Posted by
richstacy on Saturday, May 26, 2007 3:06:30 PM
At the beginning of the Iraq war the United States accomplished in three weeks, what Iran had not been able to accomplish in ten years with a million casualties. We defeated the Iraqi military and toppled Saddam Hussein, a brutal murderous thug, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
But then, we started screwing up by the numbers. We went into a mere "policeman" mode. We so feared civilian casualties that we failed to nip the "insurgency" in the bud, or to stop the influx of foreign fighters.
For the past three years, we have been in a holding pattern. There is no real plan for victory, and none is in sight. For fear of killing civilians we have failed to clean out either the Sunni insurgents, the al Qaeda sympathizers in the Sunni Triangle, or the Shiite militia thugs in Sadr City. We are not winning -- and as a consequence, the overwhelming majority of Americans have had enough of Iraq.
Rule #1 to be taken from Vietnam and Iraq: If a "war" goes on for more than three years with no sign of victory, You lose the American people. Period.
Rule #2: The purpose of warfare is to break things, kill people and defeat the enemy. If you have no intention of doing that, its best to stay the hell out of it.
We had the ability to win both in Vietnam and in Iraq -- but we failed to do it.
I thought we had learned our lesson after Vietnam -- we had not. God deliver us from getting into any more wars we have no intention of winning.