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

To: Elroy who wrote (36661)	4/22/2007 12:55:03 PM
From: epicure	Respond to of 541906

whitehouse.gov I decided to go back to the source. After reading this, I can't see it as a win. "The United States and other nations did nothing to deserve or invite this threat. But we will do everything to defeat it. Instead of drifting along toward tragedy, we will set a course toward safety. Before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act, this danger will be removed. " We didn't go to war for verification, we went to war because there was a threat, and it was made to "appear" imminent. Remember, that's why we have the aluminum tubes and yellow cake fantasies, and the weird WMD confections. I agree that number one was a goal that was achieved- but it was an achievement that would bite us in the rump. When a nation has a self-defeating goal, and they achieve it, I'm not sure I see that as a win.

To: Elroy who wrote (36661)	4/22/2007 6:17:20 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541906

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. Elroy, first of all, wars aren't fought to see who is the "toughest dude in town." They are fought to achieve goals that are thought could not be achieved by non-military means. One of the things that bothers me about your apparent insistance that "we" didn't "lose" militarily, is that it appears to lose sight of the most important part of fighting--to achieve the supposed important political end. All three of the objectives that you mention were in the service of another end, which could be expressed as: improve the security profile of the US. Establishing a democracy in Iraq wasn't simply humanitarian or a nice, but incidental byproduct of removing Saddam, it was alleged to be the best way to get Iraq to be an ally in the so-called "War on Terror." If we leave a failed, unstable state in place of Saddam, we will not have achieved our political objective. And if we leave a civil war in Iraq, we will have failed miserably--we will have created millions of new enemies and a less secure situation for ourselves in the long run. We have also managed to enhance the power of Iran in the region. They may yet squander our gift with their own diplomatic incompetence, but they definitely have been strengthened long term with the removal of Saddam, and are in a better situation than we are with respect to the most of the possible Iraqs that may emerge over the next decade (other than an outright Sunni-Shia regional conflageration, which would badly hurt them and everyone else in the region, not to mention any country that depends on oil). I have a question: why are you--and you aren't alone in this--so insistent on asserting that "we won the war militarily"? This seems to be a mark of pride somehow. I simply don't understand this. You don't win wars militarily in isolation from any political goals. If you don't achieve the political goals, you have lost the war, no matter how many casualties you inflict on the enemy or how few you yourself have suffered.