Do Americans realize they lost both Iraq and Afghan wars?

Your actions on this forum tell me the words above are hollow.

 

I realize you enjoy starting anti-American threads here at PF. That is a wonderful thing here that we have and are extremely proud of this part of America and American lifestyles.

Does your gutless chicken excrement country allow such freedoms?

 

Iraq and Afghanistan were costly nation-building fiascos, the former fraudulently-predicated and the latter woefully mismanaged from the start, as honest Americans readily concede.

Let us not ignore that Bush had Blair as his #1 cheerleading enabler in both disastrous enterprises.

 

Indeed, and I do not ignore Blair's involvement for a second. We are currently awaiting the results of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war which should be interesting.http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/pol...air-dodge-questions-over-Chilcot-Inquiry.html

 

Yes....most of us certainly do. We also understand both were no win scenarios from the onset and that our President made HUGE mistakes which cost us and the world a terrible price.

 

A couple of things:

1. Just because a lot of time passes since Bush first disarmed Saddam Hussein (the BLOODIEST terrorist in the world) does NOT mean you get to LIE and try to change history. You KNOW why the United States went to war, why our CONGRESS approved both wars.

2. Kinda hard to win any war when you have a Kenyan MUSLIM Commander In Chief SURRENDERING TO THE ISLAMOFASCISTS.

 

Point being it is true for any army in any era, we are not the exception.

 

Did we really lose them? For someone who claims to be so smart, you don't see much lol....

 

Predictably, this is getting NO media coverage in the US.

Which should be depressingly familiar.

The American corporate media played megaphone and promoter to the lurid claims that the Bush adminstration was making during its marketing campaign for the war.

I travelled a lot in those days, and the contrast between what Americans were being told by their media (and not just Fox) and what you read in the papers just about everywhere else was striking.

Most of the rest of the world saw the claims of Cheney, Rice and Rumsfled discredited almost on arrival, and everyone knew better than to believe Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. It was an oil grab, and Chalabi was to be the front man.

But in the US, the dubious quality of Bush's intellegence claims were never mentioned in the press. Americans weren't told who Ahmed Chalabi was (most people here on PF still couldn't tell you), or what his role was or would become.

The pattern continued throughout the war and beyond.

Today, other than the resurgance of ISIS, there is practically NO coverage of events in Iraq in US media.

Folks on this forum were completely unaware of the Chilcot inquiry until you mentioned it just now.

Americans want to ignore or rewrite the past. If you have any doubt about that, just watch the explosion of jingoism and anti Islamic bigotry that has accompanies the promotion of the film "American Sniper".

 

So the other nations won? What did they 'win' BTW?

 

Americans who were halfways paying attention knew that there was a good chance of that outcome before the wars even started. While we might have found success at times driving out the ruling militants, that part of the world has existed with that type of power structure for centuries and it will continue to exist that way until the people who live there want things differently. But they can't just want it, unfortunately, they have to fight for it and preserve it. What they don't seem to want in any of those areas(outside of the rich people) is American style systems.

Basically, the U.S. can kill as many terrorists as they like over there, and all the innocents that end up getting caught up in the death as well, but at no point will the U.S. find any lasting measure of success until there is a consensus among the populations there that they want what the U.S. is selling. Unfortunately, not even U.S. citizens want what the U.S. is selling. We want to watch the news, see the terrorists die, and then we want our men and women to come home. The American public does not have the stomach for the harder part, and the part that lasts far longer, which is the aftermath of the shock and awe from our military. Our fleeting attention spans don't have the patience for the long hard path that comes with rebuilding. We are desroyers, and though we do not intend to be so, America has not found any success in rebuilding after wars since WWII and even then, the success was mixed.

What both countries will require is a long term steady commitment not only from our government and military, but from our citizens too. And we don't have that. It's somewhat understandable, most people viewing domestically haven't been there and have no reference points for those parts of the world outside of the news media. We expect our military to go over there and be treated as heroes without question. We expect to be greeted as liberators bringing a better way of life. What we don't expect or tolerate is resistance. Resistance depletes resolve and desire, and it does so quickly.

There was no other outcome that would logically have come to pass with the way we've done things and the places we've done them. Terrorism and radical Islam will not ever be beaten with bombs and guns. In a way, it's exactly what those two things need to survive and grow. We are feeding it, not stamping it out. It's like we're trying to make an obese person lose weight by force feeding them twinkies.

 

Once you come to the obvious conclusion that wars are created and waged by international criminals who profit greatly from them you will know that they win every time. The soldiers and civilians who are killed and the electorates of the countries who pay the bills are always the losers. Iraq and Afghanistan are big winners for the war profiteering scum that call the shots. More of the same will follow until the consciousness level of the planet rises to a critical mass. Hopefully, we're getting close.

 

Of course we lost the war. But the purpose of the war wasn't to build a democracy in. Iraq and Afghanistan. That's all snow covered frosting. The real purpose of the war was to kill every would be jihadist that wanted to try and take a piece of us. The purpose was to destroy the stability of the region. On both accounts we were wildly successful. We are going to be right back there doing it again in the next 5-10 years. Better on their territory then on ours.

- - - Updated - - -

Of course we lost the war. But the purpose of the war wasn't to build a democracy in. Iraq and Afghanistan. That's all snow covered frosting. The real purpose of the war was to kill every would be jihadist that wanted to try and take a piece of us. The purpose was to destroy the stability of the region. On both accounts we were wildly successful. We are going to be right back there doing it again in the next 5-10 years. Better on their territory then on ours.

 

I find it cute, in a naive kind of way, that someone would ever think civilians or anyone else for that matter "lost" a war that you never had a chance in. For anyone paying attention to modern warfare all you had to do was listen to the sage prediction of one of the first to hand America it's ass in a hat, Ho Chi Minh.

In the late 60s I recall a BBC interview with Ho where the reporter asked, "You have lost every major military engagement with the US, how is it you still expect to win?" Ho's simple analysis should be taught in every war college. "The US will kill many of us. We will kill a few of them. Eventualy they will get tired and go home. We will still be here."

 

They 'won' your eventual absence.

 

My impression is that both wars have been swept under the rug.

Nam II.

 

All I've ever wanted was a review of the policies that stirred these people up and brought on the 9/11 attacks, among others, in the first place. It's got to take a special kind of hatred for anyone to go to those lengths to get at us. Was it Israel/Palestine? Was it our meddling in Saudi Arabia and the surrounding Arab nations? Was it Iraq?

I'm looking forward to reading the book mentioned in the OP, by the way. The one about how we lost these latest wars. Might be the start of further research into US policies in that part of the world..

 

And how's that working out for them? Probably about the same way the Islamic infestation is working for the UK.

 

Such is the nature of a republic willing to vote an anti-American, Islamofascism supporter into office. The One on the golf course and his supporters cannot stand winning. So they gave a victory away.

I am sure Bolger will discover many useful things about how a nation can fail to used all of its power to win. None of the lessons will matter if the nation has already chosen to commit suicide.

 

He is clearly an Islamofascism supporter. It has been clear for at least five years. Under him the Islamists will have two caliphates, one led by Iran who will have nuclear weapons in just a few more months, and the other by ISIS/ISIL. Both believe it is their duty to Islamize the entire world.

This calls for a world war but instead we are disarming as quickly as we can. This looks very much like 1936-37.

Arm up.

 

I like your response quite a bit. Many of us deal only with the proximate cause of defeat, Obama's fecklessness, and an unwillingness of any of the political generals to resign in protest.

You have approached the underlying cause of our defeat. Despite spending a great deal of money to develop strategists we either do not use them, they are overridden by "amateurs" or maybe both. We are brilliant at tactics and operational art. We lack the vision and the will for developing long term effective, war winning strategies. I have studied strategy for a very long time. When we do not have a clear reason for fighting, but instead have dozens of reasons we lose focus and we lose wars.

 

Actually, Tom has a good point in all of that.

For any of you interested in strategy I recommend reading, or even studying the history of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. This book is used by many of our top civilian and military strategy courses.

We consistently win battles and campaigns. Why don't we win wars? We are very good at tactics and operational art. We have not been good strategists for a very long time.

Bolger is likely to deal with the wrong end of the problem as it is the easiest to think about.

 

We were winning both or had won Iraq and were winning in Afghanistan in 2008.

To what does your Liberal source attribute the subsequent decline in the outcome of both?

Fools.

Traitors.

Which category do you think is most responsible for the losses which only became so after 2007?

Hmmm?