Losing the war

Patrick Cockburn writes in The Independent about the status of the war in Iraq. He provides quite a bit of fodder for a discussion about whether the U.S. is actually losing the war.

There is no doubt that the US has failed to win the war. Much of Iraq is a bloody no man's land. The army has not been able to secure the short highway to the airport, though it is the most important road in the country, linking the US civil headquarters in the Green Zone with its military HQ at Camp Victory.

The failure, he points out, was "in part political."

Immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein polls showed that Iraqis were evenly divided on whether they had been liberated or occupied. Eighteen months later the great majority both of Sunni and Shia said they had been occupied, and they did not like it.

Other points:

• The U.S. forces are over-armed, using howitzers for police duty.
• They were designed to "fight a high-technology blitzkrieg, but not much else." Supply lines were long and poorly defended. Ignorance of the local culture led to many mistakes right from the start of the occupation.
• The U.S. forces are too thin on the ground--and they are used more as a fire-brigade, fighting fires everywhere, but never putting them out.

Reasonable people can quibble one way or another regarding the elements of this failure, but I'm thinking that the evidence of failure abounds--and resounds with the death and injury of every American soldier, every Iraqi civilian, every roadside bomb, every victory shout from the "insurgents." Even so, as distressed as I am about the situation in Iraq, the question of winning or losing is not the most important point in Cockburn's article. This is.

The greatest failure of the US in Iraq is not that mistakes were made but that its political system has proved incapable of redressing them. Neither Mr Rumsfeld nor his lieutenants have been sacked. Paul Wolfowitz, under-secretary of defence and architect of the war, has been promoted to the World Bank.

Almost exactly a century ago the Russian empire fought a war with Japan in the belief that a swift victory would strengthen the powers-that-be in St Petersburg. Instead the Tsar's armies met defeat. Russian generals, who said that their tactic of charging Japanese machine guns with sabre-wielding cavalry had failed only because their men had attacked with insufficient brio, held their jobs. In Iraq, American generals and their political masters of demonstrable incompetence are not fired. The US is turning out to be much less of a military and political superpower than the rest of the world had supposed. [emphasis added]

How sad that this morning's conversation with My Prince, included the words:

The reason the U.S. has won so many wars is because we've had a stronger military than anyone else. Bush has done a good job of levelling the playing field.

My Prince doesn't read The Independent. He did show up for his military service.