Posted on 12/19/2006 10:12:33 PM PST by DakotaRed
WP: U.S. not winning war in Iraq, Bush says
President seeking expansion of Army, Marine Corps
By Peter Baker
The Washington Post
Updated: 8:04 p.m. PT Dec 19, 2006
President Bush acknowledged for the first time yesterday that the United States is not winning the war in Iraq and said he plans to expand the overall size of the "stressed" U.S. armed forces to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists.
As he searches for a new strategy for Iraq, Bush has adopted the formula advanced by his top military adviser to describe the situation. "We're not winning, we're not losing," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. The assessment was a striking reversal for a president who, days before the November elections, declared, "Absolutely, we're winning."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
"You know, I think an interesting construct that General [Peter] Pace uses is, "We're not winning, we're not losing." There's been some very positive developments. And you take a step back and look at progress in Iraq, you say, well, it's amazing -- constitutional democracy in the heart of the Middle East, which is a remarkable development in itself."
President Bush on Iraq, Elections and Immigration
As usual, it appears to me he didn't quite say what the headline says he said.
"President seeking expansion of Army, Marine Corps"
Whether this is for "Iraq" or not, we MUST do it. We have plenty more than Iraq that we need to be prepared for.
Words like winning, losing, victory and so forth are going to bite us in the ass in the end. The struggle against Revolutionary Islam is not like a Napoleonic war. It is more like the Cold War. Our priorities are
1) Keeping WMDs out of the hands of Islamofascists. Thugs like Hussein no longer get the benefit of the doubt.
2) Not letting fanatics topple democracies. This goes back to Harry Truman a Democrat:
"It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures."
Or as John F. Kennedy put it,
"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty."
3) Stopping genocide when we can.
There reason why we do these things is because 911 showed us the wellbeing of people overseas is related to our wellbeing here in America. What is going on in the Middle East is a freakshow, and strongly worded letters and supporting dictators is not a peace process. If we're going to change things, we need to support liberal democracies. We can't wait until a fanatic spikes a nuke over the net, because by then it is too late. A modern Iraq will be a Huuuuege push in the right direction for the region if we can sustain it.
Unfortunately, the McGovern-Dean wing of the Democratic party, along with their friends in the media and in Europe, doesn't believe in liberal democracy anymore, so its up to us.
This was pretty dumb for Bush to say. Morale alone, how do you think all the troops in Iraq feel when they hear their commander in chief telling the world that they're not winning? It's doubly bad when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs says the same thing.
It's one for the media to say stuff like this, but when the President does it it's a bad move imho.
Part of being a commander is maintaining morale and leading. Telling your troops and the enemy that you're not winning is not the way to go.
Even during the worst days of the summer of 1940, Churchill never said "we aren't winning". FDR never said "we aren't winning". Neither did Lincoln during the Civil War. Acknowledging challenges and struggles is one thing. Coming out and and saying that we're not wining is another.
The thing is by any objective standards, we are winning. It would be much more beneficial if Bush would come out and say that.
If he would mention how Saddam and his whole regime was rolled up in a few weeks, how tens of thousands of terrorists have been killed or captured, how terrorist leaders continue to be eliminated, how Al Qaeda has killed as many Americans in the United States over the past five years as Borat(i.e. 0), how the US now has Iran and Syria encircled by air, ground and naval units orders of magnitude greater than they were on 9/10/01, how Bin Laden and Zawahiri who declared themselves modern day Saladins and Muhammads have been reduced to dropping new tapes at about the same frequency as Jay Z, how their primary weapon is no longer a suicide bomber but a 90 minute TDK audio tape, how despite their best efforts the Saudi royal family and the rest of the Gulf Kingdoms are as strong as ever, etc...
Enough of this defeatism and complacency. It's bad enough when it comes from the media but when Bush starts parroting it, it's getting ridiculous.
Sorry, Iraq is busy chewing up our equipment. The U.S. isn't going on any adventures for a while. Increasing the Army and Marines by a few thousand isn't going to change that. If you think fixing the hundreds of Abrams and Bradleys that are sitting in depots awaiting repair from their tour in Iraq is a priority for the Congress nowadays I think you're going to be disappointed.
EVERYTHING IS NOW PERFECT
As long as everything isn't perfect, we "haven't won". That is the common parlance definition of "winning" now in infantilized, spoiled-brat America.
If we used the word "victory" the way it has traditionally been used throughout 99.999% of human history, everyone would instantly recognize that the United States won the war against Husseinist Iraq in 2003.
We invaded their country in large numbers and blew lots of things up. No Iraqi soldiers or projectiles are known to have entered the U.S. in anger. We toppled their government. The U.S. government hums along. We captured their leader who awaits death. Bush is serving out his 2nd term followed by wealthy retirement. We occupy their country and oversaw a new constitution. Our government continues as before. We have lost some 3,000 dead, mostly military. They have lost tens of thousands, many of them civilians, as their civil society has been pulverized.
Now, come on now. It's not a hard question: Who won this war? Why do we have such trouble with the concept of winning a war that we've deflated the definition beyond all meaning, and invented this Disneyfied notion that the purpose of wars somehow involves making everything perfect (thus until we do, we "haven't won")?
If "winning" means "there's no violence in Iraq and everything's grand", of course we haven't "won". But that's a stupid definition and it's high time we let go of it. We won the Iraq war and now we're engaged in a reconstruction. (There is an ongoing low-level civil war in Iraq amongst Iraqis and neighbors, but that has no bearing on whether we won the war. If they choose to fight a civil war, that doesn't mean we "didn't win"!)
If nothing else, it's time to learn to separate the two notions (war and reconstruction) because all this neverending obsessing on whether we "are winning the war" and how the "war" is going (as if there's still territory to take...) is preventing us from doing what needs to be done in the reconstruction.
well thanks for your thought.
I prefer to view these things thru wide-angle lenses. I said exactly what I thought. I suppose you're free to add or construe anything you like, right?
All that aside, I'm for tripling or quadrupling the Army and Marines, because I believe we are likely to need that many in a few places before a decade goes by. And I pray to God that we don't have to use them much beyond the deterrent value of having them.
Sharing perspectives is what a place like this is all about.
All that aside, I'm for tripling or quadrupling the Army and Marines, because I believe we are likely to need that many in a few places before a decade goes by. And I pray to God that we don't have to use them much beyond the deterrent value of having them.
I understand the 'freeper fantasy' of invading Iran, Syria, re-igniting the war on the Korean penisula, etc. still burns fiercely for some, but it's just not in the cards. The people advocating a 'New American Century' forged by American military adventure got their comeuppance. They never saw it coming, and some of them still don't realize what hit them.
The militia principle holds, and Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov's contribution helps ensure the age of overt empire is dead.
What really sucks is that when the last convoy of American military vehicles exits Iraq I wonder if its government will manage to hold up for even the three years that Najibullah's regime held on in the face of the Mujahedin after the Soviets had enough (10 years and ~13K KIA)
It's a shame Bush went from understanding that the American military shouldn't be used for nation building to buying into Kristol & Co's siren song of 'fixing' the Middle East with military might. Trying to 'fix' the Middle East in 1991 is why we had troops in Saudi, and why Bin Laden and his cohorts started attacking us in the first place. This globo-cop crap is counterproductive.
You forget, it's a 'War on Terror', and I'd say terror rules Iraq.
If "winning" means "there's no violence in Iraq and everything's grand", of course we haven't "won".
"winning" is setting up a functioning Iraqi government that isn't propped up by the American military. We can claim we won like in Vietnam and get the military out, but if that government then falls, is anyone going to consider it a 'win'? Nobody thinks the USSR won in Afghanistan even though the government more to their liking held onto power for nearly three years after they finally got sick of the price of 'helping' and left.
Not many people are going to call Iraq a 'win' if we hang Saddam only to see him replaced by Sadr.
9/11 showed us that playing Middle Eastern interloper and kingmaker carries a price. Some folks want to pay that price and keep trying to determine the make-up of governments and borders on the other side of the globe. I wonder how many thousands of Americans will get killed propping up kings, borders, etc. established by the dying European colonial powers on the other side of the world before these same people realize that's not America's role in the world.
Again Bush uses the criticism of democrats to get what he wants. CIA doesn't work, OK, lets reform it under one person who reports to the president. More streamlined that way. What, we have too few soldiers in Iraq, democrats? Well we can fix that by expanding the military to meet future needs to counter Islamofacist plans. Does anyone see a pattern here?
It's not a fantasy. It's about our survival. And screw invading them. Just nuke them. Now. Latest, this evening. We have the weapons to end the war now. Why wait?
That's a word game, not an argument.
If I take what you say here at face value, it means that your conception of victory is predicated on the idea that we have to prevent acts of terrorism from occurring in Iraq. If acts of terrorism occur in Iraq, we "lost" the Iraq war. Only when no acts of terrorism occur in Iraq, can we say we "won".
That is silly. "Making sure acts of terrorism don't take place in Iraq" was not a war objective. Don't get me wrong, it would be nice for it to happen, but it was not and cannot be a war objective.
Peoples' thoughts about war nowadays, perhaps influenced by war movies or - more likely - the movie "Star Wars" - are highly simplistic and childish. People imagine all sorts of utopian, perfect outcomes as if they can be war objectives in the real world. In the movies, the Death Star was blown up and that, almost immediately, led to everything becoming great and that's how you know who won. So, that's how people think all wars are supposed to be. This is ahistorical and puerile; the best thing I can say about it is that we must have a really safe, prosperous society for so many people to have been able to form such a fantastical, utopian vision of what war objectives consist of and what sort of "victory" can be expected.
"winning" is setting up a functioning Iraqi government that isn't propped up by the American military.
No, that's "successful reconstruction". Tell me, when does your clock run out? Suppose we do eventually set up a functioning Iraqi government that isn't propped up by the American military. And suppose it remains in power for the next century. Heck, the next 5 centuries. But then in 2506 there is a civil war and the government is toppled. Will that future event, in 2506, retroactively mean that the United States "lost" "the Iraq war" of 2003?
Winning was what we did in 2003: dethrone the Hussein regime. The war was explicitly against the Hussein regime, and it was defeated, unseated, and is gone. Barring a shocking comeback by Saddam due to unforeseen, unlikely events, later events don't change that - can't change that. That doesn't mean bad things can't happen, nor that future wars, even wars in and around Iraq (for example, the war to prevent Sadr from taking over), can't be lost. But the 2003 "Iraq War" was a war waged to dethrone the then-ruling government of Iraq. We succeeded. Ask Saddam. Where does Saddam Hussein currently reside?
We can claim we won like in Vietnam and get the military out,
Notice, I'm not advocating for getting the military out. Just because we won doesn't make it a good idea to get the military out; your Vietnam example is a very good one. And here's another example: Germany. I think everyone acknowledges that we won the war against Germany in 1945. But that doesn't mean we got our military out of Germany in 1945. For some reason, that didn't confuse people back then, like it does now. Nowadays, if we win a war but keep a military presence somewhere, people have a hard time grasping that we could have won the war. If I took this attitude too seriously I'd probably start having doubts about whether we won World War II.
but if that government then falls, is anyone going to consider it a 'win'?
Perhaps not, but remember, my whole point in this thread is that peoples' conceptions of what constitutes "winning" nowadays is entirely out of whack. So whether or not people "consider" something a win doesn't necessarily correspond to reality either way.
That said, if we "got out", and the Iraqi government fell, for the record a more or less correct description of the events would be:
1. we won the Iraq war
2. we abandoned the reconstruction in cowardly fashion for no good reason
3. after we were gone, whatever-group filled the resulting power vacuum by waging a civil war against and defeating the Iraqi government.
#3, if it happened, would not disprove #1. #3 and #1 are not inconsistent unless one takes the view that the objective of the 2003 "Iraq war" was to dethrone Saddam, PLUS replace his government with one that would never fall (the USSR, I am sure, had an explicit objective of creating a permanent socialist client state in Afghanistan; our objective was not analogous). Indeed, as I've already said, some people seem to hold the implicit view that this sort of thing - making everything permanently perfect - was the objective of the Iraq War.
But as you can see, that creates a standard of victory which is literally impossible to meet. How can we ever say "we've succeeded! this government will never fall!" That can never be said, of any government, in any context, anywhere. So, my whole point in this thread is to say that peoples' views regarding what war objectives are, or can be, are hopelessly unrealistic and create an impossible standard of victory. Thus, if that attitude prevails, we shall never "win" another war. We can fight wars, wreak great death and devastation and have the most lopsided tallies in human history but, apparently, there will always be this constant chatter that terror-acts haven't been zeroed out, the new government might yet fall, something bad might happen, etc etc etc, thus we "haven't won". There's always a Sadr. We haven't won!
You might think that's all fine, you might defend the sensibility that method of analysis. And maybe you're right. But I am simply pointing out the ramifiaction; by this sort of standard, we will never again "win" another war. In which case it's not worth talking about in the first place, I guess. Did we "win"? The answer is, and shall always and forever be, no.
Because things aren't yet perfect. Only when things are perfect is the United States allowed to claim victory in a war.
Logistics aside, after Iraq I think it would be political suicide for any future President to invade any or all three of these countries. And you can forget about nuking them unless you want our allies in those regions (like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Israel) to get slow death by radiation sickness.
Bush needs to get a clue and quit giving his opponents ammunition with his not so well thought out words.
I read almost daily on this site of the good things being done in Iraq and this buffoon comes up with "we're not winning"?
Well all I can say is that Bush has for the first time described his policy ,we are not winning and we are not losing.THANK YOU MR.President! All this time he has said this is a War on terror ,well all we see is our troops walking house to house or patrolling neighborhoods ,THIS IS POLICING not a WAR, How do you expect to win or lose?
Thank You for finally at least in a round about way describing the actual scene and maybe you will at least have one more chance in your speech next month to have a coherant message ,if this is a war then lets have at it ,or if it is to be more policing then say so ,but when our troops capture some real bad guys and then the president of iraq says give them back and we do , well that is not a war that is suicide!
"I understand the 'freeper fantasy' of invading Iran, Syria, re-igniting the war on the Korean penisula, etc. still burns fiercely for some..."
there ya go again, putting YOUR OWN thoughts into MY mouth, then aggrandizing yourself, LOL.
pissoff, man.
there ya go again, putting YOUR OWN thoughts into MY mouth, then aggrandizing yourself, LOL.
Read what I wrote, and then note post #13. I didn't say "for you", because I wasn't sure if you shared the sentiment that is regularly echoed around here. Furthermore, I didn't 'aggrandize' myself at all in the post. I'm not sure what you're reading.
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