Posted on 06/22/2014 10:01:37 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Like fellow veterans of the Iraq war, I’ve watched the events of recent weeks with a combination of anger, helplessness, and disillusionment. So many gains reversed and so many lives lost — and for what? The American lives given heroically in Iraq were not in vain, but a legacy is a terrible thing to waste — just ask Vietnam veterans.
The implications of radical Islamists’ capturing large — and significant — swaths of Iraq and threatening Baghdad are so much greater than any soldier, unit, deployment, or decision. Iraq veterans are wringing our hands over events, but we did all we could against long odds — abroad and at home.
After 9/11, the nation was not properly girded for long, difficult, and messy wars. The premise of the Iraq war has always been murky and contested; the post-invasion period was terribly managed; and the military leadership was slow to adapt to a mounting insurgency. The deck was always stacked against us, and we’ve all learned countless hard-won lessons from Iraq — which I’ve written about for years in these pages.
But was the mission in Iraq doomed from the beginning? Of course not. The surge of 2007–2008 answered that question — turning a hopeless situation into a beacon of possibility. Violence was abated, sectarian reconciliation was occurring, and politics was replacing street fighting. The gains of the surge, as General Petraeus said, were “significant, but fragile and reversible.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
By soeotro’s islamist design.
This country apparently never learned the lessons of Vietnam, and it was to our detriment in Iraq.
When they write the history books about the U.S. in the first decade of the 21st Century, George W. Bush will be remembered as the second incarnation of Lyndon Johnson.
Obama has been the President of the United States now for yearly six years.
More than an entire administration.
Obama.
Obama is responsible for what is happening. Good or bad, it’s on his plate now.
He has had plenty of time now, to take charge. He is making history.
Good or bad, it is Obama’s responsibility now.
Wait a minute. Something about that doesn't look right ...
And .. I believe it was ON PURPOSE.
Our president was raised by Communists, Marxists, Socialists, and Islam.
He doesn’t like America; to him we’re just thugs who stole from the world to become rich. His hatred is really taken out on our military - whom he fears.
SOMEBODY TELL ME WHY THIS PERSON EVER GOT ELECTED TO SERVE AMERICA ..??
But .. I know why he got elected - he’s Black. The left used him to silence the right. Now, they’re still defending him .. at their own peril.
We are incapable of winning a war in the modern era. Once it drags, people lose their patience.
The trick, seems to me, it to end the war before it’s even announced to have happened.
We haven’t had a chance since the end of WWII when we quit defeating our enemies and decided to fight to force them to negotiate.
I’m not going to blame Bush for the current Iraqi mess but I do blame him as well as myself for being wrong.
You are so right. 6 years on the job. Its his fault through and through.
The current circumstances are exactly the opposite of what happened in Vietnam. In Vietnam, a US President became obsessed with the prospect of losing his supermajorities in Congress because of "losing" Vietnam. He believed that would happen because, as FDR's fixer in the Senate, he [falsely] concluded that the Republicans retook that chamber when China fell to the communists. Consequently, he did nothing more than what was necessary not to lose.
Nixon did what was necessary to win, and when American Leftists finally extracted their revenge against Nixon for embarrassing them during the Hiss-Chambers case, Democrats in Congress and a weak, stupid, Republican successor refused to enforce the US terms of the Vietnam peace treaty, a treaty which, like their treaty with the French, the communists had negotiated in bad faith and never had any intention of honoring.
What is happening in Iraq is exactly the opposite. Bush did what was necessary to win despite enormous opposition and the loss of the Congress, left the country with a promising start, and his Democrat successor has p!ssed it away.
Please elaborate on what you think he got wrong.
dittoes to that!
Baloney. If Bush had "done what was necessary" there would have been no need for a "surge" in 2007. The entire invasion of Iraq in 2003 was fouled up from the get-go.
It's bad enough for delusional idiots to be managing this country's foreign policy -- or even worse, to be managing military affairs based on the influence of foreign governments right here in Washington. There's no need to make excuses for incompetence or malfeasance.
I'll tell you what the real problem was. It's that Dick Cheney was much smarter and more prescient in 1994 than he was in 2003 and he is now in 2014:
'It's a quagmire if you go that far -- trying to take over Iraq.'
Sure, as long as we stayed there with a whip in hand things would probably have stayed in semi-control. But we would have to leave or pull back sometime right? Or were we to stay there in perpetuity whip in hand?
These people have been at war with each other for thousands of years. The outcome was inevitable.
say it over and over and over...
We shouldn’t have wasted the blood and time on Iraq and gained exactly squat. I don’t care about chemical weapons or Saddam’s support of terrorists.
If I knew then, what I know now, there’s no way in hell I would support getting into the Iraq mess.
Other than quick preventive or retaliatory strikes, if a conflict doesn’t necessitate a formal declaration of war, it should be avoided.
Kinda like Reagan and Libya. It wasn’t a war, it was a message and an effective message at that.
If by fouled up, you mean completely successful, you would be correct.
If Bush had "done what was necessary" there would have been no need for a "surge" in 2007.
Circumstances called for more troops, which he committed. That is the definition of doing what's necessary.
There's no need to make excuses for incompetence or malfeasance.
There's no need to replace your personal -- and completely nonsensical -- version of history with what actually happened. There is no parallel between Bush and Johnson. None. Anyone who sees one is a fool.
Well, fortunately for the United States of America, the person who was President was not a complete moron, and he did care.
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