History has shown us that victory is awarded to the side that wants it the most. This doesn't just apply to war. In fact, it applies to life in general. That's exactly what Night Phoenix is saying. As he explained above, the prospect of this war depends on what we've accomplished and the stipulations of it. You can say we won this war by overthrowing Saddam's regime. You could also say we lost because of the current quagmire. It solely depends on your perspective.

what you're actually saying is that, if the insurgants stay and fight, they'll win because they have the will. in fact, like i said before, all they have to do is oppose us and keep killing off our soldiers.

however, in direct contradiction to what you said, we have to kill/assimilate all of the insurgents to win... good luck there.

Any victory we get out of this will be meaningless if we can never create enough returns that will make up for the loss of lives and capital. Right now I can't see Iraq as anything other than a charybdis that consumes money and vomits debt.

You don't know what you're talking about.

Insurgencies can't go on forever, especially when they tend to kill more civillians than actual soldiers. Insurgencies win because they make things difficult for the politicians who command the troops back at home. The insurgents can only win if we choose to give up. Every day that passes, we eliminate their support base because everytime we engage them we kill them by the DOZENS and they tend to kill hundreds of the people they claim to be 'liberating' from American occupation.

But is US winning, no matter how long it takes, the course of least harm?

I'm really worried about potential backlash against American troops in Iraq. We've had quite enough casualties already as of late.

true, same here. But what would it show the world if we were to 'weak' to do what needs to be done? (actually the Iraqis tried him, not us anyway, but...)
it would show a lot of things...none the least of which is that anyone can do that kind of stuff, and have no repercussions from it

Ask yourself this question then: Is America handing victory to the insurgents, allowing Iraq to completely collapse into what will inevitably become a fundamentalist state allied with Iran the course of least harm?

Yes, the Iraq War is costly as hell and could've (and should've) been prosecuted much better than it has, but the costs associated with having to deal with an Islamic axis in the Middle East is a far greater cost.

The cost of winning is preferrrable to the cost of losing.

I might agree with you Phoenix, but the Republicans have done a poor job selling that story to the American public. I think you'll see proof of that as the election results come in tonight. The cost of losing is high, but the track record of the current administration suggests another approach will be employed.

People's decision to elect Democrats into power is a sign of weakness, nothing more, nothing less. We know what the Democrats want to do - give up.

10 years down the road, the decision to turn over power to the Democratic Party will come back to bite us harder than even I can begin to fathom right now.

Iraq will implode completely once we surrender to the insurgents and withdraw, Iran will help the Shites take control and it'll become a mirror of their former enemy. Together, they'll go after Israel and one domino after another will fall.

Good job, Americans.

I thought most democrats just wanted a faster way out. Not to suddenly give up. Most of the time when I hear one talk about Iraq they do not say they're going to get us out of Iraq right now. They say they just want a faster route out of Iraq. But that we're not leaving anytime soon. Not untill Iraq is stable atleast.

I dont see how anyone could reasonably believe anyone would get us out before Iraq is stable.

The policy of the Democratic Party is withdrawal. Of course they aren't going to demand the immediate removal of troops, but they have been since '04 demanding some sort of 'timetable', which basically amounts to "American troops will leave on ___" which tells the insurgents that all they have to do is chill the fuck out until American troops leave and then just unleash hell during the ensuing power vacuum.

Do you think during World War II that the opposition party was sitting back demanding a timetable as to when we would stop fighting the Japanese and Germans (I'm keenly aware that SOME Republicans probably were arguing something similar, but in no way are the like the modern-day Democrats)? Fuck no. No, it was "The troops will come home when the battle is won" - period, point-blank.

Listen to the statements of Jack Murtha, Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, and a host of other Democratic leaders. Mind you, you're talking about future Speaker of the House Pelosi and potential future Senate Majority Leader Reid.

Whether they call it withdrawal or redeployment, the policy of the Democratic Party is simple: Give up.

Can you at least acknowledge that the job the Bush administration has done in Iraq has been horribly misguided, if guided at all, and suffered from lack of communication at several levels? Not saying we should give up here, but we've been over there a while now... Republicans still dont have a time table, or a real semblance of a plan.

thanks, i feel the same about you.


insurgencies can't go on forever? well, i guess so. but on the same token, neither can state-supported combat using armies.

they care, why? i mean, their mission is chaos and killing civilians doesn't matter to them -- casualties of war to them. in any case, i think they can last indefinitely as they have no unified financial backer who is suffering, and instead they will keep fighting because they believe they are doing a service to themselves. further, even when the current generation of insurgents dies off, there will always be children to indoctrinate and convert to their cause.

as a logical consequence, we will only win by staying there forever OR by having them all die out (unlikely since there are constantly newly indoctrinated ones).

every da, they kill our soldiers, weakening the morale of the troops and the support back home. and like i said before, i don't think they really care about the casualties on their side. i mean, these are the people who believe strongly it's more than worth it to die for this cause (as evidenced by the suicide bombers).

Again, what is your definition of a victory in Iraq? I'm sorry, I'm just having difficulty understanding how the US can win a foreign country's civil war.

Apropos of nothing, Night Phoenix, you seem to be a very bang-up kind of guy. Very support the troops. Aren't you of enlistable age?

Worse than a decade of occupation, during which terrorist groups have a powerful soure of propaganda to fuel their recruitment campaign and the collective world opinion increasingly turns against America and her allies. A generation of our young men dying over a lost cause based off false intelligence. I don't know, it's hard to say.

We can't be certain of the future, no matter how confidently you try and predict it. What we can be certain of though is that no matter with we withdraw tomorrow or dig in or ten years, Iraq is fucked either way. There is going to be years of bloody violence there, a combination of anarchy chaos occupations and civil war. The question is; do you really want to be part of it?

lol I was almost taking your predictions seriously until you reminded me of the domino effect. Those damn commies took over Malaysia and Singapore and Indonesia and the Philipines and Japan and Australia and and and no.

Come to think of it, what dominoes do the terrorists have to fall in the first place? It's not like militant Wahabbi doesn't already have a stranglehold on Arab nations.

Yes, but the very things I listed are the reasons why insurgencies can't go on forever. Insurgencies, over time, destroy their support base, especially when such insurgencies have very little regard for civillian lives like these. Insurgencies count on the fact that civillians of the occupying country will force the politicians to surrender. If the will to stay and fight remains for a prolonged period of time then an insurgency cannot win because they win only through psychological warfare on the civillians back home, not militarily. The longer U.S. troops stay, the more time the Iraqi government has to solidify its resources, and consequently the less effective the insurgents become. If we leave before the Iraqi government can effectively defend the country and have something to truly offer the people to not make them support or at least tolerate the presence of the insurgency.

Again, I'm not for being in Iraq forever, just long enough so that we can make sure the Iraqi government is strong enough to handle shit on their own. If we leave right now, then it's outright surrender.Given the majority I just woke up to, it's fairly certain that America will leave prematurely, giving the Democrats their self-fulfilling prophecy because they've been determined to see Iraq fail from day one and have done everything in their power to undermine the policy, with the requisite help from the most incompetent administration I've ever encountered.

See above.

I'm 22, with a fucked up left ankle held together by a metal rod that not only makes me physically unable to be in the military, but fucked up me being the most dominant defensive tackle coming into the University of Texas in 2002 (which assuredly would have me in the NFL by now....dunno, hopefully?), which forced me to accept an academic scholarship to the University of North Texas and a dual degree in political science and history.

Besides, why don't you just come out with your idiotic "You can't support the war unless you're in the military" argument instead of trying to veil it?

I'm an analyst by trade - I did go to college and got a degree for this shit and get paid on the side by both the private sector (hello Heritage Foundation) AND the government (CIA) to study this shit. How many of you kids had a job offer from the CIA sitting on the table the second you got ya degree? If we surrender in Iraq (and the way things look, as soon as January 2009 when a Democratic president takes over, we will) then the whole region is fucked off because we won't be able to do shit anymore because it becomes a known fact that if you inflict a few thousand casualties on American troops that we will give up. That's when they go for the juggular.

But maybe I'm wrong, maybe surrender is the right policy and everything will be better if America refuses to engage the enemy and just plays defense.

That statement would be fine if we had a leadership that could develop a plan that would allot the Iraqi government the power to be self-sustaining. But perhaps thats a tangent best left unsaid in this thread.

what I find funny is the fact he wanted to reconcile the tension between the people AFTER he got sentenced to die. typical isn't it?

The problem with all this "we need to stay until the job is done" crap is that the problem right now is sectarian violence. Iraqis fighting Iraqis. The U.S. doesn't have the solution to that -- Iraq does. This isn't something we can solve. Sticking around and helping repel any foreign fighters is alright, but really, at this point it's up to the Iraqis to resolve their own civil war, not us.

But shouldn't the US be responsible for cleaning up their mess?

It's not like the Iraqis started this civil war out of boredom. Removing Saddam has left a vacuum - and nobody has come up with a solution to fill it.

We're going to have to deal with Iran one way or another, and the religious views of the Iraqi people aren't going to change.

Why wouldn't the insurgency just lay low now? It would have the same effect. If we didn't see an insurgency, we would finish up the job and come home anyway, whether or not there is a timetable.

The job is failing because we can't (or aren't) doing it. We don't put enough into fixing Iraq. All the money we've spent on this war, and we can't even control a force that has no major central figure heading it. We're supposedly the best force in the history of mankind and we can't even control Iraq. We've been at it for 5 years and we can't control an area the size of Arizona. And we probably never will, considering that 30-40% of the Iraqi population (at least) doesn't even want us to.

Perhaps you need to focus less on whether we can win or lose or whether or not what the hell we are doing is winnable at all.

And the corollary to what you are arguing is that the Iraqis, the ones we want as friends, they will never step up unless we force them to. The initial wave of the war has been over how long? And how much progress has been made? Pulling out immediately is wrong. But there isn't anything wrong with saying to Iraq, "Look, fuckers, we came in here and took care of the worst shit for you guys, now learn to fucking deal with your own problems."

It's good news, NP. Wounded veterans with missing limbs are being sent back to Iraq, so your injury might not be as big of a burden as you might think.

But you're mistaken about my argument, sir. You can support the troops until the cows come home while being a civilian, that's silly to say that you can't. But, I don't see you crying over flag-draped coffins or bitching about vet benefits being cut back, in this thread. You're smart enough to read what I'm trying to say.

Understand this and understand it well, lurker. I support the U.S. military to the highest degree possible for a civillian. While I don't break down and cry everytime I hear about soldiers dying over there, it does indeed disturb me, but alas, that's what happens during wars - soldiers die. I got a brother who has served five tours in Iraq, another that's served since 2001 in Afghanistan, so to say that I have basically nothing at stake here, that I'm just totally detached from the reality that soldiers do die in war is bullshit.

That's one of the few things that someone could say to my face that would get the piss knocked out of them.