Ok, time for a “reality check” for the reality based community. We need to get the fuck out of Iraq now. Pull every single troop out, every contract killer, every trainer, everyone.
We should have never gone in at all. I never supported the invasion. I thought it was foolish and dangerous when we invaded Iraq in 2003. I never trusted or believed this administration, but many of you were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Because you learned nothing from our invasion of Vietnam or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Well now it seems Americans are waking up to the realities of war. Wonderful. Thank you for pulling your heads out of your asses. Once again, too little too late America.
Invading another country takes commitment and brutal, murderous force. Think back to the colonial days, or even the ancient empire days. You have to be prepared to kill until the populace will is broken. And then you have to be prepared to keep killing anyone who dares to even think about resisting. You have to be prepared to take control and force your will through murder.
Now, you might be thinking “What about WWII?’ We bombed Germany to rubble, killing everyone and anyone with our carpet bombing. We were relentless, brutal. We destroyed city after city, reducing them to piles of rubble. If you think we only targeted the military industrial complex, you are naive. We did the same in Japan.
The biggest difference between those two countries and Iraq is that there were governments in those countries that people were loyal to in the first place. So when the governments finally fell, when there was nothing left to do but surrender, the wars ended. The general populace was so devastated they could not resist any longer. But in Iraq there was no real wide spread loyalty to Saddam. The populace had its own agenda from the start. So when we took Saddam out, every other agenda came into play. But we didn’t bomb the place to rubble to subdue them. You might say 600,000 dead is a lot, but we didn’t really go into it with the same murderous zeal we used in WWII.
We have never been in the position to force a government upon the Iraqi people. For starters, we have never understood the divisions that existed long before the British made Iraq the country it is, long before Saddam. We didn’t go in with a real conquering force, that could kill and kill until the populace will was broken.
The Iraq War has been a failure because we haven’t fought it like a real war. Bush tells us we are liberators, that we are there to give Iraq freedom. Besides being utter bullshit, that statement also means nothing in regards to war. War is about winners and losers. There is an enemy, and the war ends only when one side runs away or is obliterated. That is the lesson of Vietnam. We ran away because the Vietnamese were willing to keep throwing bodies at us, no matter the cost in lives, no matter the destruction. For our part we were not willing to win at any cost.
Now we face the same reality in Iraq. We are either committed to the whole sale destruction of the country to destroy the public will or we leave. All this talk about setting up governments, about spreading freedom, is worthless crap and shows the complete lack of understanding the American people have about the realities of war. We dropped atomic bombs on Japan and may very well have done the same in Germany because we were willing to win at any cost. We stopped in Korea without going the the last mile and look where we are today, still sitting on the 38th parallel.
I am not for the destruction of Iraq, or Afghanistan for that matter. But just like Iraq, Afghanistan continues to haunt us, even if the media ignores it. The Taliban is regaining momentum because we didn’t complete the war, because we shifted our attention to Iraq. We are making the same mistake the Soviets did.
We won Desert Storm because there was a clear objective: kick Iraq out of Kuwait. Mission accomplished, we left victorious. But now we are trapped in a vicious cycle of lies and propaganda by our own government telling us we are the police of the world and have a duty to spread freedom across the globe while at the same time defeating an obscure enemy and something as yet completely defined called terrorism.
Well folks, we have two choices. We either commit to war for war’s sake or we go home. We are either prepared to level every city and kill every person or we are not. War is not a fucking game. You kill until a defined enemy has no choice but to surrender and submit or is destroyed completely.
War is not about liberation, it is about victory or defeat. Our military exists to protect us from those that would destroy us. It was never intended to play the role of police force. Without a clear objective, our military forces cannot operate effectively. Our soldiers are dying every day for no reason, fighting with no greater purpose.
All this talk by our politicians about gradual withdraw or staying the course is insane. We need to leave now or commit completely. If we stay, we need to be prepared to win at any cost. But that would also require a defined enemy, a clear objective and an obtainable victory. Who are we fighting? Where are we fighting? For what purpose? The global war on terror, like the Iraq war, provides no answers to these questions.
Iraq is falling into chaos. Are we prepared to stop that chaos through brutal force? Are we prepared to commit to a global war against an ever growing mass of people that see us as an aggressor nation? Are we as a nation committed to winning at any cost? If not then we need to bring our troops home now. War is not a game, real people are dying. The longer we pretend like we are liberators the worse it will get.
just another vet 