Re: 1. "Define "winning".. Is it merely military, or socio-political and economic victory that you think can never be achieved?"
I wrote, "in a war we can't win." It would be more logical for you to define winning instead of asking me to prove a negative?
I will say, however, that I can't think of a single broad objective articulated by the Bush team that can be accomplished by our military using the tool of "war" in Iraq
Who do you fight and how do your fight them? How do you identify your enemy? What benchmarks do you use to measure if you've won or if you've just driven them underground for a week or two? How many times do you "win" the battle for Fallujah? If you have to claim as "victory" the capture of, or killing of, small numbers of "insurgents" in a land where millions of people approve of killing your soldiers, how big are your "victories?"
Face the facts. The Iraqi people understand that this isn't a war of "good versus evil." They understand that this is a war of Sunni vs Shiite vs Kurd vs sectarians vs tribes vs nationalists vs separatists vs educated vs ignorant with a little Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran thrown into the mix. The Iraqi people understand that you can't create an effective, trusted army or police force made up of men who are free of the influence of such politics and religion. The Iraqi factions understand that a "democracy" dominated by their enemies will create an intolerable Iraq for them. And one thing is very clear; the Iraqi people, at best, barely tolerate the presence of our soldiers.
This war will not be "won" by us. After we've left it will be "won" by some faction in Iraq, or maybe by the division of Iraq into enclaves of sects and religions, and it will probably be a bloody "win." That's the reality.
It's already apparent. The Iraqi insurgents have almost completely driven our soldiers out of the everyday lives of Iraqis. Sure they make some patrols and knock on some doors but for the most part they're now off the streets and trying to avoid making targets of themselves. The real "influence" we exert in Iraq is through the hundreds or thousands of millions of dollars we dangle as "rewards and incentives" to move the Iraqis in the directions the Bush people want them to move. Unfortunately, most of those directions have turned out to be dead ends. We don't hear much about how we've created a better world for Iraqi women now, do we?
"2. What kind of war IS winnable?"
Lots of kinds of war are "winnable." Where the mission is to take or hold territory or destroy of neutralize an identifiable force then it can be won or lost.
We "won" the war against Saddam's army. When the mission became defeating the insurgents and preventing Iraq from descending into chaos, however, we learned that there were powerful forces in Iraq that were beyond the power of our military. If you'd paid attention, that's what many experts and our best thinkers were telling us long before we took out the Saddam government.
"3. What is your threshold for going to war should we see a number of countries become Islamo-Fascist as their current regimes are undermined and overthrown, and what would be your appropriate reaction?"
So what? If those people have the will and the support to undermine and overthrow, let them "win." Once the current regimes are "undermined and overthrown" the underminers and overthrowers will come out in the light. If they directly or indirectly attack us then we will have a mission we can accomplish; i.e. we can make them sorry they ever moved against us.
Because of the strength of our military it's not nations that threaten us, it's those who are hidden from sight. We CAN dissuade those who are in sight from harming us. The overthrow of the Taliban was a good lesson and a good message to send.
Conversely, the course of our involvement in post overthrow Afghanistan and Iraq are also instructive. Although we can punish and destroy those who attack us, we cannot reliably manipulate the evolution of societies and we should certainly understand that forces beyond our control will determine what arises out of the vacuum we've created.
In other words, the best cure for populations that think they want to be ruled by Islamo-Fascists may be rule by Islamo-Fascists. Maybe then, like the Eastern European nations and Communism, they will embrace democracy, or maybe not. Maybe it will turn out that they accept such rule. It's their country. Ed |
