US losing this war!

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-12-2004
US losing this war!
6
Sat, 09-18-2004 - 12:44am
I am listening to Air America right now:

Bush is claiming to be winning the war... He keeps telling us that we are going to win this "war on terror". Of course we have all heard this. In the meantime, war Strategists are saying that this war has lost. Retired war strategists and generals have come out saying that this war has already lost.

anyone heard anything about this?

Mike Malloy says that obviously retired people are the ones to come out, as there is no danger of losing thier jobs over it.
iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Sat, 09-18-2004 - 1:15pm
Of course the US is lousing the war, but don't expect the administration to tell the truth.

Published on Friday, September 17, 2004 by the Inter Press Service

From Bad to Worse in Iraq

by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - After weeks of hurricanes and controversies over swift boats in Vietnam and Texas and Alabama National Guard records, Iraq is beginning to creep back onto the front pages, and the news is uniformly bad.

Consider some of the headlines in major newspapers that appeared on their front pages on Wednesday alone:

Wall Street Journal: ”Rebel Attacks Reveal New Cooperation: Officials Fear Recent Rise in Baghdad Violence Stems from Growing Coordination”.

Baltimore Sun: ”In Iraq, Chance for Credible Vote is Slipping Away”.

Philadelphia Inquirer: ”Outlook: The Growing Insurgency Could Doom U.S. Plans for Iraq, Analysts Say”.

Washington Post: ”U.S. Plans to Divert Iraq Money: Attacks Prompt Request to Move Reconstruction Funds to Security Forces”.

And then Thursday:

USA Today: ”Insurgents in Iraq Appear More Powerful Than Ever��.

New York Times: ”U.S. Intelligence Shows Pessimism on Iraq's Future: Civil War Called Possible -- Tone Differs from Public Statements”.

All of which tended to confirm the conclusion of the latest 'Newsweek' magazine's Iraq feature: ”It's Worse Than You Think”.

Against these stories -- putting aside the other headlines detailing deadly suicide and other attacks that have killed scores of Iraqis in the past week -- Bush's insistence in a campaign address to a convention of the National Guard Tuesday that ”our strategy is succeeding” appears awfully hollow, a point made repeatedly not only by Democratic, but by some Republican lawmakers at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Wednesday.

”It's beyond pitiful, it's beyond embarrassing,” noted Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, who has long been sceptical of administration claims that the Iraq occupation was going well. ”It is now in the zone of dangerous.”

Indeed, it is now very difficult to find any analysts outside of the administration or the Bush campaign who share the official optimism.

Consider the case of Michael O'Hanlon, a defence specialist at the Brookings Institution and former National Security Council aide who has been among the most confident of independent analysts of the basic soundness of Washington's strategy in Iraq.

”In my judgment the administration is basically correct that the overall effort in Iraq is succeeding,” he testified to a Congressional panel just 10 months ago. ”By the standards of counterinsurgency warfare, most factors, though admittedly not all, appear to be working to our advantage.”

This week, however, O'Hanlon, who has developed a detailed index periodically published in the New York Times that measures U.S. progress in post-war Iraq, was singing an entirely different song at a forum sponsored by Brookings and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

”We're in much worse shape than I thought we'd ever be,” he said. ”I don't know how you get it back,” he conceded, adding that his last remaining hope was that somehow the U.S. could train enough indigenous Iraqi security forces within two to three years to keep the country ”cohesive” and permit an eventual U.S. withdrawal. ”A Lebanonization of Iraq” was also quite possible, he said.

His conclusion was echoed by his CSIS co-panelists, Frederick Barton and Bathsheba Crocker, who direct their own index that relies heavily on interviews with Iraqis themselves in measuring progress in reconstruction .

According to the five general criteria used by them, movement over the past 13 months has for the most part been ”backward”, particularly with respect to security which they now consider to be squarely in the ”danger” zone.

”Security and economic problems continue to overshadow and undermine efforts across the board”, including health care, education and governance, according to a report their project released last week. Among other things, it noted that despite a massive school-building and rehabilitation programme, children are increasingly dropping out to help their families survive an economy where almost half the working population remains unemployed.

The growing media chorus of despair actually began just one week ago, a few days after the brilliantly staged Republican convention in New York City had ended, when the U.S. military death toll in Iraq since last year's invasion topped the 1,000 mark, and the New York Times published a front-page article entitled ”U.S. Conceding Rebels Control Regions of Iraq”.

Since then, a number of articles have featured the increasing violence of the insurgency, which is now mounting an average of more than 80 attacks on U.S. targets -- four times the number of one year ago and 25 percent higher than last spring, when the U.S. faced serious uprisings in both the Sunni Triangle and in the south.

Washington officials had predicted that attacks would increase sharply just before the transfer of sovereignty from the U.S.-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to the interim government headed by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi in late June and would tail off.

But, as noted by a front-page article in the Washington Post late last week, more U.S. troops were killed in July and August than during the initial invasion in March and April 2003. Injuries suffered by U.S. troops in August alone were twice what they were during the invasion.

The escalation in violence over the summer is now being attributed by administration officials to the insurgents' efforts to derail the elections, currently scheduled for January.

The increased violence -- particularly in Baghdad and the so-called ”Sunni Triangle” where Falluja, Ramadi, Baquba and Samarra, among other towns, are controlled by insurgents -- has created a serious dilemma for administration strategists who, on the one hand, reject the notion that there are ”no-go” areas for U.S. troops, and, on the other, want to keep U.S. casualties down and off the front pages and U.S. television sets, particularly before the November elections here.

As a result, they appear to have settled on a strategy -- bombing suspected insurgent hideouts from the air -- that further alienates the civilian population.

”I don't believe that you can flatten cities and expect to win popular support,” noted CSIS' Barton.

”This is the classic contradiction of counterinsurgency,” Steven Metz, a strategy specialist at the U.S. Army War College, told the Inquirer. ”In the long term, winning the people matters more. But it may be that in the short term, you have to forgo that in order to crush the insurgents. Right now, we are trying to decide whether we have reached that point. In Vietnam, we waited too long.”

Meanwhile, both independent and U.S. military analysts believe that the insurgency, which the administration still insists is made up only of Baathist ”dead-enders”, foreign ”jihadis”, and criminals, has grown from an estimated 5,000 people one year ago to at least 20,000 and possibly significantly more.

”The bottom line is, at this moment we are losing the war”, Col Andrew Bacevich (ret.) of Boston University told USA Today Thursday. ”That doesn't mean it is lost, but we are losing, and as an observer it is difficult for me to see that either the civilian leaderhsip or the military leadership has any plausible idea on how to turn this around”.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0917-01.htm

Link to Newsweek: It's Worse Than You Think

As Americans debate Vietnam, the U.S. death toll tops 1,000 in Iraq. And the insurgents are still getting stronger.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5973272/site/newsweek






iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Sat, 09-18-2004 - 2:04pm

The left is as determined to loose this war as they did Vietnam.


Thank God Hanoi

Renee ~~~

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Sat, 09-18-2004 - 2:22pm

You want truth? As a liberal actor once said, 'You can't handle the truth."


"The number, nature and geographical distribution of US combat deaths in Iraq provide a statistical indicator of its character. It provides a clue into the nature of the fighting and helps us answer the questions that are being raised in the press: 'is Iraq descending into civil war?'; 'is unrest spreading?"


...


"The number, nature and geographical distribution of US combat deaths in Iraq provide a statistical indicator of its character. It provides a clue into the nature of the fighting and helps us answer the questions that are being raised in the press: 'is Iraq descending into civil war?'; 'is unrest spreading?"


Pt 1: belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004/09/iraq-part-1-number-nature-and.html


Pt. 2 belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004/09/iraq-part-2-while-there-may-be-wide.html

Renee ~~~

Renee ~~~

Avatar for claddagh49
iVillage Member
Registered: 07-20-2004
Sat, 09-18-2004 - 4:18pm
I wonder if you would be singing a different tune if your husband or son, or daughter was there? I wonder how you would feel if they came home in a body bag? Going into Iraq was WRONG!
iVillage Member
Registered: 05-12-2004
Sat, 09-18-2004 - 11:31pm
"The left is as determined to loose this war as they did Vietnam."

Ok, of course I have to ask you if you meant "lose" not "loose".

Renee, you come up with this idea because why??? I mean, let's put this in perspective, a soldier will be ok after the war if he comes back to clapping happy people? I beg to differ. I think that Post traumatic stress syndrome has had a history of running rampant in soldiers that come back from ALL wars and ALL confrontation. I will give you a personal example, my friend came back about three months ago after over a year in combat. Before he left, he was a happy intellect who wanted to do well at his job, suceed in school... Now, I can't even explain the changes, has he been demoralized? and I think you may mean to say degraded, so yes, he has been that too. the actual demoralization would have occured over there in the war. He had to do things that were not in him to do. He had to be a different person, and lives were lost at his hands, and he knows it. People were clapping like freaks at him when he came back. I was too. Of course I supported him. Still, he is not ok. He hits the bottle every night so he can sleep, he does not care what he does or with whom. Before he went he never drank, he never did anything without carefully weighing the consequences.

But I am not measuring it all on him, It is just common knowledge that soldiers who are in combat come back a different person. I reccommend that you go out and talk to some of these people, and their wives and friends, but I am sure you do already, don't ya? ;)

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Sun, 09-19-2004 - 2:02pm

You can

Renee ~~~