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

To: Cogito who wrote (36669)	4/22/2007 1:57:38 PM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541921

I dispute your definition of defeat in war. When you get defeated in a war that takes place in your own country, then much of your country gets destroyed. When you get defeated in a war abroad, it doesn't. You wouldn't claim that we won in Vietnam, would you? I can't really claim much special knowledge of the Vietnam war beyond one history book and the various movies that came out from about 1978 to now. From what I know in the Vietnam war I'd say our side lost. But again, for the US it is more like we quit than what happened to the South Vietnamese, who really lost. They were turned into refugees and suffered great loss of life and freedoms. We (the USA) essentially decided their cause was no longer worth fighting for, and we went home. It's not the same as losing a war on your homeland, or losing a colony to the indigenous people. The main difference between Iraq and Vietnam is that in Vietnam there was an enemy - the North - to lose to. In Iraq, if we decide we've accomplished some of our goals, but one of our many goals (stable democracy) is not worth the cost, and so we leave at a time of our choosing, there are more accurate ways to describe that than "being defeated in a war". Anyway, it isn't necessarily a question of victory or defeat as it is whether we have succeeded or failed in our mission. Replacing a totalitarian regime with a stable democracy was an important part of the mission. We haven't really accomplished that. Agreed, we've only partially accomplished that. That is a much more accurate way of describing things. Another important justification was removing a threat to our own security. Since we now know that Hussein's regime was not a real threat to our security, in that it had no WMDs nor any operational connection with Al Qaeda, that mission wasn't really a success either. We simply discovered that we had been mistaken, and had removed a threat that didn't really exist. Yup. I think it is much more useful to describe as you are each separate mission and the success or failure of them, and the benefits or cost, than to blanket the campaign with the " we cannot let the enemy defeat us", which is the dogma that comes out of the idea of viewing the entire situation in Iraq as a single war which we will win or lose. However, the part that most resembles what you average person considers a "war" was the coalition versus Saddam's regime, and I'm still surprised at people who are hesitant to say the coalition won that war hands down. Whether it has positive or negative results for the US, the coalition won that war. Whether rebuilding a stable regime for the people of Iraq is also part of another "war" is debatable, but in that it is US goals thay may not succeed, but to call a lack of success in building a stable environment the same as losing a war trivializes the reality of losing a war. When you lose wars, you don't turn the channel to watch American Idol while planning summer vacations in Vegas, you look for food.