Stick a Fork In Iraq: WE LOST

[smoogatz]

It's all over but the shouting. We have officially turned Iraq--formerly no threat to the U.S. or our allies--into a hard-line Islamist theocracy, and placed it firmly in the pocket of soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. Iran, by the way, does have chemical and germ weapons, and missiles capable of hitting Europe. They also actively support terrorist groups like Hezbollah, which has numerous cells in the U.S. Heckuva a job there, W!!

[wakeme2008]

1. Add to that the rights of women are out the door

IMHO Iraq will follow the Saudi beliefs on women covered in black, not working and not driving cars.......

Bush legend will be a great one. :sarcasm:

[danalytical]

2. I don't like talk of winning and losing

They are meaningless words in a war like this. We already "won" by destroying their army and capturing their "king" so to speak. But since we aren't really there to keep territory and live on it, we have an odd goal of stabalizing a country that obviously doesn't want us around. SO it's nearly impossible to create stability when you yourself are the destabilizing factor. Throw in some ethnic civil wars and you have yourself long term difficult situation. We can never "win" so to speak, because we don't really have any flag to capture. Unless an American style democracy is the flag, then I guess we lost. But what about that initial invasion, we won that already? So did we win before we lost? The fact is we can neither win nor lose, we can only stay or leave, either way there will be at least a decade of violence.

[Lexingtonian]

5. What would you term

a Shia government in February officially telling the U.S.: 'You have a choice between jumping (leaving Iraq "voluntarily") or getting pushed (officially told to get out, which the UN resolutions make you obey)'? Subtext, screw your stupid ideas about 'freedom' and 'democracy', we're gonna have our psychologically inevitable civil war now.

That's losing- Losing The Peace. That makes a complete waste of three years of essentially barbaric, bloody, foolish, horrendously expensive and corrupt American occupation. Yeah, we/they 'got' Saddam and his regime, eliminating one last residual and obsolete Stalinist/Soviet-allied chess piece of the Cold War, but the marginal virtue to that was more than outbalanced by the manifold vile atrocities committed on Iraqis (all in the name of 'freedom and democracy', of course) during the idiocy of occupation. Americans have now more than recapitulated Saddam's barbarism toward Iraqis. Okay, Saddam still has the lead by a nose in the My Lai category, a proven wholescale village massacre, in the public eye- but chances are pretty high that Americans have already or will match him on that in Anbar Province. (One Freeper officer is all it takes.)

The Iraqi behavior involves inevitability and the traumas of their history. The American behavior in Iraq is psychologically explicable and residual from the Cold War and its traumas and American history/problems. But the moral distinction, the historical crime in it all, is that Americans wrongfully took out their problems/traumas on particular people objectively not responsible for them. That's the great crime Osama bin Laden is guilty of, by worldwide consensus, but Americans do not admit the large scale hypocrisy that doing likewise in Iraq represents.

[TheFarseer]

3. I say

if we can pull out our troops and the oil keeps flowing, then that is enough of a win for me. That is still within our grasp, I believe. I know that is cynical, but how can anyone expect more at this point?

[smoogatz]

4. In reply to this and the previous post, I think there are two yardsticks

with which to measure "winning" vs "losing" in Iraq. First, did the invasion and subsequent occupation make America safer, as Bushco assured us it would? Since Iraq was no threat to us in the first place, and now it's a training ground for the next generation of international terrorists, I think the answer to that one is clearly a resounding "no." Second, does the political outcome favor America's strategic and economic interests? Again, the answer is a big, fat, obvious "no." What Bushco wanted at the end of the day was a pro-western, free-market "democracy" fronted by Ahmed Chalabi or someone very much like him. Instead they're getting a Shi-ite theocracy, an independent Kurdistan and most likely a decade-long civil war, which will draw in all of Iraq's neighbors. In an attempt to create stability in the region, they've sown the seeds of chaos. Sounds like losing to me.

[Beer Snob-50]

6. this is the perfect answer to the question of what is

considered a winning situation. i think though, that what bush wanted all long was a country where his oil-producing contributors could clean up.