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Aswad -> RE: Iraq war over,congradulations to our troops and thanks to President Obama for keeping a promise. (12/19/2011 8:22:33 AM)
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ORIGINAL: DarkSteven
There is no happiness or success in this, and congratulations are not in order.
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We never should have invaded in the first place. Our withdrawal is simply an acknowledgement that the invasion was one of the biggest mistakes of all time.
Acknowledging a mistake is a small measure of personal success for an individual; might it not also be so for a nation?
You were not the first nation to be baited into destroying itself, and you won't be the last.
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We have killed thousands of US soldiers and wasted trillions of dollars in this fiasco.
As I pointed out to someone else, if you're going to start counting losses, don't stop at counting the losses faced by the USA, as you dragged allies into this shitfest, too, to say nothing of the countries you attacked. The reason I am making a point of this is twofold. First, you were initially fond of reiterating that you were not alone in this purported war on terror. Second, because it happens to be the case that even as some of your allies were telling you how this would go, they still saddled up anyway.
In the course of your engagement, the losses have been about 3~4% (counting KIA only), which is comparable to what most of the other early entrants have suffered. For perspective, your losses in Afghanistan have been about 2% (again, KIA only), which is about identical to the official losses for my own country in that conflict (real figure is about half that, since SF units are not counted in the statistics).
In pure numbers, the USA may have suffered more losses than any of the other attackers, but porportionally, the burden has been shared quite equally. In short, other countries have been standing by you through this debacle, and it would be somewhat insulting to forget that your allies' servicemen and -women have given their lives the same as yours, in a war not their own.
As for the financial cost, it hasn't exactly been free for most of the other nations involved, either. Also, while one can't ascribe the entirety of the euro crisis to the wars, there has been a contributing element there. On this point, of course, I can't complain, as my country has been profitting immensely from both wars, as well as the Libya engagement (we are, as you may or may not know, a net exporter of oil, electricity and munitions). Plenty of your other allies could probably complain quite loudly, though, especially since the USA is leaving a lot of the cleanup work to others in both wars.
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There is no reason to believe that Iraq will not descend into civil war, and that the ensuing government will be friendly to the US.
The new regime is unlikely to be very friendly, but the civil war will probably be brief.
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Obama accomplished nothing by withdrawing except to keep a promise, and to realize that the entire invasion was destined to failure from the start.
Keeping a promise is something of a novelty from a president, is it not?
Credit where credit is due.
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Condolences to the families of those who died in a senseless war.
There is a difference between dying in a senseless war, and dying for one. I would like to think that most of those who died, did not die for a senseless war, but rather in one. What they died for will vary, but I like to think it was something that at the very least seemed worth dying for.
Again, I'm more familiar with the situation in Afghanistan than the one in Iraq, so I'll draw on that by noting that I do know that at least one of the people that died from my own country was hoping, against hope, to bring some semblance of stability and dignity back into the lives of a foreign people he had come to know in the course of his time in the service. One of the men in the sniper detachment has even publicly voiced an interest in settling down there if the region quiets down again. Such dreams and hopes may be futile, but still seem worth holding on to.
My ancestors believed it was better to die for a cause, any cause, than to wither away and succumb to old age. That is at odds with the ways of the modern lifestyle, but it seems somewhat applicable: even if the war was meaningless, the lives lost and the things that drove them to be there, those need not be meaningless. Sometimes, we express our self in living, and other times it is in how we die that we do so, and the time and place become less relevant. Meaningful death is, in my opinion, thus also possible in a meaningless war.
The circumstances were unfortunate, but I find some consolation in these thoughts, and hope others might, as well.
Health,
al-Aswad.
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