You refer to "resolution", Elroy. I assume you have in mind the one which passed congress. However, the one we all have in our minds is the one the principle Bush spokespeople iterated and reiterated on the national media.
They knew that removing Saddam would simply not sell. Too many other brutal dictators out there. So they sold it on national security grounds--the Al Qaeda and wmd argument. Then, they threw in the "making the ME safe for democracy" filler just for kicks. And, once it became apparent that the wmds were not there nor was Al Qaeda before the invasion, they went 24/7 to the democracy arguments. But those were certainly there before the invasions.
So, I think the resolution is largely irrelevant to what the country believed. And in those terms it's hard to argue anything other than defeat. Goals weren't attained, if you prefer. Which smells like defeat to me.
In general, when you get defeated in war, many you die and much of your country gets destroyed. Nothing like that is even close to happening in the US, and nothing like that is even close to happening to US forces in Iraq.
Well, on the "many of you die" part of your argument, it's not clear how many would have to die for it to be "many." As for the last sentence, there is little doubt the US was defeated in Vietnam, by general agreement. The argument is over whether the war was lost by politics in the US. In that case, much of the US certainly did not get destroyed but a helluva of lot of Americans died. So it meets even the first of your criteria. |
