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Paying the Price of Defeat
by AntiChimp
Wednesday, Jun. 15, 2005 at 4:34 AM
antichimp2005@yahoo.com
Is it time to admit that we've lost the war?
When will we admit defeat in Iraq?
Not just a worrisome problem, not just an issue of training the Iraqi military, and certainly not a case of the insurgency remaining a bother while in their "death throes", as a certain warmonger and profiteer would have us believe, but out-and-out defeat. We lost.
The cultural divide that exists between our soldiers and the Iraqi trainees will never permit trust, let alone the kind of automatic tractability that military organizations depend on. A Muslim man will never enter a mosque with a weapon and use it on command, without thought, as our forces might reasonably expect and demand. Without mechanical obedience and the expectation of dutifulness, a military unit cannot function.
Our purported goal was to transform the Iraqi recruits into an autonomous military outfit, capable of taking control and policing their own country, and it is highly unlikely that our work toward that goal will ever be completed. We will have to either remain as imperial occupiers, at an unsustainable cost both in money and in blood, or we will have to admit defeat and leave, as neatly and as quickly as possible. Either way, the Bush administration's bloody experiment in nation building has cost us plenty.
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