Can anyone tell me what would constitue a "Win" in Iraq?

[Cyrano]

The last time we won a war was when the Germans and Japanese surrendered to us unconditionally.

So what would a "Win" in Iraq look like?

When all the Iraqis are dead?

When Exxon-Mobil owns the entire country?

When Iraq becomes the 51st state and votes only for Republicans?

When every Iraqi converts to Christianity?

When they decide to elect Paris Hilton as their queen?

Beats me. Anytime I hear the phrase "Win in Iraq" come out of a politician's mouth, I really don't have the slightest idea what they're talking about.

Can anyone help me out here?

[VP505]

1. That is the problem,

especially with the hard core war supporters, they have no clue what a win would be but yet they still spew that mindless talking point.

[lapfog_1]

2. A big sucking sound

that comes from the bottom of the empty oil wells.

I love the smell of light sweet crude in the morning... it smells like victory!

[WinkyDink]

3. Yes, with the possible exception of Paris Hilton. Otherwise, no joke.

[TwilightGardener]

4. As long as we're still there, we're "winning", as far as the Neocons are concerned.

"Losing" is leaving, and allowing Iraq to become its own country, and possibly allowing our influence to wane, and losing our strageic foothold, and watching Iraq's oil turned back to state control instead of US/multinational/corporate control. Winning is staying, losing is leaving.

[enid602]

5. trillions

Getting back our 2 TRILLION dollars, with interes.

[harun]

6. The politicians don't know what a win is either. How does one win

an occupation? You don't, you just stay or leave.

[indepat]

7. When the Iraqis agree to let most of their oil revenues inure to the benefit of big oil?

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

8. "Peace with Honor" See precedent in Vietnam for what really happened.

[bdamomma]

9. when Iraq starts looking like Dubai.

and they will continue killing those civilians and our troops out there for this illegal endless occupation, for the damn abuse and greed of the * regime.

[ieoeja]

10. That is a trick question.

Conservatives would tell you we win if Iraq ends up with a liberal democracy supported by the overwhelming majority of Iraqis, that supports the international community and does everything in its power to stamp out Islamic theocracy and the terrorists who support it.

Al Qaeda and their ilk will consider it a victory when we leave. Preferably they would like Iraq to end up as an Islamic theocracy that supports the violent expansion of Islam. If not that, they would be happy with a destablized Iraq where they could work largely unhindered by government forces.

But even if Iraq ends up exactly as American Rightists wish it to end up with a gov't dedicated to the destruction of Al Qaeda, when we leave Islamic militants will call that a retreat and use that to appeal to a new wave of recruits.

[I work for workers]

11. A stable and democratic Iraqi government.

I posted this two days ago on a thread nobody saw, so I'll repost it:

Had this happened a couple of years ago, there was a legitimate argument that a democratic Arab state would provide a peaceful counterbalance to the grassroots support radical Islamic terror enjoys in the Mid-East. It didn't. Even assuming Iraq fully stabilizes, its birth pains will have likely been bad enough to prevent it from becoming an Arab shining city on a hill, at least any time in the near future.

Now the issue at hand has changed. If the US can't stabilize Iraq by the time we pull out (assuming a Democratic victory in 08, this gives the military three more years to do so) advocates of terror will have learned a very dangerous lesson; they can destabilize the developing world regardless of developed world intervention.

I don't think we will see another 9/11 style attack. That type of terror is going the way of the dinosaur. It's too expensive, requires too much effort, and produces too much backlash. Terrorism is as much about economies of scale as it is about spectacular violence. The terror of the future is infrastructure terror, small attacks with big returns against the machinery that makes modern life function. When infrastructure crumbles, a populations faith in government crumbles along with it.

When a government loses legitimacy, one of two things happens. Either another government rises to take its place, or society fractures along ethnic or religious boundaries and plunges into chaos. Terrorist groups lack the ability to replace the state, and the state lacks the ability to stop terror, so the first option is highly unlikely in the long term. The second is almost guaranteed.

Today's economy is globalized. If the infrastructure of a nation holds its society together, the infrastructure of all nations is supporting our collective economies. Every time a pillar is brought down, the rest need to prop up more weight.

To destroy our way of life, terrorists need only to collapse the infrastructure of the world's weaker nations and let the ripple effect hurt the economies of the developed world. Iraq is teaching them how to do this, and teaching them they can succeed at it. If that nation does manage to overcome the forces trying to tear it down, with our help or without, it will have sent a powerful message to violet radicals of all kinds around the world.

[sinkingfeeling]

15. Then I would say the 'terrorists' are very close to victory here in the USA. As we continue to

pour our $trillions into Iraq, our infrastructure as well as our economy is collapsing.

[coalition_unwilling]

18. You speak of "terrorists" the way Cold Warriors used to speak of "Communists",

as some sort of monolithic group of quasi-Satanists. Such lazy verbal logic has allowed for monstrosities like Vietnam (under the rubric of combatting global communism) and Iraq (under the rubric of combatting global terrorism) to flourish.

I would argue that very few people self-identify as "terrorists." Non-partisan studies have shown that the Iraqi Resistance is composed 95% or more of Iraqis, with only very small percentages being non-Iraqi 'jihadists.' Even that percentage of non-Iraqi Jihadists, I doubt many of them would self-identify as 'terrorists.'

I would further argue that very few members of the resistance see their self-defined aim as being "to collapse the infrastructure of the world's weaker nations." Instead, they probably define their mission as a) resistance to Western imperialism and neo-colonialism and\or b) re-imposition of an Islamic caliphate stretching from Malaysia to Algeria.

We would do well to remember that the nation states are themselves relatively recent creations of Western imperialism. To wit, there was no Iraq or Kuwait before World War I and the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire. The primary mode of social organization among people in the middle east is not the post-1648 Europe-centric 'nation state' but rather tribal.

[I work for workers]

21. How have those imperial creations worked out?

In the Mid-East? In Africa?

Many of them have serious ethnic division causing them societal strife. As Iraq has clearly showed, today's contained ethnic troubles can easily turn into tomorrows war zones. The beauty of the terrorist threat, as certain politicians who need not be named are happy to point out, is that it doesn't need a central body to threaten us. Any one of hundreds of radical groups or ethnic factions can set off a chain of events to destabilize a nation.

Traditional terrorist doctrine for overthrowing a government involves undercutting societal support for the ruling power, fracturing existing societal bonds, establishing safe areas, and replacing the status quo as a ruling power. Very few ever accomplish all of this and mostly just manage to kill people. Iraq has provided a new model for success; keep people in the dark, without water, and scarred to shop. A government that can't prevent this is a government that can't earn the trust and support of its citizens. People without faith in their government turn to their next available social structures, be they tribes, political organizations or religious groups.

In regions with weak commitment to the national identity, this will almost inevitably result in violence and chaos. Destroy the national infrastructure and destroy the nation. Every nation that declines into anarchy strains every nation that doesn't.

A cheap and easily prepared terrorist attack or act of sabotage can cost the world economy hundreds of millions of dollars. Couple hundreds of these together and tens or hundreds of billions of dollars are lost. We feel (relatively) safe because we have successfully stopped several 9/11 style attacks. It is the height of false confidence. The US will likely continue to thwart big spectacular attacks against our homeland, but these attacks not the greatest concern we face. Our way of life depends on the stability of a hundred nations around the world, the vast majority of which do not have the ability we do to safeguard against terror and sabotage.

[TwilightGardener]

19. No offense, but we were never after a stable and democratic Iraqi

government. We want a weakened Iraqi government and a subservient people who will allow us to stay. Read "Shock Doctrine". And you're overemphasizing the role of terror in Iraq, which means that you bought the Repub BS about Al Qaeda as the reason we're still there, and that's unfortunate. Are there foreign fighters and terrorists there? Yes--a relatively small number. Are they defeatable by the Iraqis? That's already been proven--look at Anbar and the "concerned citizens" payroll. That's not the real lesson of Iraq--it's only natural that troublemakers would try to exploit the power vacuum and the tribal conflict, but it's manageable. The real lesson of Iraq is that Cheney and the Neocons knew exactly what would happen when we lifted the lid off the boiling pot by removing Saddam, and what happened with the insurgency and the tribal warfare was exactly what they WANTED and EXPECTED to happen. We didn't add more troops (the Surge) until four years into the insurgency, and there's a reason for that.

[I work for workers]

22. You're missing the point.

It doesn't matter if the people who keep he lights off are terrorists, militia, or looters. All that matters is that they don't come back on. All the AQ Iraq members can die, and as of now it seems they are, and Al Qaeda can still pull a victory if Iraq remains mired in chaos.

Hopefully Iraq will pull itself together at the grassroots level and that stability and trust will eventually work its way up. The former looks to be happening, the latter doesn't. Will that require a US military presence in the near future? Probably, at least to a small degree.

I seriously doubt the neocons really knew anything about what they were getting into. As far as I'm concerned they came up with a nice sounding theory and tried to implement it in the worst possible way. I can understand the principle of the original democratic counterbalance goal, but the time for that has long since passed, if it ever existed. At this point so far as I can tell the most urgent goal is to disprove the AQ operational plan by stabilizing the nation.

Either way I expect infrastructure destruction to be the biggest terrorist threat in the near future. This has all become a conflict of degrees between many groups inspired to use the tactic and a few bolder groups employing it. A few small scale campaigns might be slight enough to stay a minor hassle. A widespread outbreak would be another story entirely. The developed world would be powerless to stop it, particularly if the global economy had to sustain severe damage as a result.

[TwilightGardener]

23. No, I think YOU'RE missing the point--

Al Qaeda can't declare "victory" about anything in Iraq unless WE KEEP STAYING there, mired down and going bankrupt, as they strengthen in Afghanistan and Pakistan. By Al Qaeda, I mean the REAL al Qaeda, not the loosely-affiliated Sunni fighters of the same name that we blame everything on in Iraq. You have this strange Republican idea that our presence is necessary to foster peace in Iraq, saying that we will have to keep troops there to "stabilize" it and keep the "grassroots" stuff going. You're wrong--Iraq is not pulling itself together at ANY level--many areas have ethnically cleansed or segregated themselves tribally, and the south (Basra) has been completely overtaken by Shia militias--we do not control it. The one thing we HAVE been doing is creating an artificial security situation by paying lots and lots of would-be Sunni insurgents a salary to snitch on each other and stop setting IED's against us--if you call that a grassroots peace movement or reconciliation, what happens when the monthly paychecks stop? We rule by checkpoints, curfews, concrete blast walls and barriers, kicking in doors, demanding ID's--and more airstrikes, bombings and raids than any other time since the start of the war--how long can we keep that up? Is that a viable way of life? How long do we occupy a foreign country with more than 100,000 of our troops? Iraq will NEVER become truly sovereign and functional until we leave--that is a fact, and we know it, so we DON'T PLAN to leave--we don't WANT them to become a cohesive nation if it means they ultimately reject our influence and presence--hence the Surge to lengthen our presence beyond the Bush Presidency, hence the push to create long-lasting "force" agreements, hence the massive embassy. We're afraid that they will become what we don't want them to become--another Saddam might rise up, another Ahmadinejad, or maybe just a government that decides to kick our asses out and keep its oil from us. Iraq has NOTHING TO DO with terrorism. And look at what Dick Cheney said about why we didn't take out Saddam in 1994, and tell me he didn't know exactly what he was doing. The whole "democracy" thing was a lie, just like WMD's were a lie, just like the overemphasis on terror and AQ in Iraq is a lie. None of that is why we're in Iraq today.

[WinkyDink]

24. Theocracy can NEVER accommodate a democracy. And any way, Bush is DESTROYING democracy HERE!

He's such a lying, thieving, psychopathic mass murderer.
What's he aiming to do, have the Iraqi communications system eavesdrop on the citizens? Give the President of Iraq the power to declare any citizen an enemy of the state? Impose the U.S. Constitution minus the 4th and 6th amendments?
"Democracy"??
The man SAID HIMSELF he'd rather be a DICTATOR, as then everything would be EASIER.

GMA**%#$%&^B.

[Bright Eyes]

12. When we have all the oil.

[sinkingfeeling]

13. Can't tell you what a 'win' or a 'victory' is and I've waited about 5 years

for a response from my DINO Sen. Mark Pryor to provide the answer. I wrote to him with that very question years ago.

[leftofthedial]

14. for the criminals who used the US to invade and occupy

"winning" means never leaving and the chaos never ending

[DavidDvorkin]

16. When everyone in America stops thinking about it

[Hugabear]

17. When the Rethugs say they've won

Meanwhile, they'll thank the spineless Dems in Congress to keep authorizing funds for the war.

[stillcool]

20. When all this gets worked out..

[dchill]

25. Any Neocon concept of victory...

creeps me out.

There will be blood.

[NNN0LHI]

26. When Saddam's Republican Guard surrenderers n/t