I have have a pretty good memory, but this is a mess; WMDs-Mushroom Cloud, War on Terror, Liberation & Combating Evil, Fight Them There, Democratization - Middle East, Staying the Course, Standing Up/Stand Down, New Way Forward and somehow "Victory" seems to be a catch word throughout. What I don't see is a unifying strategy, I see a bunch of different slogans covering a bunch of different themes. I thought it was bull-hockey but I understood WMDs, bad things in bad hands need to go away - pretty clear, definite objective. A Problem arose, no WMDs. 1 target missed.
War on Terror, oddly enough I thought this was Afghanistan and law enforcement. 2nd target missed.
Liberation & Combating Evil, so Saddam is run out of town and...? Oh, we've got to catch him...Caught. Funny, they're starting to act like we're occupiers not liberators and now it's more deadly than under Saddam. 3rd target missed.
Fight Them There, we're fighting there and we seem to be a wonderful recruiting poster all over the world, it seems to be getting worse world wide, so we're not fighting them where they are, not to mention Afghanistan is going in the toilet. 4th target missed.
Democratize Iraq & Spread it through the Middle East - There's a government in Iraq? I don't think the citizens are noticing. I can't think why anybody else in the area would want what's there. Not looking like a real fertile seed. 5th target missed.
Staying the Course, nobody seems to like this one anymore. 6th target missed.
Standing Up, and who else is? Getting blown up and the country blown up seems to be the outcome. Who gets stood up? Nobody seems to trust the Iraqi police or army and they accomplish nothing. 7th target missed.
New Way Forward, this isn't even a target, moving or otherwise, how can it be hit? ISG non-target missed
Victory is what? I've listed 7 or 8 targets that we've missed, they just keep moving them around. If you have no end in mind, the means are mindless. Victory involves achieving your end goal, what the heck is it? We just keep breaking things, and people keep paying and paying and paying.
If it weren't so sad it would be silly, like trying to play cards with marbles. There is no blunter tool in the work-box than the military. They are really good at putting holes in things and blowing stuff up, that's their job and we should be glad they're good at it. Iraq is a pretty big place so it'll take awhile to run out of stuff to do that to, but at some point you get to diminishing returns. This much seems obvious, these folks seem to be pretty good at putting holes in and blowing up their own stuff without our help.
A long time ago we helped the Afghans bleed the Russians white in a broken Muslim country and looked pretty smart - for awhile. Now George II is managing to do it all on his own, the casualties keep mounting, the US debt is skyrocketing, the American public is disgusted, Iraq is still broken, and nobody knows what the mission is, other than a banner, "Mission Accomplished" a couple years ago.
I have an idea, let's pull the Americans out, just exactly as fast as they can be gotten out safely, let the thing sort itself out, and then if they'd like us to help rebuild, we owe something; or not.
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