News How We (US) Lost in Iraq and Afghanistan

[russ_watters]

Oops, guess I fell for that one.

 

[Czcibor]

How does it "not fit my theory" when you said that first attempt at building democracy was not as successful as the second? That's _exactly_ my point.

There are more examples.

Consider Germany. First democracy (Weimar republic) fell apart, because people and politicians did not yet know what it is and how to use it. Both communists and nazis tried to seize power, and keep it forever, crushing opponents. Nazis did it first...

Well, I think that Nazi Germany is exactly a well picked argument against democracy and that both Germany and the world would be better off if Wilhelm II was still the kaiser.

I see one serious flaw in your reasoning - you assum

As I said: exactly my point. E.g. South Korea, while being nominally "democratic", at first was quite authoritarian in reality - they suppressed communists with quite brutal and in many cases illegal means. But gradually, it become better, and now they have well-functioning democracy.

But insctead of striving for democracy the priorities were economics/education and getting rid of communist in a way that's not democracy at all. Had they been more serious about typical features of democracy like human rights / freedom of speech actually they risked state collapse thus moving far away from becoming a democracy in long run

Where would "mature society" appear from? Thin air?

Can you ride bicycle well without ever trying?

Main source:
- mass education. At best not done now but already such tradition of more than one generation
- respect for law/rules (there are some clear rules based on secular law, and they are enforced)
- cultural transfer from more advanced countries
- responsibility for your own choice (try first democracy on local level when you would directly feel pain of your bad decisions, while you would not cause collapse of everything)

(You can provide that all under authoritarian regime. Under perfect condition you organize a burial of the dictator (like Ataturk), call him in the speech the father of nation, thank him for all achievements in education and industrial development during decades of his reign, and while body is decomposed you prepare a free election)

Do you consider as good idea to try to ride bicycle when you haven't learned to walk yet? Or maybe in such a case it would be mostly a source of unnecessary bruises.

 

[Vanadium 50]

both Germany and the world would be better off if Wilhelm II was still the kaiser.

A Kaiser 126 years old!

 

[nikkkom]

>> Where would "mature society" appear from? Thin air?

>> Can you ride bicycle well without ever trying?

Main source:
- mass education. At best not done now but already such tradition of more than one generation
- respect for law/rules (there are some clear rules based on secular law, and they are enforced)

Neither of this is beneficial to authoritarian elite. Say, today's Egypt.
They _prefer_ to have uneducated, poor, gullible population.
They also prefer to enforce a simple rule "whatever we say is the law. Any laws we don't like are ignored".

 

[mheslep]

Jonathan Foreman of Commentary Magazine has a http://jonathanforeman.info/coin-wars-on-daniel-bolgers-why-we-lostcommentary-magazine-april-2015/on Bolger's "Why We Lost". The review is critical of Bolger for failing to back his primary thesis. Foreman does cite some strong points, good writing, and at other times the resort to the petty.

...Regardless of who was in charge, Bolger believes the underlying situation [in Iraq] was impossible. “Replace Bremer with Henry Kissinger and Sanchez with Dwight Eisenhower, cancel the de-Baathification orders, and the stark facts on the ground still sat there oozing pus and bile,” he writes. “With Saddam gone, any voting would install a Shiite majority. The Sunni wouldn’t run Iraq again. That, at the bottom, caused the insurgency.” (Like many commentators on the war, Bolger often seems blasé about the oppression of Iraq’s Kurds and Shia under the Baathist regime and the dominance of the Sunni minority.)

Bolger makes sure to remind the reader of Petraeus’s relative lack of height, as if that might be the key to his character flaws.

In short Bolger insists that the military must pursue only “short, decisive conventional wars, for limited ends”. Those conditions might well make war clean for the US military and a big budget military industrial complex, though I don't see how outside of Hollywood films those conditions meet successfully with real threats to the US and allies.

 

[nickyrtr]

Did the US really lose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Saddam and the Taliban were both removed from control of their respective states relatively quickly, and they still haven't got it back. That's an important difference from Vietnam.

 

[Hornbein]

But on the other hand, would it be any better to fight only wars that we could win and profit from? If we were to attack and invade Canada, we could seize her oil, gold, rare Earth minerals, timber, fisheries, fresh water and polar access. With all that, perhaps we could pay off the national debt and restore our reputation as a fearsome winner rather than a feckless loser?

SHHHH! They might hear you and get "ideas!"

 

[Hornbein]

Go into a country, select ten thousand people at random, then torture them in the most obscene possible ways. Surely this will win the trust and allegiance of their friends, relatives, and countrymen.

 

[Astronuc]

Vice President Dick Cheney: Wrong Then, . . .

 

[Dotini]

This report hints that some type of deep game is being played in Syria, as it was in Iraq.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...0-spies-say-isis-intelligence-was-cooked.html

More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military's Central Command have formally complained that their reports on http://www.thedailybeast.com/features/isis.html and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials, The Daily Beast has learned.

The accusations suggest that a large number of people tracking the inner workings of the terror groups think that their reports are being manipulated to fit a public narrative. The allegations echoed charges that political appointees and senior officials cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s supposed weapons program in 2002 and 2003.

 

[jim hardy]

Who knows what Saddam sent into Syria just before we attacked. Might be his old chemical warheads that are surfacing now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WMD_conjecture_in_the_aftermath_of_the_2003_invasion_of_Iraq

And from America's most trusted news source (only half kidding)
http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/ymppi0/general-georges-sada
around 5 minutes 10 seconds

What to think ?

 

[Hornbein]

Who knows what Saddam sent into Syria just before we attacked. Might be his old chemical warheads that are surfacing now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WMD_conjecture_in_the_aftermath_of_the_2003_invasion_of_Iraq

And from America's most trusted news source (only half kidding)
http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/ymppi0/general-georges-sada
around 5 minutes 10 seconds

What to think ?

I can tell you what my Mother thought when she heard that. "Now Bush says that Syria has WMD. Who's he trying to kid?"

 

[Student100]

Go into a country, select ten thousand people at random, then torture them in the most obscene possible ways. Surely this will win the trust and allegiance of their friends, relatives, and countrymen.

Not to far off.

The only way to win a counter insurgency is to kill as many people as possible, in the most horrific and terrifying ways. The populace doesn't need to like you (they never will as shown in all the failed counterinsurgencies of the US and British to date) but they do need to fear you. The hearts and minds strategy will never work with a culture that isn't already more or less like your own.

Mass firebombing campaigns, mass and random executions for every troop killed by insurgency, scary weapons that don't really need to be more lethal than conventional weapons but evoke fear, etc. In other words, you need to commit multiple war crimes until the alternative to your rule is worse than just submitting. The western civilizations won't do this (thankfully I guess), so they should just admit upfront they can't win against an insurgency. Their campaigns should then reflect direct goals instead (kill this person, destroy this infrastructure, etc) without the nation building.

Afghanistan was winnable, they had a peoples who were already involved in open arm conflict against the government. Assisting them in nation building was the right move. Iraq was never winnable, and stupid. If we believed they had weapons of mass destruction we should have targeted those facilities. If we needed to capture the government to do that, we should have left Saddam in power. Saddam was an effective buffer against Iran, and hadn't made any moves against our allies in years.

Did the US really lose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Saddam and the Taliban were both removed from control of their respective states relatively quickly, and they still haven't got it back. That's an important difference from Vietnam.

Of course the US lost Iraq, they enemy effectively targeted our moral until we pulled out. There's only two ways to win a war, target their ability to make war, or their desire. The US was targeting the ability, against a enemy that had no real war making industry, which makes no sense. The insurgency in Iraq targeted our moral until we pulled out, which makes sense for an enemy who doesn't have nearly the war making capability of the US. We lost, and left the region far more unstable then when Saddam was in power. The current Iraqi nation is in tatters, the armed forces and the government are both ineffective. ISIS and the Taliban control parts of the country.

Afghanistan is still ongoing, both the formal Afghany armed forces war against the Taliban, and the US secretive war against the same/ISIS. It hasn't been lost quite yet.

 

[mheslep]

Of course the US lost Iraq,...

Please defined "lost", or lost to whom? After great loss of life and expense during the invasion and insurgency, Iraq held multiple free elections; as of 2009-10 the country post-surge had been under the control elected leadership for four years and the civilian violent fatalities was apparently heading below http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Centers/saban/iraq-index/index20091120.PDF (Brookings page 4), or 0.9 per month per 100,000 among Iraq's population of ~33 million. By contrast, the homicide rate in, say, Chicago, is 1.75 per month per 100,000.

 

[Student100]

Please defined "lost", or lost to whom? After great loss of life and expense during the invasion and insurgency, Iraq held multiple free elections; as of 2009-10 the country post-surge had been under the control elected leadership for four years and the civilian violent fatalities was apparently heading below http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Centers/saban/iraq-index/index20091120.PDF (Brookings page 4), or 0.9 per month per 100,000 among Iraq's population of ~33 million. By contrast, the homicide rate in, say, Chicago, is 1.75 per month per 100,000.

Your statistics a bit dated, and pre-pull out.

There is currently a power struggle going on within the government between the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurd. Not to mention Iranian agents operating freely in the country, large parts of the country controlled by ISIS, tens of thousands of causalities and many more injured in the 2014-2015 Iraq war, ISIS making and using chemical agents in country, refugees still flooding to neighboring countries, etc.

Unless our objective was to actually destabilize Iraq, I think it's safe to say we lost.

 

[mheslep]

... large parts of the country controlled by ISIS, tens of thousands of causalities and many more injured in the 2014-2015 Iraq war, .

So the U.S. won earlier, 2009, but now, after the U.S. is gone, the U.S. lost?

 

[Student100]

So the U.S. won earlier, 2009, but now, after the U.S. is gone, the U.S. lost?

The US didn't "win" in 2009. Circumstances became more favorable to the counter insurgency, partly the surge, partly the Anbar awaking, partly the focus on high value targets, that's all. To win the counter insurgency, after draw down and the pull out Iraq should have been stable, with limited sectarian violence, an efficient non-corrupt government, and security. It never had any of those things. So the US didn't meet their objectives, or they lost.

 

[mheslep]

... To win the counter insurgency,

These are your milestones for success in Iraq; they differ from those stated by the US and allies.

after draw down and the pull out Iraq should have been stable, with limited sectarian violence,

Starting in 2008 as the data shows above Iraq did have limited violence for several years.

an efficient non-corrupt government,

This is desirable for any country but is hardly a mandatory outcome for military action. S. Korea suffered under corrupt governments for years after the armistice, though this hardly makes a failure out of the military intervention that freed S. Korea from the likes of Kim Jong-un.

Below are the goals from the Bush administration, 2005, with the WMD failure long gone at that point. There is no complete "pull out" among them.

In the short term:
An Iraq that is making steady progress in fighting terrorists and neutralizing the insurgency, meeting political milestones; building democratic institutions; standing up robust security forces to gather intelligence, destroy terrorist networks, and maintain security; and tackling key economic reforms to lay the foundation for a sound economy.

In the medium term:
An Iraq that is in the lead defeating terrorists and insurgents and providing its own security, with a constitutional, elected government in place, providing an inspiring example to reformers in the region, and well on its way to achieving its economic potential.

In the longer term:
(a) An Iraq that has defeated the terrorists and neutral
(b) An Iraq that is peaceful, united, stable, democratic, and secure, where Iraqis have the institutions and resources they need to govern themselves justly and provide security for their country.
(c) An Iraq that is a partner in the global war on terror and the fight against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, integrated into the international community, an engine for regional economic growth, and proving the fruits of democratic governance to the region.

By 2011 Iraq had a good measure of imperfect success in the short and medium term goals.

 

[Student100]

These are your milestones for success in Iraq; they differ from those stated by the US and allies.

Really? Tell me how they're different? I was in Iraq, I think I can somewhat guess at what our goals were. US was in full COIN at this point, in build mode. The objectives I stated were the US objectives as presented to everyone.

Below are the goals from the Bush administration, 2005, with the WMD failure long gone at that point. There is no complete "pull out" among them.

In the longer term:
(a) An Iraq that has defeated the terrorists and neutral
(b) An Iraq that is peaceful, united, stable, democratic, and secure, where Iraqis have the institutions and resources they need to govern themselves justly and provide security for their country.
(c) An Iraq that is a partner in the global war on terror and the fight against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, integrated into the international community, an engine for regional economic growth, and proving the fruits of democratic governance to the region.

So it's okay to ignore the long term objectives because we had a good year?

By 2011 Iraq had a good measure of imperfect success in the short and medium term goals.

Really? Unemployment at 50%~, lack of security, not enough infrastructure to provide water, food and electricity to it's population is a good measure of success?

I don't understand why you're grasping at straws here to try and show the US "won." Every military commander with any sense will tell you we didn't accomplish what we wanted to accomplish. The fact the insurgency proved to be somewhat under control prior to pull out doesn't mean we can wash our hands of the situation unfolding now. We, the US, caused it. We weren't able to build a safe, stable Iraq.

 

[lisab]

Below are the goals from the Bush administration, 2005, with the WMD failure long gone at that point.

OK, so let's look at those goals...first off, it's someone's blog. Under (1)(a), there is a hotlink to "Victory in Iraq Defined" but the link just goes tohttps://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/#part1 , which says nothing about Victory in Iraq.

Under (1)(b), there is a link to "Highlights of the Iraq Strategy Review", which goes to this page, which says nothing about Highlights of the Iraq Strategy Review.

And I'm not going any further, that blog is BS. mheslep, if you want to discuss this issue please use legit sources - preferably original sources, not blogs.

Besides, large parts of Iraq are besieged by ISIS - this is hardly what the Bush administration was aiming for as victory when they made the unwise decision to "liberate" Iraq.

 

[russ_watters]

Really? Tell me how they're different? I was in Iraq, I think I can somewhat guess at what our goals were...

Really? Unemployment at 50%~, lack of security, not enough infrastructure to provide water, food and electricity to it's population is a good measure of success?

I don't understand why you're grasping at straws here to try and show the US "won." Every military commander with any sense will tell you we didn't accomplish what we wanted to accomplish.

Since when has an unemployment rate target ever been a goal of a war? Which branch of the military is tasked with job creation? What was our post-WWII unemployment rate target For Germany in 1941?

Look, I get that it would have been nice if the result of the Iraq War II had been a peaceful, stable Iraq, but that's outside the scope of what "war" is. However, you want to say that the nation-building exercise that was undertaken after the war was won failed, I'm fine with that.

 

[mheslep]

Iraq war 2005 goals, as originally posted on the White House web site, now archived
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/iraq/iraq_strategy_nov2005.html#execsum

 

[mheslep]

...We weren't able to build a safe, stable Iraq.

The December 2011 speech

...all of it has led to this moment of success. Now, Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.

 

[Student100]

Since when has an unemployment rate target ever been a goal of a war? Which branch of the military is tasked with job creation? What was our post-WWII unemployment rate target For Germany in 1941?

Look, I get that it would have been nice if the result of the Iraq War II had been a peaceful, stable Iraq, but that's outside the scope of what "war" is. However, you want to say that the nation-building exercise that was undertaken after the war was won failed, I'm fine with that.

It wasn't outside the scope of the war, that's part of the problem. In the example of unemployment, we were funneling large amounts of money into local business to stimulate the economy. The DoD was writing contracts to rebuild infrastructure, which would get sub contracted out to locals.

Part of the militarizes strategy during the war was to nation build, I don't think we can discount that as a military objective, even though it seems illogical.

all of it has led to this moment of success. Now, Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.

Obviously the speech was wrong...?

 

[mheslep]

Obviously the speech was wrong...?

Then for some reason you read the speech to say something else, like "Iraq now has full employment, a complete infrastructure, and is stable for all time". At the time the speech was given, the multiple peaceful elections, obliteration of AQI, and low violence rate were strong evidence, over several years, that the quoted Obama phrase was correct at the time it was given. Clearly, Iraq has changed for the worse since then and the important question is why, a question that is not addressed by repeating "The U.S. lost".

 

[Student100]

Then for some reason you read the speech to say something else, like "Iraq now has full employment, a complete infrastructure, and is stable for all time". At the time the speech was given, the multiple peaceful elections, obliteration of AQI, and low violence rate were strong evidence, over several years, that the quoted Obama phrase was correct at the time it was given. Clearly, Iraq has changed for the worse since then and the important question is why, a question that is not addressed by repeating "The U.S. lost".

The answer to why is because it didn't have any of the things you just mentioned.

 

[mheslep]

The answer to why is because it didn't have any of the things you just mentioned.

It wasn't the unchecked growth of ISIS and Malaki's purge of Sunni in the military, allowed by a complete withdrawal of the U.S. military? Theses are things that changed since that speech, unlike the Iraqi infrastructure and employment which had serious problems then, has them now, like many other developing countries.

 

[Student100]

It wasn't the unchecked growth of ISIS and Malaki's purge of Sunni in the military, allowed by a complete withdrawal of the U.S. military? Theses are things that changed since that speech, unlike the Iraqi infrastructure and employment which had serious problems then, has them now, like many other developing countries.

No, it's mostly just that the speech was a lie, a political nicecty. Iraq was anything but stable in 2011. I don't know how massive unemployment is not a red flag for the stability of country. Or that just because they had a few rigged elections and the 8th most corrupt government in the world means everythings stable and good to go now because they were "democrratically elected". Don't mess it up now Iraqis, things are going great!

Sectarian rifts existed even in 2011, and 2010... and 2009... I think everyone knew, including Obama that the country wasn't in fact stable and that withdrawal would create a power vacuum. I don't see any reason, if he truly believed what he said, to attempt to negoiate a new SOF agreement to try and keep troops in country otherwise.

Which he did do, he wanted troops to remain in country, but Iraq wouldn't agree to the needed protections for US troops. That's not something you do if you really believe in a stable and self reliant Iraq.

 

[mheslep]

I don't see any reason, if he truly believed what he said, to attempt to negoiate a new SOF agreement to try and keep troops in country otherwise.

Iraq was stable *with* some U.S. troops in place, that is, stable enough that the size of factional violence did not impair the government, elections or disable the Iraqi military. Obama changed the conditions. Pointing to some factional violence regardless of size and claiming instability would classify all countries unstable or close to it. See the riots in France, the UK in recent years.

 

[lisab]

Iraq was stable *with* some U.S. troops in place, that is, stable enough that the size of factional violence did not impair the government, elections or disable the Iraqi military. Obama changed the conditions. Pointing to some factional violence regardless of size and claiming instability would classify all countries unstable or close to it. See the riots in France, the UK in recent years.

mheslep, I read the book that this thread is about. Some of it I agreed with, some I did not - but I did read it.

Did you read the book? It's long, but it does give a foundation to work from. There is ample evidence, in the book and pretty much everywhere you look, that we not only lost the war but we screwed up the ME pretty badly. Your stance in this thread seems to be: we had the war won when Bush left office, and what happened in the years months after that had nothing at all to do with our actions there (in other words, Thanks Obama!). Am I understanding you correctly? If so, the book doesn't exactly agree with you.