Thursday - October 26, 2006
15 Reasons We're Losing the War
And it's all Bush's totally unecessary fault. In
no particular order . . .
1. We
invaded Iraq without a plan for what we would do when we finished the invasion.
Rumsfeldian and Cheneyesque philosophies of using minimal force are the opposite
of traditional Republican ideas on how to fight a war. We have waged a massive
war and tried to do it on the cheap.
2
We squandered the United State's people's good will by not being decisive.
Americans will support any military action, so long as we're perceived as
winning.
3. We mistook democracy for
freedom. Decades of claiming that our nation is a democracy has led us to
forsake our traditional understanding of the bedrock of freedom and we allowed
the Iraqis and the Afghans to vote against freedom of religion. In a war with
Islam, we helped create two more Islamic nations. We invaded them, overthrew
their governments, and then allowed their people to coerce their own populations
to be subject to relgious ideology.
4. We supported a charade of Iraqi elections,
pretending that the Iraqi government has power when they don't. Wishing doesn't
grant power. We continue to play this charade and hamstring our own power by
pretending to give them some.
5. We
allowed massive corruption in the elected Iraqi government to restrict our
tactical warfighting, and channel money to our enemy. We looked the other way
when ministries paid cronies for Iraqi National Guard forces that didn't exist
or were the enemy. The ING finally collapsed because US field commands could
not live with the charade any longer. One of the longest hold outs was in my
battalion's area of Hit, and they frequently used their position to counter us
or hurt us.
6. We still have failed to
identify the nature of our enemy. Our enemy is radical Islam. We can never win
until we take that first step of identifying
them.
7. We allow the enemy to operate
with impunity in mosques and through religious
leaders.
8. We fail to recognize the
enemy's greatest strength, it's public disinformation and propaganda campaign,
as a legitimate war target. From Al Jazeera, the BBC, and CNN, we have failed
to recognize that these enemies are where the real war is being
fought.
9. Bush has failed to sell the
war to the American people. Like his father, he thinks that the people should
support him without him working for it. Keeping a free people focused on a long
term war takes a lot of work. American support can never be taken for
granted.
10. We have failed to
understand that Iraq is not the objective in the war. The fate of the Iraqi
people is of little consequence and until they square their own civilization
away, they can only be a drain on our efforts. Iraq has merit only as an
example of we will do if a nation opposes us in ways we think are vital to our
national interests, and as a staging ground we can use against other potential
enemies in the region. The Iraqi people do not need to be happy for these
purposes to succeed. Making them happy and safe is a nice thing to do, but not
our primary job. We've gotten the equation
backwards.
11. We have failed to use
Iraq as a base of operations against our other enemies in the area. Instead of
threatening them, they threaten us by keeping us tied down. They have no fear
of us anymore when they should be quaking in their boots with us seen as an
imminent threat to their lives.
12. We
failed to understand that we are at war, and this is a time to increase the size
of the military. We have increased the size of the military, but only above the
post-cold war lows. The US Marine Corps is still 10% understrength compared to
the mid 1980's. We weren't in a shooting war back then, and the Marines were
the least useful in the Fulda Gap war plans. Now the USMC is one of the primary
players in this war and we're still substantially smaller when people are
dying.
13. We failed to increase the
size of the military deployed in Iraq to decisively squash lawlessness. When I
was overseas my regiment covered an area the size of South Carolina. You cannot
be decisive while that spread out, it's impossible. US commanders decided that
being decisive was not necessary and chose to fight a long protracted
insurgency, which democratic governments are very prone to give up on.
Commanders at all levels knew this, knew we had insufficient people to win and
only enough to hang on, yet all ignored reality and fed Rumsfeld what he wanted
to hear. We learned nothing from Viet
Nam.
14. Bush has been making
statements that he was going to try a new tactic in the war, and then promptly
apologized to the powerless president of Iraq that he's sorry for not
coordinating with him on our latest raid, knowing that the President of Iraq
has a vested interest in insuring that the targets of our raids are warned of
our coming. His new direction is not stronger action, it is more appeasement to
the insurgents.
15. We've allowed
militias to operate with impunity, partly because we haven't got enough soldiers
and Marines to fight them all, but mostly because we don't want to upset anyone.
You cannot win a war by being afraid to anger your
enemy.
I can keep going all day, but I
will stop here. I'm disgusted enough. And I've not even gone into what the
enemy is doing. We've done enough to lose this on our own without considering
their strategy.
Go Back to the Start, Do Not Collect $200 Send me your two cents
|
