Replies

Unfortunately the author of this article doesn’t know how to win a war either.

These are the sort of gibbering platitudes we hear all the time.

What is needed is a clear understanding of the three major phases of war, the principle of offense, and the nature of submission.

We are now in the last stage of this war where the US must continue to apply military pressure to the states opposed to the victory in Iraq.

Syria must be attacked and defeated. Leave the remains to the French to sort out.

After Syria is crushed, Iran is next, and the Sauds after that.

Victory requires relentless offensive military action against the enemies discussed above.

Submission means making the choice of surrender easy for the enemy.

The US must put enough pressure on its enemies that they choose to leave Iraq alone. If they don’t the US must continue to punish its enemies.

You are right - Platitudes don’t win a war, but a ruthless and correct strategy pursued until victory does.
If this was an easy thing, we’d be done by now.
It isn’t.

I’ll say what I’ve said before: There are plenty of critics of this war, but few who step forward and outline the set of steps needed to win victory.

I don’t know if your steps are the right ones, but we should at least be asking the question “How to win?” rather than assuming it is lost and asking “How do we get out?”

One good thing about Bush - he is still asking question #1 while most of the DC establishment is in question #2.

Playing defense - as the US is now doing - is a losing tactic. It allows the enemy to choose the time and place of battle. In this fight the US can only chase after them in an endless war of attrition.

Thank Bush for that. The war was botched from the beginnings, for too many reasons to count, but the one that stands out to me is this: Parts of Iraq were never "conquered" (lousy word, but one that fits best). I'm not talking in a sense of firebombed or leveled like parts of Germany or Japan during WWII, but just that we never had the troop strength during and immediately after March 2003 to make all of Iraq feel that it had been conquered.

Some blame the Turks for not letting our 4th Mechanized into the north of Iraq, but that's just a small part of it.

I would say the bigger problem, is that after 9/11, when it was clear that we were going to be engaged in a war without end, that we needed to ramp up the size of the military. Why Bush did not boost authorized troop levels is beyond me - his father and Clinton gutted the military of many that would have been mid and senior-level, both in terms of NCOs and Officers, and Bush should have done a lot more on that front after 9/11.

In a country of 25 million, surrounded by many hostile nations, and full of radicals with centuries of hatred for one another, we needed to go in, with a lot more force, to all parts of the country, and we needed to keep the Iraqi military and government together (barring those who committed crimes against the Iraqi people), similar to how we treated Germany in the late '40s. Instead, we just let them fade away, and parts of Iraq did not see much, if any of an American presence, and as a result, the radicals become emboldened, along with the neighboring countries. Way too much Iraqi military hardware was left laying around, and rather than relying on experienced Iraqi soldiers and bureaucrats (the same people we are trying to recruit now), we thought we could build a military and government from the ground up. That's not working to well.

I think the war can be salvaged, I just don't think Bush can or will do so - he's beginning to weaken, as are those around him, with their comments and innuendos about pulling out large numbers in 2008.

The North Vietnamese always felt that if they could just hold out, eventually we would leave. I'm sure many in Al Qaeda are thinking the same thing.

Our troops are winning the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, but unfortunately our government is acting like we are losing the war.