Who wants to lose the war in Iraq?

Question

Nobody, right?
Most of the candidates running for president want to withdraw from Iraq. None are offering a winning proposal.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that mismanagement by the Bush administration has been the major stumbling block in Iraq.
What if a presidential candidate came up with a surefire plan to win in Iraq, a plan that would require less money and fewer troop. Would you vote for that candidate? Or, would you vote for the candidate that wants to toss in the towel?

Answer 1

Winning in Iraq is as easy as herding cats out of the woods onto a moving merry-go-round.

It helps to know who the fighters are. In corner number one there are the Kurds. Their population is about 1/6 of the total in Iraq. They have a lot of oil in their sector in the North, have a good army, no insecurity, very few attacks, and no serious complaints.

The Kurds are giving a little help to the Shi'ites in corner number two. These guys are about 4/6 of the total population. They have a lot of oil in their sector in the South and East, now that Bush got rid of Sadaam Hussein. They also have received a lot of armament and training, also from Bush, for the last few years. They are even being helped by Shi'ite Iran, our sworn enemy! Lately, they are using Iranian IEDs to kill our guys, too. They are divided into two main factions that are fighting each other over the oil when they are not fighting Sadaam's old gang.

Sadaam's old gang are the Sunnis in corner number three. They are the remaining 1/6th of Iraq's population but, before Bush's invasion, they had all the weapons. were running all of Iraq, and controlled all the oil. They and the Shi'ites have been killing each other for 1300 years. Now, as insurgents, they would like to get back at least some of the oil. They still have some of their weapons and can hit and run, but can't hold a position very long. They avoid our guys if they can and do most of their damage to the Shi'ites with suicide bombers coming in from all over the world - an endless supply.

The Sunnis were helped somewhat by incoming Al-Qaeda Sunnis in corner number four, who want to train with live targets (our guys) and do the jihad thing. Lately the more moderate Sunni tribes are killing them. The last ones standing will leave when the targets leave. The dangerous plotters are all in Pakistan, anyway.

Our guys are in corner number five. There are about 160K of them, well-armed and courageous, but poorly led. After deposing Sadaam, their Commander-in-Chief held a democratic election, which the Shi'ites naturally won and will always win with 4 Shi'ites per Sunni. (They were the ones with the purple fingers.) Now the C-i-C wants the Shi'ites to give some oil to the Sunnis, their blood enemy, and can't understand why they won't. He also wants the Sunnis to pay taxes to the Shi'ites, their blood enemy, and can't understand why they won't. The C-i-C should ask his father why "reconciliation" and a "National Unity Government" will never, never, never happen.

The Shi'ites could defeat the Sunnis, but prefer not to. They would rather keep getting more equipment and training as long as possible. So they pretend weakness and political stalemate. It's a con and our guys are being killed for no good reason.

Bush can beg and beg, but these guy will never live together in peace. They have to fight it out without our interference - or anybody else's interference - until they have had enough and can agree on boundaries for Kurdistan, Sunnistan, and Shiastan.

If the C-i-C had brains, he would take our guys out of combat and move them to strategic border areas where they could be supplied or could exit with relative safety. They could keep the war from speading and protect Kurdistan and other nations.

But he has no brains - or else he would prefer to stay the course until he leaves office and then blame his disaster on the next president.

Unfortunately, none of the presidential candidates from either party are much smarter than Bush. They haven't yet figured it out.

Answer 2

First what is a "win"? Does that mean peace & security at any cost? A pro-American business government in place? A unified government? Ending the sectarian violence? Or partition? I know it seems like an elementary question but it is one that should be considered- what are our goals, our original casus belli didn't pan out, and was a flat out lie; now that we are there in what direction should we head?

I would love to think a cheaper plan with less troops would be feasible but honestly I don't think that that is realistic.

"Tossing in the towel" I don't think that it's fair to say that that's what people want. Personally I feel like we have already screwed up so much, pretty much starting right after the invasion, that we are making a mistake by being there. It is like some scene in potter barn, we knocked something over it shattered and broke and we are just standing on top of it, right in the middle with our arms crossed, insisting that our presence is helping and is needed.

I think it comes down to one thing, which is more harmful: our presence or our absence?

Answer 3

Surefire? If a candidate could convince the American people of that he wouldn't need to be elected, he could become Dictator overnight! "Flat, black and glowing" is not an option!

I'd prefer to vote for a towel-tosser than to suffer interminable losses to our troops for the next few generations. As long as we're there in the midst of the terrorists we'll keep on dying uselessly.

Don't toss a towel but pull back to secured bases and take them out as the terrorists lift their heads from their hidey-holes. Why do we have rapid-response forces if we don't use them? Let's use small, fast, stealthy forces just like our enemies do - we have better "eyes and ears" and far better weapons; this "war on terror" should be a total mismatch and conducted as such.

Answer 4

" What if a presidential candidate came up with a surefire plan to win in Iraq..."

That would require (according to the generals fighting this war) a political solution, but the fine art of diplomacy seems to be something the Republicans have decided is 'quaint.'

Instead they've relied on Shock and Awe, but now as in Vietnam we see the limits to US Military force. We are making enemies faster than we can kill them.

The right wing kooks who say that Democrats "want us to lose" are insane. These are the same nut jobs who think "nuke 'em till they glow" is an effective foreign policy.

God help us, the inmates have taken over the asylum...

Answer 5

Any plan with a chance of working would require more money and troops or much more brutal tactics - or both. Trying to 'win' the war easily and on the cheap was the primary mistake the adminstration made in Iraq.

No, I wouldn't vote for a repeat of that mistake.

Answer 6

I don't. I think we should stay until we get rid of Al Quaeda which means never. But we have a moral obligation now to Iraq because of the mess the chimp we had in office made over there. We can't just leave things can only get worse in Iraq if we leave. And things could get worse for us too. They could attack again and there are reports that Al Quaeda is stronger than ever and we need to protect ourselves.

Answer 7

I agree with "wolf." The Democrats have far to much invested in us losing the war for them to be on our side. Just imagine how catastrophic it will be for the Democrats when we stabilize Iraq.

crabby_blindguy:

The Germans didn't attack us in WWII either. The Japanese did. Yet both the Germans and Japanese posed a threat to the security of the USA. Should the USA have only attacked Japan because Germany "never did anything to the USA?"

While the Nazis didn't directly attack America, Roosevelt recognized the Germans were part of the larger war on totalitarianism which, if left unchecked, could pose a significant and imminent threat to our country. The U.S. preemptively by attacking the Germans after it became clear appeasement and conciliation had become a feckless policy to combat the spread of Nazism. Acting pro actively, millions of lives would be spared.

Even though Hussein didn't directly attack the U.S. on 9/11, his documented past associations with terrorist organizations qualified Hussein as a very likely terrorist threat. Hussein made $25,000 payments to families of Palestinian homicide bombers and harbored al Qaeda terrorists.

To deny Saddam Hussein was not "part of the war on terror" would be to deny his past terrorist actions. Hussein was a well-known terrorist who used WMD and poison gas on his own people, killing hundreds of thousands of Kurds in the 1980's and burying them in mass graves. He routinely tortured his own citizens with electric shock and castration. He raped women and killed them in front of their families. Hussein long harbored one of the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in February, 1993. He already had attempted to assassinate a U.S. president.

According to the Duelfer Report of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) released in October 2004, Saddam posed an imminent threat to the U.S. and to the rest of the world.

While it is true no actual facilities found producing chemical or biological agents on a large scale, there were many smaller scale laboratories operating under the Iraqi Intelligence Services which engaged in small scale production of chemical nerve agents, sulfur mustard, nitrogen mustard, ricin, aflatoxin and other agents.

I could go on and on but the point is that it was the right decision to go into Iraq, and both parties agreed on it. There is nothing "illegal" about the way we went into the country.

Answer 8

wait i thought the war was over didn't bush land on a carrier and say just that??
as i see it if we pull out now there would be massive infighting funded by Iran and the Saudis. (genocide)
but how long will it take for Iraq's government to get their act together and actually control the country my guess 10 to15 years or more
i liked Tommy Thomson's idea let the Iraq people vote on it

Answer 9

Coragryph believes that we are like the umpire in a baseball game.---We are not.--We definitely have a side to support: --the side of the democratically elected government. The Iraqis did not vote for a theocracy.
We have already seen what happened in Afghanistan. We can't stand by and watch that happen again.

Answer 10

we are already losing the war in Iraq.

and I would not vote for a candidate that has a plan to further violence against the peoples of Iraq.

I would vote for a candidate that wishes to pull out the military and replace it with people that can help rebuild the country.

The violence that is happening is a civil war and would be happening whether the US is there or not. There is nothing more we can do in a military sense, but we definitely need to clean up the mess we have made.