American Wars, Won and Lost

On a recent visit to Moab, Utah, I saw a T-shirt with a picture of a Jeep stuck in a gap between two rock formations and a caption: "Confidence is the feeling you have before you fully understand the situation."

If you still brim with self-assurance despite hopelessly stranding your vehicle, you may have to repeat the mistake a few times before confidence yields to comprehension. That's also the case with members of Congress and other fans of intervention who call on the Obama administration to use force in Syria or Iran.

They always make such ventures sound quick, low-risk and ordained to succeed. You can believe that, if you erase from your mind everything that's happened in the American wars of the 21st century.

We've fought three: Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. What they have in common is that each time, we scored a stunning victory -- only to find out that victory was a brief mirage on the road to defeat.

We got a reminder of this when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki came to Washington recently asking for military aid to reverse the country's slide into civil war. Al-Qaida, supposedly vanquished by the U.S. surge of 2007, has rebounded in a big way. In fact, the country has reverted to the bloody chaos that prompted the surge.

"Iraq today looks tragically similar to the Iraq of 2006, complete with increasing numbers of horrific, indiscriminate attacks by Iraq's al-Qaida affiliate and its network of extremists," wrote Gen. David Petraeus, who commanded coalition forces in Iraq, in Foreign Policy. "Add to that the ongoing sectarian civil war in Syria ... and the situation in Iraq looks even more complicated than it was in 2006 and thus even more worrisome."

The campaign he led under George W. Bush was supposed to not only crush the insurgency but give the government the chance to become more inclusive and democratic as it forged reconciliation between warring sectarian factions. Maliki's Shiite-dominated regime, however, passed up the opportunity.

One foreign aid worker told The Economist magazine, "At the moment, what fuels the conflict the most is the presence of central-government security forces in Sunni areas, where they arrest young men by the hundreds, torture them and then release them back after money is paid." Violence is now at the highest level in five years, with an average of more than 20 deaths a day in bombings and other attacks.

Afghanistan originally was a surprise not because it went badly but because it went so well. Attacking shortly after 9/11, the United States needed only a few weeks to rout Taliban government forces and their al-Qaida confederates.

In hindsight, that would have been a good time to begin our departure. But we stayed on, hoping to create conditions favorable to stability, human rights and the rule of law. Twelve years later, we're still bogged down fighting jihadists.

President Hamid Karzai, whom we helped bring to power, has staged a carnival of corruption, including massive vote fraud in his 2009 re-election. On human rights, the watchdog group Freedom House gives Afghanistan a rating of 6 -- with 7 being the worst possible score. Karzai recently charged that the U.S.-led coalition effort has produced "a lot of suffering" but "no gains because the country is not secure."

Things are bound to get worse once the American military withdraws the last of its combat units. Though they managed to hold the Taliban to a stalemate during this year's fighting season, reported The New York Times, "the Afghans were unable to make significant gains and, worse, suffered such heavy casualties that some officials called the rate unsustainable."

Libya? The security environment there is usually characterized as total anarchy, which is unfair to anarchists. Last month, the prime minister was kidnapped by one of the many militias that operate with impunity. In the end, he was rescued -- not by government forces but by another militia.

Our military help in the removal of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi turned a country that posed no threat to us into a lawless haven for terrorists, including al-Qaida. Instead of making the U.S. more secure, we have done the opposite.

Using military force, we should have learned, is like taking a Jeep off-road in the Utah desert. It's important to know what it can do -- and even more important to know what it can't.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, it was not the military that screwed up, but the politicians after the victory. But that is often the case.

Libya should never have been our fight, period.

Prior to the Korean War, the US with the help of it’s allies could win every war thrown at via the use of Carpet Bombing. The carpet bombing targets of today needn’t be civilian targets though there certainly would be collateral civilian deaths, they’d be industrial, transportation, power production, refineries and of course, hard military targets. Waves of B52s loaded to the brim with cluster bombs would do the trick nicely after our stealth force took out the command bunkers, runways, bridges and anti aircraft weapons. No need for “Boots on the ground” just drop your loads and go home. Wait a day for the surrender message then do it again. No nukes or months of talks required, just DO IT!

“Confidence is the feeling you have before you fully understand the situation ... “

I love it!

I’ve always hated the term and concept of “confidence.” As if you can go into any situation and know exactly all factors involved and how each of them will play out beforehand. That simply does not exist in reality. You can have a reasonable expectation of how a situation may play out but you cannot, and should not, have expectation of a result. You can hope but that and $1.50 will get you exactly one cup of coffee.

I have always equated “confidence” with “arrogance” in my mind. The (while one seems to suppose competence and the other hubris) two concepts are also too closely related and confused.

We don't fight wars to win them anymore. The last declared War by congress was WWII. The basic point of war is to kill your enemy and crush them until they submit or die. We haven't tried it since WWII. We have gone in many places with lots of firepower but our end goal wasn't to make the enemy submit or die. Even Viet Nam, with all our firepower we only had very limited bombing campaigns in cities. In Afghanistan we aren't trying to win either.

Hold fire at Taliban fighters: they are attending a funeral

"We were so excited. I came rushing in with the picture," an army officer told an NBC television journalist who obtained the grainy black-and-white photograph taken in July. But then, to his frustration, they were told that the United States military's rules of engagement made an attack impossible because the men were attending a funeral in a cemetery. e officers then watched the satellite footage of the fighters splintering into small groups — not big enough for the drone to target — and heading back to their mountain redoubts. They were convinced that prominent Taliban leaders had been present.”

Prior to the Korean War, the US with the help of it’s allies could win every war thrown at via the use of Carpet Bombing.

Ahem. That didn't work on the Japanese at all. It took hard-core ground campaigns to clear every inch of the territory they held. If we hadn't invented the A-Bomb, the Marines would probably still be clearing fanatical resisters out of mountain caves in Hokkaido.

Your larger point is that today we are too concerned with civilian casualties. That may be so, but it's also an early indication that the war under consideration might be of questionable value.

Ok, then what do folks of your persuasion propose to do the next time?

Lets say “next time” is another 4 airliners flown into college football stadiums on Saturday afternoon with 400,000 dead.

I agree with the carpet bombing guy (sorry, too lazy to go back and look your name up). But, like you I agree on his larger point which I think is that I think it’s time we learn from past wars and not put boots on the ground. Instead we use aerial explosives and YES in some cases various size nukes.

And, I want to repeat that it takes MONEY to pursue this terrorism all over the world and its substantially coming from the incestuous Saudi Royal Family. Nuking their oil fields is a start and PLEASE don’t bring up we need their oil. Arguably we always could have done without it but they successfully buy enough of our corrupt politicians (re bushes) to convince many of us to the contrary.

Can you ever really win a war? I suppose in the case of defeating an invading army. But in every other case you’re just re- aligning the geopolitical deck chairs for awhile before the never-ending forces of culture, economics and politics gain steam. We will never defeat Islamic terrorism on the battlefield so we better come up with a workable definition of victory.

If a next time like your scenario occurs, we should immediately topple the Saudi government. We should have done that decades ago.

We won't, of course, because our entire government works for the international bankers and the Saudi government is a key player in those circles. And as long as that remains true, these little wars are nothing but phony demonstrations - a larger form of the TSA's "security theater", wasteful of American lives and military hardware without accomplishing a thing beyond giving incumbent politicians a positive headline or two.

Asinine Rules of Engagement have cost American lives since Vietnam.

The only exception was the first Gulf War.

The most critical wars America lost were the 2008 and 2012 elections.

"Can you ever really win a war?

Of course you can! Actually most wars are in fact "won". The problem the USA and the West in general is having, is a lack of will to do what it takes to win. The rest of the world does not suffer that affliction.

Too early to call Iraq a loss. Our cause isn’t lost just because Maliki comes to the USA and tries to get some free money along with everyone else. The facts are that, while the terrorists can still do car bombs and suicide attacks: (1) the Iraqis are now paying their own bills with their increasing oil production; (2) they are only just beginning their military recovery; and (3) the Iraqi government, unlike its predecessor, is living at peace with its neighbors.

We can complain about their living at peace with Iran, but they have to live next door to that aggressive regime and we don’t.

While Iraq is no model of USA-style democracy — or former democracy under Obama — the Iraqi government is a whole lot better than many of the world’s governments; and they are not aborting their children, sexualizing their girls at younger and younger ages, and promoting the gay agenda.

We have lost every war from the moment we accepted the concept of asymetrical warfare. There really is no such thing outside of our own weak will. If there is no “front line” it’s because we have chosen not to create one.

We can’t keep fighting for hearts and minds. We have to fight for the land itself. You take the dirt and move forward with troops. Cleanse every resistance in front of the line, disarm and control everything behind the line. Move forward across the entire land mass until the battle is completed. That’s all folks. It’s called war. We use to do it well.

In a sense we always win our wars: our young people are invariably brave and supremely effective. We also lose every time because those young men and women are the best of us - those precious lives lost, are lost to our future. Our surviving vets must also live with the memories, the sorrows, the loss for the for the rest of their lives.

The only reason we should ever invest our lives in a war is when the loss of those lives counterbalances the harm that would have come if we avoided conflict.

You may recall the “Road To Hell” pics during the Iraq war. It was done by a single aircraft load of cluster bombs. Please imagine wave after wave of cluster bombs going over every Japanese city. There wouldn’t be many people left to complain and the Emperor almost gave in after the incendiary bombing of a city there.

Thanks Kaslin.

...was supposed to not only crush the insurgency but give the government the chance to become more inclusive and democratic as it forged reconciliation between warring sectarian factions. Maliki's Shiite-dominated regime, however, passed up the opportunity. One foreign aid worker told The Economist magazine, "At the moment, what fuels the conflict the most is the presence of central-government security forces in Sunni areas, where they arrest young men by the hundreds, torture them and then release them back after money is paid."

>>>In Iraq and Afghanistan, it was not the military that screwed up, but the politicians after the victory.<<<

What victory? You might be kidding.

Iraq situation is not much different than Libyan and as for Afghanistan it was not the first time it was ‘won’ this way. The Brits, the Soviets has ‘won’ it the way US military did but it doesn’t count today.

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