perfidy

Ross:

First, "welcome back", or words to that effect - I hadn't seen anything from you in a while.

Second, I, too, am waiting for the moron lamp to be lit, and to see someone try to spin the story as something less disgusting than it is. I'll be sickened to my stomach should I see that, as will every other person with a functioning moral code.

Here's the hard part, for me - let's pretend that these actions are only vague, unsupported allegations at this point (of course they're not, but we're just pretending). The simple allegation of such actions is enough to sicken; their proven truth isn't even needed for the debate, nor is any comparison to previous atrocities, in Iraq or elsewhere, in this war or any other, applicable. Douchebags, indeed, though thankfully, the diminishing minority, not that this helps right now.

I'd also agree with you that it's important to have criteria for defining failure - to do otherwise would be ignorant in the extreme, and I am sure that such criteria exist, just as I'm sure that we'll never hear what they are unless and until they're acted upon.

You laid out one scenario in which the US and its coalition could declare failure and go home, and I read it as an extreme, to make your point, not that you expected it to happen.

Had we, for example, razed Fallujah, that would have met the failure criteria for me, and there are other possibilities. Blowing up mosques in Najaf while being shot at from within them, on the other hand, would not.

I'm curious - what reasonably forseeable events or failures would you or any of the other readers and commentators categorize as definitive in requiring an exit, stage left?

It was an extreme scenario, laid out for that reason. "Failure criteria" are hard, in this case; giving up just isn't a natural part of our culture.

For Tacitus, failure criteria may already have been met:

[url=http://www.tacitus.org/story/2004/4/30/125923/437]http://www.tacitus.or…]

Let me think on it a while.

My definition for Patton:

Should our coalition forces kill more innocent Iraqi civilians than Saddam Hussein and his thugs, I'd have to say it is exit, stage left time. I don't buy "we destroyed the village in order to save it" arguments.

We're sitting on what looks like a civil war now. Could happen. Yuck.

GP - your scenario fits into my "didn't raze Fallujah" category, and I'm right there with you.

Of course, we'd have to raze Fallujah multiple times to even get into Saddam's league.

There's no chance of that happening, so there has to be a lower threshold of failure we can pick, no?

So far, we're not really close to any reasonable failure criteria. Despite the depraved and stupid (Hey, let's get this on film! Smile at the camera!) actions of a few soldiers; and the violence in the Sunni Triangle and a few other areas - things are going better than we can have expected.

The violence in Iraq is very limited in terms of where it's happening - the Sunni triangle, mostly, Baghdad, and a few parts of the shia areas. Most of the country is getting better. And the care that the Marines have shown in Fallujah demonstrates to me that we are not in a destroy the village to save it mode.

The insurgents, regime holdouts, jihadis and assorted scumbags are frankly stupid. They are attacking the US where it is strong, and getting killed by the busload. When they can't manage to die by the dozen in largely fruitless attacks on Marines and soldiers, they stage showy bomb attacks on Iraqi targets. If we could seal the borders, we could really start making progress.

This whole thing with the prisoners is a huge black eye for us, and for our hopes for Iraq. I'd like to personally kick the crap out of those responsible. But keep in mind that despite Ross' handwringing nothing, let me repeat, nothing that we are doing in Iraq is remotely comparable to what Saddam did.

Oh dear... I can't believe this... I am agreeing with Buckethead on a political matter.

No, I don't think anything we've done in Iraq is as bad as what happened under Saddam Hussein. But it is, nonetheless, very, very bad.

So the question I'd like to interject is do we let these guys hang for what might possibly be considered 'war crimes?' Discuss... (/me ducks and runs for cover)

Uh, what are we doing in Iraq, again? What is the REASON we are there? I think the latest one is "create a stable democracy in the Middle East".

Sure, relative to a full-on shooting war, what's happening in Iraq is pretty minor. But major combat operations are over, remember? We're not IN a shooting war any more. This is supposed to be the "build the peace" phase. Stop judging it by WAR standards.

These are relatively modern (and for the region) relatively secular people. They've been bombed (by both sides), threatened, shot at, been menaced by dramatic rises in crime, been menaced by the religious nutcases who are screwing everything up, and they're at the edge of what they can take.

It's been a year. I think it's great that YOU think that the bad guys are stupid. Seems like their tactics are working just fine, thank you. When you say "kill by the busload" are you implying that new recruits are not being _generated_ by the busload?

The cold mathematics dictate that the bad guys need to be killed faster than they're replaced. The terrible part of this is that nationalism and pride on their part plus shitty behavior by some bad apples on our side produces _exactly_ what the Islamic nutjobs want.

It's difficult to know exactly how bad Saddam Hussein was. Pinning down an accurate estimate of the number of people he killed is hard to do. I suggest, however, that the ten thousand or so civilians killed by the US in this particular conflict (not including the six figures worth of soldiers) are not an insignificant number.

So exactly what does the fact that "nothing we are doing is remotely comparable to Saddam" have to do with anything? Is comparing ourselves to Saddam really the way to go, here?

You are dead silent on failure criteria, my friend. You vaguely mention "reasonable" criteria, then fail to ennumerate any.

I am curious about the sourcing of your statement that "things are going better than expected".

Ross,
I recently posted similar language you just used in your last response to B to Free Republic under my nom de guerre there. My succinct version was " body counts will not win this war", and I was referring not only to Iraq, but the laerger WoT. FReepers get testy when you disagree with them, but most of them are reasonably sane.

In a strictly military sense, B is right. It IS stupid to fight a modern land force with small arms. But Ross is right in that open battle isn't the point anymore; indeed, it should have been a minor part of the larger war effort, a war fought virtually through perception and public media.

Ross:

In order to get you to pardon my repeatedly exhibited ignorance, I'll start by stating general agreement with your latest comment, above. But then I have to ask - has the US really killed "ten thousand or so civilians"?. Does that tally include those who've perished through the fratricide of their kind countrymen, in other words?

As for the six figures of soldiers, war has a way of doing that, but that wasn't really your point, was it: You still wonder why we're there.

I'm of the opinion that the rationale for entering Iraq (actually several of the rationale) were correct. Sadly, I'm also of the opinion that the never-quite-static communication of those rationale has been done so poorly that my daughter's third grade class could have done better.

As for better managing the aftermath of the hostilities, her class (while admittedly the "gifted and talented" students that they are) would not be able to deal as well with things as the US has until at least fifth grade.

There - I've said it. Now, is that a reason to declare failure? Gad, I hope not. But it should surely be a reason to declare a time for the end to classless fuckups like the Abu Ghraib prison and, perhaps more importantly, to the Chinese Water Torture method that the DoD has so far used to deal with it in the public eye.

Game over? Not even. Game in need of a strategic plan that doesn't suck so badly that it can't be articulated? Absolutely.

Side note: Buckethead's "better than expected" may not be as far out an assessment as you might think. Arab friends of mine (some here, some there) claimed that the US would get creamed in Iraq, not militarily, but via post-war insurgency, and be run out of the country almost a year ago. They admit they were wrong, to their utter surprise. These friends are not Islamic, but that's either time, chance, and circumstance or due to the fact that that Islamic Arabs might hate a guy like me.