILLION troops in Germany. We have less than 200,000 in Iraq. Doesn't look like we are very serious about "winning" the occupation, does it? So we either have to dramatically increase the amount of troops in Iraq, or leave.
How committed are you to ensuring the occupation works? Would you agree to higher taxes? A military draft?
Goodness, Thanks for saying what I've been repeating for months, even years now, in discussions, on the blogs, wondering when it will become obvious enough for this to beconsidered common knowledge.
It is an old right wing ploy to take the "Moral High Ground" anywhere they can, and they do it here all day long, without a peep of an answer from the Left or from pundits who pretend to act independently. It drives me crazy. You're exactly right- It's not a war, not anymore, and has not been for years. It's an OCCUPATION. This means there is no surrender, there is no DEFEAT.
America has the strongest and most lethal military in the history of this planet. That these neocons continue to drive their fear mongering drivel about how the left wants to lose this "War" is absolute nonsense.
We need to take back this moral high ground and end this criminal occupation of Iraq for oil.
I've been saying this for years as well. Speaking as a military man that served in Iraq, what more do we have to do to declare victory. We defeated their army, deposed their govenment and established a new government favorable tours, we even planted our flag in their capital. From a military standpoint, that is victory. Great, we won, now let's take our toys and go home.
Obama 08
Dave Winer,
I tend to agree with your proclamation that "There is no such thing as winning an occupation". But a possible exception might be the U.S. occupation of the Philipenes 1898 - 1947.
You'll recall Adolph won in Poland. Look out.
Who are we? Certainly not I, as I didn't 'march' into Baghdad.
IMHO,
If the idea behind going into Iraq is described as 'turning Iraq into a US friendly democracy', that is also not possible. The world is a diferent place where people know whats going on since they only need a small solar receptor and a laptop to find out who is where and what they are doing. Even though you can't win an occupation by defintion, you also can't end up a winner by walking out or staying either. Starting or making an occupation neccessary, therefore, is a no win situation. Anywhere! Now...or ever.
We never had a chance of any definition of success in Iraq.
Excuse me but you are wrong. Our glorious victory in Iraq will not be complete until we suck every last drop of sweet crude from beneath their soil into our gas tanks. THAT is the true sign of glorious victory. And if you don't think that Americans will be dying protecting ExxonMobil in Iraq for decades, then I have a nice condo in the Gulf of Mexico to sell you.
well said.
True, but we actually failed in the one thing we were after. Bush was outflanked and outsmarted by Maliki. Nouri stalled Bush about a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and oil deal until Nouri had used our military enough to guarantee his own security. Then he said, no deal and told us to get out. As soon as we're gone, he'll expropriate our "permanent" bases, reduce our embassy to appropriate size in the Green Zone, and nationalize the oil industry, creating a sovereign wealth fund. He'll then join the oil rich countries buying up Manhattan skyscrapers. We painted ourselves into a corner with all this "sovereignty" talk and by over generosity in the hope of reimbursement, ie, confiscating their oil.
Absolutely spot on! We *did* win that war a long time ago and quite handily!
However, to our chagrin we found out all too soon that we knocked down the guy who had held the lid on the boiling pot all those years.
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