Originally Posted by Hard-Driver

There is no such thing as "success" in Iraq. There is only "less failure".

Several neocons have been on here posting about the lower violence in Iraq. That is a good thing. Although the right wing hate mongers make straw man arguements that the left want failure and death, that has never been the case. It is a good thing that Iraq is moving forward.

What the radical right seems ignorant of, is that a war based upon lies is wrong, and can never be a success. As an analogy, suppose I burn your house down, kill one of your children in the fire, and then re-build your house. Is that a success? We started a war based upon information that was wrong. We killed tens of thousands of people. We killed thousands of American troops. We borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars to finance our war mongering. Even if Iraq emerges from this as a model of democracy in the middle east, that does not retroactively make the neocons any less of a pack of murderous war mongers. And BTW, Iraq still has a long way to go before it could be considered anything close to a model of democracy for the middle east.

Also ignored is the fact that the lower violence we are seeing in Iraq is a result of Iraq taking care of their own business. Fostering a dependence on the US troops is not a new way forward. Obviously we will never be able to see what "would have happened" if the US planned an orderly withdrawl over a year ago. We do know that the Sunni leaders were already turning on the islamic radicals before the "surge" even started. So it is certainly reasonable to believe that this decrease in violence that has occured would have occured anyway.

All the progress in Iraq is because of internal progress in Iraq. That progress has been slow in coming, and argueably delayed in coming by the presence of a large external occupying force.

I think that everyone knows and has known that Iraq will eventually "stabilize". The only question really has been if that should be left to the Iraqis to do, or if a large external military force helps or hinders the situation. The progress that is occuring in Iraq can be debated if it is because of, or in spite of, the surge in US troops. But no matter what the future holds in Iraq, there is no way that a war of choice and an exercise in nation building can be called a success, it can only be called less of a failure.