[Deo volente]

This is the most frustrating war scenario that I can imagine.

We need to hammer the enemy into the ground and destroy them utterly. The problem is, in order to do that, we'll have to destroy half the country of Iraq.
We can't do that, since we have committed ourselves to bringing them "democracy" and rebuilding them in our image. So our soldiers are stuck in a position of "policing" neighborhoods, and trying to help the incompetent Iraqi military to defend their country. Most of our soldiers have been killed by roadside bombs while driving around the country.

You can't have it both ways. In a war, the object is to destroy the enemy.
But the enemy consists of all sorts of groups such as Al-Qaeda, Iranian and Syrian backed fighters, former Baathists, and other assorted bad guys. To get them all, you have to kill large numbers of innocent Iraqis in the process.
The only sure way to defeat them is to disarm them, and that is logistically impossible. You'd have to round up every person in the country, and that's 25 million people.

And the enormous loss of life to our soldiers that would result while fighting house-to-house is unacceptable to the American people at this point in time.
The whole thing is a mess, and I don't see any good way to victory at this point.

And I haven't even taken into account the hatred and blood lust that has been ongoing for about a thousand years, more or less, between Sunnis and Shiites.
Or the burning desire of the Kurds for an independent country in the north.

This is a lose-lose situation, and how many more hundreds of billions are we going to pour down the drain?

[rlmorel]

ping for later response

[CJ-50]

This is a lose-lose situation, and how many more hundreds of billions are we going to pour down the drain?

As much as it takes. We made a commitment when we crossed the border into Iraq and we have to do this until the Iraqi government tells us to go home. It is the innocent that we are trying to protect now.