Reply #22: You cannot win a guerilla war, say military historians, unless

[Eloriel]

you resort to genocide, as the Europeans did when they invaded Turtle Island.

The war was lost before it began. There was NO popular uprising in Iraq wanting to overthrow Saddam (which is not to say that he was so beloved by all, or that he wasn't a brutal dictator), and we blew just about every chance we had to "win hearts and minds" in one comedy of errors after another. Of course, we never actually CARED about winning hearts and minds or, for that matter, establishing anything but a "managed democracy" (at best) over there, so it's not as if we were actually trying that hard.

It was ALWAYS going to be a clusterfuck. Always. Now it's a tar baby, our tar baby.