Do Americans realize they lost both Iraq and Afghan wars?

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/11/12/why_we_lost_retired_us_general

I'm confused, do Americans not realize they lost these wars? Are they just ignorant of their losing? Why did US invade these countries again? Isn't Iraq now a strong hold of ISIS which was born out of Al Qaeda in Iraq which did not exist until Bush invaded Iraq?

 

The American military lost the war because of the American public.

Ask anybody who has ever served, they'll tell you the same thing. Our biggest enemy is our civilian population.

 

How did civilians cause ISIS? Maybe the military should start blaming itself for its own failures.

 

It shows how superior we are when we choose to lose wars. We got bored of killing muslims and began focusing on other things.

We are an ADD nation, sue us.

 

Any conflict that doesn't involve nuking the Middle East can be considered a loss because these people will just replenish their numbers and resources and come back just as they've done for hundreds and hundreds of years.

They've had many allies along the way ensuring their survival and many adversaries who either lacked the tools or the will to eradicate them.

In this era their ally is American liberalism.

A hundred years from now it will be somebody else.

 

Civilians grew tired of the war.

Civilians determined our ROE's.

Civilians restricted our capabilities.

Civilians are the reason we left.

Do you think, honestly, that if we wanted to wipe Iraq and Afghanistan from the face of the earth, that we couldn't do it?

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What resources?

They're cave people. They've got nothing. Its not them we are fighting, its the ideology.

You cant beat someone who has nothing to lose, unless you kill them. That's been a rule of warfare for as long as there have been wars.

 

I don't see how we could've lost Iraw exvept to Isis.

We're still in Afghanistan and since it is a profitable drug war for America, well will never get out.

I'm not sure it is a win or lose situation, but I've come to view the Afghanistan war as a hyopcritical one.

 

Please read up on Operation Cyclone.

 

Situation in Afghanistan is better than under the Taliban. That war was won. But we should have stopped there. Iraq is now worse off than under Saddam.

 

Resources like the billions of dollars and container loads of hardware Obama gave ISIS, to give and example

 

Our civilian compatriots are certainly a major factor in the equation, but the way I see it, there are other competing elements in the overall framework such as embedded media coverage, social media and the lack of political will. War fighting by the U.S. has been allowed to be pacified, made politically correct.

 

That is what happens when your enemy turns into an ally based upon an election.


Both of those countries were stabilized and wars were won....until Obama lost them.

 

Sheer nonsense. Saddam may have been a bastard but Iraq was stable, profitable and was not infected by the imposition of 'democracy', and neither was the country riven by the factional in-fighting, bombings and the daily litany of murder and assassination which began almost at the moment America and her allies left after having reduced the country to rubble and dire poverty.

Afghanistan is an equally disastrous 'intervention'. If you think the Taliban are defeated just wait until the last allied troops leave; they'll be back in force and absolutely nothing will have been achieved.

Nothing was 'won'.

This, from an Iraqi national: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-life-in-iraq-was-like-under-saddam-hussein-2014-7?IR=T

 

Another anti-American post from snakestretcher.

This is new and exciting.

 

The Op is establishing a pattern, let him keep talking with the fat weapon known as a keyboard.

 

The true tragedy in this entrenched battle of wills is that we have to be like them to win: convert them or kill them.

"Do you support jihad against the United States (or whatever country)?"
"Yes!"
The man who said "Yes" is promptly shot in the head. The next person in line steps forward.
"Do you support jihad against the United States?"
"No!"
"Next, please."

While platforms like drones have advantages of its own, the pin prick nature of them do not reduce numbers of active enemy combatants fast enough to compensate for the amount of people recruited to the Islamists' cause because of the drones. A more thorough hands-on approach is absolutely required to put a truly effective dent into this worldwide problem we find ourselves smack in the middle of. This problem predates my birth by many years and the limited hammer approach since 2001 has not stemmed the flow of Islamists ready to be martyred. The world has witnessed 60+ years of continued diplomatic efforts between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Diplomacy has failed. Thousands of rockets are fired at Israel every year and Israel bombs the bejesus out of the Palestinians, combatants and non-combatants alike. Nuclear negotiations with Iran have failed and will continue to fail when the choice for Iran should be as simple as this: If you do not want your country to be destroyed more so than it already is, then you will stop your nuclear program as we have requested that way Israeli pilots aren't bombing you back to the stone age by Monday next week. Every inch they're given they will try to take a mile instead. In this clash of civilizations, people have to choose what said they're on: theirs or ours. We've failed to win conflicts before because we were unwilling to play by the same set of rules our opponents play by. The Israelis learned long ago that they had to be just as ruthless if they wanted to make it in their neighborhood. Israel hasn't gotten by by playing patty cake, they've gotten by because they carry a big (*)(*)(*)(*)ing stick that they are not afraid to use.

 

Thanks to Obama we lost the Iraq, Afghan, and now Yemen to muslim terrorist. Whos side is Obama really on????

 

Is there anything inaccurate about my statement? If you think there is then I welcome your comments. You might also have notice the inclusion of the phrase, '...and her allies'. What does that imply to you?

 

The General has a number of good points.

There should be a formal inquiry. There were real hearings during Korea and Viet Nam.

The American public never paid much attention to our troops in Afghanistan after the first few months, and, by the Spring of 2006, it wished Iraq would go away. Americans didn't want to think about Iraq either until ISIS reared its ugly (and inevitable) head'

None the less, the fault IMO is not with the military. It's with the political leadership.

And specifically, with Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

They launched a war in Aghanistan that they said would not be nation building because they learned from the experience of the Russians in that country. After they bungled and let Bin Laden escape, they forgot about Afghanistan and essentially abandoned it.

Instead that went for what they thought was going to be a quick and easy military takeover of Iraq, sold to jittery Americans with a loud propoganda campaign that deliberately sought to insinuate that Iraq and 9/11 were related.

The military didn't bungle Iraq. Cheney and Rumsfeld did. They did it primarily because of their own simplistic view that they could just march in, install a government, and everything would go back to normal in a week or so.

When that didn't happen, they didn't have a plan B, and they had dangerously understaffed and underfunded the war, knew little about Iraq, and had no idea what to do next.

So, they tried to manage the news cycle, which in Bushworld, always took precidence over actually managing the war.

 

Just like yours?

 

says the guy ashamed to list his country in his tags.

 

Idiotic prattle.

The war in Afghanistan was lost by the spring of 2002, when the Bush adminstration abandoned the search for Bin Laden, and wanted to forget about Afganistan and shine their attention on the war they had decided to start in Iraq.

The Administration knew next to nothing about Iraq, and they planned for, and proclaimed that it would be a quick, easy victory that could be done on the cheap. Most of their "intelligence" was so laughably fraudulent that it was dismissed around the world almost on arrival (and would turn out the be largely fiction manufactured and promoted by a political public relations machine).

But when the reality of Iraq hit, there was no Plan B, and no way that the Bush team could go back and tell the American public to forget about shopping and recognize that we had a real war on our hands.

So, the Bushies tried to bluster their way through, with staged election, "good news": promotion efforts, and a lot of rearranging of the deck chairs. But the war ground on, and Iraq dissolved into civil war by 2006.

The surge promoted the image of stability,and served teh purpose of getting Iraq stable enough that Bush could walk away from it.

But none of the underlying issues in Iraq were ever adressed, and Iraq inevitably fell apart as soon as the Americans started to leave.

Ironically, the lockstep wingnuts who cheered every piece of this disaster, now pretend that all the propoganda was true and that we achieved something. We did, but not what they have in mind. Sadaam Hussein was a brutal dictator who knew how to contain the radical forces of extremist Islam. Once we removed him, and set up the weak, corrupt, Iranian run, puppet state that replaced him, the whirling dervish was free to flourish in the chaos.

What is the far right response? They blame Obama for not defying that government and leaving US troops there.

When you point out to them that this means a permanent US military occupation of a sovereign nation, they either bellow their slogans, try to float a distraction, or run away.

 

Ive always wondered how much insanity you could pack into one post.

 

Yeah, we've seen yours so we need wonder no longer...
What was that you said about a stable Iraq?

 

Of course, we realize the wars were lost. We also realize there isn't much you realize other than your hatred. Pitiful, really.