Elements Of Dolchstosslegende In Our Exit From Iraq

[Ecthy]

I missed some good entertainment while I ignored you.

[Ecthy]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
Germany sucks so bad it's hard to say that they won anything.

It's not like Canada was ever relevant at all. At least we could start a bunch of wars.

[Chemical Ollie]

I missed threads like this in 2003. Back then it was only me and the evil commies who thought the war was a bad idea.

[Impaler[WrG]]

Excellent and incite full thread

I've started to notice this stab in the back interpretation of Vietnam become more popular following the First Desert storm which gave the "we are invincible" macho-ism a major jolt. Its also paralleled the rise of conservatives in the US as they gain political power their interpretation of history increasingly shades debate on the subject. Its interesting to see how history can be re-written by merely changing interpretations and connotations, hard historical events don't need to be altered in an Orwellian ministry of truth fashion.

[Ecthy]

Insightful? You must be talking about the first 5 posts.

[snoopy369]

I think the interesting question here, is "myth one". IE, did we lose, or did Iraq give up the chance we gave them? Both arguments have a lot of validity to them, and more to the point both arguments are quite accurate in their own way.

Personally I straddle the line a little bit. I was one of the ones, back in 2002, who knew exactly what was going to happen - to the T - and my brother (at the time, a 101st airborne soldier about to be deployed) can back me up on that. I basically told him that the "army vs army" war would be easily won, but that if Saddam was smart, he would just have the army hold us off for a short while until the rest have a chance to merge into the population and fight a guerrilla war. The war would then take years, and either Saddam or someone else (Al Sadr, etc.) would continue to fight us from the homes and the countryside for years later. I never felt we would actually win the war, without actually imposing a far stricter martial law than we were prepared to impose (or capable of imposing). It would have taken around 2 million troops to manage what I was thinking.

However, knowing all that, I am not sure I would not have gone in anyway. I still supported the decision, although I was mightily concerned about the vision of the leadership. (Of course the soldiers in the ranks won't know the details, but they were kept even more in the dark then I'd hoped.) The ultimate question that I could not satisfactorily deny is, is it better to have a group of diverse and poorly integrated ethnic groups in a situation where they will probably fight a bloody war against one another, or to have a dictator who is capable of integrating them through fear and power but is also quite willing to use said power to do awful things to people?

Basically, is Tito a hero or a villain? Is it better to murder thousands to keep the peace and keep those thousands from murdering each other? It's a very deep question, and is not easily answered. Personally I feel it is not okay, and thus would prefer a different regime in Iraq to Saddam's; but the way we did it wasn't the way to do it, obviously.

However, if anyone has a better way to accomplish said regime change, please give me (or better yet, give George) a call... after all, look what happened to Yugoslavia.

Personally I'm all for splitting up Iraq, but the problem with that is you still have to uproot millions of people. That combined with the fact that Shiites and Sunnis aren't separate ethnicities, but simply separate religions essentially, and religions that share enough in common that it's simple to 'convert' from one to the other - I've read that it happens all the time, especially in Baghdad - that it's probably not going to work out that way.

My guess is we'll just have to wait it out. The reason we're there now is to make sure someone we like wins the power race, and not some Al Quaeda frontman. I'm not sure why the fighting isn't dying down slowly - or maybe it is, and the media just isn't reporting it that way - but eventually it should slow down, and things settle a bit. I suspect we'll have to live with a charismatic leader eventually, and not have a perfect democracy ... but that is better than what they had, as long as it is still a democracy.

[Ecthy]

There's another problem as far as splitting up Iraq goes - status quo powers. If you split Iraq into 3, not only will you have to draw the border between Sunnis and Shiites (who would become a puppet of Iran), you'd also have to explain to Turkey why there's now an organised and free Kurdish state laying claim on their territory. Also, what would you do with the Sunni Arab part of Iraq? Let them rule themselves under the same name or let one of those borderline legitimate despotist regimes take care of them?

Splitting up Iraq would only work as a part of a universal solution of the ME, which will not take place unless we're willing to support the overhrow of the ruling powers in favour of moderate Muslim forces at best or fundamentalist evildoers at worst, chaos and civil war probable in all cases.

I have sketched out a sort of optimum final status quo for the entire Middle East before, anyone with a bit of understanding of geography could do that. The problem is how to get there from the current point, and there is no direct course. That's why the clue is in finding widely acceptable compromises, not messing up things radically.

[Jon Miller]

I believe that Turkey has started working more with the Kurds... Or at least I read something to that affect recently.

JM

[Ecthy]

Turkey as it is now shall be a strategic partner of the EU. They can join fully only under one premise: letting us create a buffer-state of Kurdistan out of their Kurdish territories + Iraqi + Syrian Kurdistan.

It's 2 AM, time for armchair geopolitics

[notyoueither]

Get Turkey to accept Kurdistan, and go even further as being a guarantor of Kurdistan, on the condition that the Kurds accept the current border with Turkey.

[notyoueither]

Oh, and the OP has some problems, but at least it provokes thought.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by DinoDoc

that the Tet Offensive was actually proof we were winning, and Charlie was desperate

Well it did destroy the Viet Cong as an effective fighting force for the rest of the war.

No, it didn't though it most certainly did hurt them for several years. I not that the Vietcong did continue to engage the Americans though instead of continuing with costly full frontal assaults they went back to hit and go tactics. Rather then destroying them as an effective fighting force it merely reinforced that they couldn't go toe to toe with the US Army and so guerrilla warfare was the favored tactic.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
Germany sucks so bad it's hard to say that they won anything.

They beat the French in the Franco-Prussian war and they were a big factor in the end to the Napoleanic period. Of course both times it was against the French.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Oerdin


They beat the French in the Franco-Prussian war and they were a big factor in the end to the Napoleanic period. Of course both times it was against the French.

I was actually talking about since WWII

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Ecthy
Insightful? You must be talking about the first 5 posts.

Please reread post #8. It's a big deal to understand that not only did the protesters not stab the troops or the President in the back but the anti-war types actually prolonged the war. They caused the majority of Americans to rally back to Nixon, strengthing him, and giving him a more free hand to follow his polocy desires. The end result was still failure because short of liquidating most of the population it is impossible to end such an insurgency unless of course one follows the Turkish example of occupying, sustaining massive casualties, relocating most of the population, but refusing to leave for decades while the next generations are forced to be reeducated. That can work but not in a modern democracy.