"The US goes from one hotspot to the next, fighting and winning the battles, but losing the peace"
Well, last time I checked, that war with the USSR was going pretty well...... What does that mean, anyway - "losing the peace"? I will opine that it means nothing; that it is a slogan promoted by nay-sayers.
You don't have to believe this, and I doubt that you will, but I certainly believe it to be true. Once again, with feeling: Our fight in Iraq is NOT with the Iraqi people. Our fight was with the baathist regime; now it is with the remnants of that regime, and a relatively small number of untrained, under-equipped, but highly motivated jihadists. You don't gain from broadening the fight by destroying the property and lives of innocents, who you are trying to convince that you are the good guys.
Our soldiers and marines certainly don't have any desire to die doing their jobs. But they recognize, with eyes wide open, that sometimes it happens. Most are prepared for that. That's why they are heroes. Adapting the philosophy that we must protect them at any cost is a defeatist; after all, that is what Cindy Sheehan wants to do, isn't it? We must certainly not waste their lives, but if we are not willing to risk them to do the right thing, we SHOULD go home....
"Adapting the philosophy that we must protect them at any cost is a defeatist; after all, that is what Cindy Sheehan wants to do, isn't it? We must certainly not waste their lives, but if we are not willing to risk them to do the right thing, we SHOULD go home...."
The point I was trying to make was that Fallujah was a hotbed of Baathists and fanatics. Rather than send American troops into that city and conduct a costly house to house search and destroy operation,., it would have been much better to have just bombed the entire city and reduced it to rubble. I think that we done that, a lot of the lunatics running around now in Iraq would have been dead and fewer Amereican soldiers killed.
It was my understanding, and another poster here also stated it, that a large number of civlians had departed Fallujah anyway.
Given two alternatives: destroy the enemy with minimal American casualties and some collateral damage to cvilians, or destroy the enemy with heavy American casualties and fewer but still some civilian casualties, I would opt for the former.