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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (36659)	4/22/2007 12:43:11 PM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541785

When armies fight they don't just fight to win a war in abstract - they fight a war to win an objective, right? The war is fought because it is necessary to gain territory, to repel an aggressor, etc. There are reasons for the war. Does it serve some purpose to see the war as a win even though the objectives were lost? If you line up the objectives, you'll see that they were not all lost. 1- Remove Saddam Hussein from power - that has been US policy since 1998. Why do you seem to ignore this when discussing how we lost against Saddam? The argument that we shouldn't have removed him is not the same as we lost. We can have won the war with him, and the result be worse than not having fought at all, ya know? 2- Verify that there are no WMDs in Iraq that can be used against American insterests. 3- Establish a democracy in Iraq which will blossom throughout the Middle East. #1 and #2 are the "war" part in my mind. And I think they were the main reason for the move to war (right?), with #3 being a spin introduced when we found there were no WMDs, so #2 was already accomplished, and #1 was probably therefore unnecessary. Although it may have been uneccesary, the war to achieve 1 and 2 was a complete resounding success. #3 is a humanitarian effort to help the people of the country, an effort that has gone amazingly poorly. But I don't think a failure to improve the lives of other should be described as the USA losing a war. You can do so if you choose, but it doesn't look anything like what happens to your average country that loses a war. Any other country loses a war, and its people get killed, infrastrucutre destroyed, and it often ceases to exist or loses land. If you think the US wanted to colonize Iraq then yes, we lost that war. But using the objectives above, we clearly won the war, then didn't know what to do to replace the Iraqi leadership that we defeated.