a no-win situation :: Jan 3, 2005
It's really quite simple. Iraq is worse than Vietnam. We can't even hope for a draw in this one. We cannot win. Because we aren't fighting anyone.
There is a common thread to the end of most major conflicts throughout history: One of the involved governments either surrenders, negotiates a truce, or gets overthrown and replaced with a gov't that has sufficient popular support or military might to keep the peace. Even in Vietnam, to which the parallels have been flying fast and furious lately, there was an acting government with which to negotiate a ceasefire.
But of course that requires having an enemy government to negotiate with. That assumes the enemy combatants are following orders from someone. That assumes there is a centralized authority to which our opponents are loyal enough to follow orders to lay down their arms, or that they are only fighting because they were ordered to and really just want an excuse to stop without being imprisoned or shot.
In Iraq we are no longer fighting an enemy government. We already "won" that part of the conflict... and yet when the Iraqi government fell, there was no cessation of hostilities, Bush's victorious photo-op on the aircraft carrier notwithstanding. Obviously there are folks there who are fighting out of more than loyalty to or fear of the old Iraqi regime. The new Iraqi government is in our pocket rather than being the product of Iraqi design and therefore lacks the popular support needed to effectively give orders, and we haven't yet decided to properly install a totalitarian dictatorship.
We are fighting against a decentralized enemy. We cannot cut off the head of the beast, because it doesn't have one. We can't drive a stake through it's heart, because there isn't one to aim at. Even if one anti-US group stood up and said, "We surrender," there is nothing binding the other groups and individuals to that decision.
We cannot win because we are effectively fighting against nobody and everybody in Iraq at the same time. Every citizen within arm's reach of a rock is a potential 'insurgent', and yet not a single one of them is giving orders. The 'insurgents' have shown that the death of like-minded countrymen will not deter them from taking up arms against us, and if death will not deter them, it's reasonable to assume nothing will.
The closest we can get to winning is to minimize our losses and withdraw. But if we withdraw today, there will be a power vacuum thus turning Iraq into a civil war and destabilizing the entire region. The smartest thing we have done recently is to use the US military to help tsunami relief operations.
Posted by plus size lingerie @ Jan 04, 05
there will be a power vacuum thus turning Iraq into a civil war and destabilizing the entire region
Well, establishing a US puppet dictatorship isn't much preferrable in my book...
...all in all, I think we have officially given ourselves enough rope to hang ourselves with, no matter what we do.
Posted by mivox @ Jan 04, 05
books gone wild
