Posted by dave

It is amazing to me that most of the people who think “we lost” or are loosing the war in Iraq never served there or even been there, and the politicians that do go, never leave the green zone. They are more than eager to stand up declare defeat and leave, or they say redeploy but they don’t mean into Afghanistan, they mean back home and many of them would pull out of Afghanistan as well.

They declare defeat but they have no facts to back it up just by saying its a failure does not make it so. The media inundates us with endless commentators and news anchors telling us its a disaster, not only the news but regular TV shows like, sitcoms, and dramas all put in there two cents worth of Bush is an idiot, liar, failure.
NBC is the worst of the networks but CBS and ABC are not far behind, watch Keith Doberman or Chris Hacknews on MS-NBC you will be in Liberal democrat heaven they mix their commentary and opinion with the news so freely that by the end you cant tell what actually happened in the world, apart from what happened in their head. I watched part of a Saturday Night Live a few months ago, and 90% of their news segment was extreme anti-bush and the “TV funhouse” cartoon segment was not kind to the Bush administration.

The pop culture has decided, since Vietnam that war is bad, period, quick missions, where we go in kick ass and come home are fine but the default position on any sustained conflict, since Vietnam, is anti war.

By what historical measurement has the war been lost, the casualty’s?

Only when compared to gulf war I and Afghanistan have the casualties been heavy, compare it to Korea.

By the fact that after three years we are still there?

Look at the the list below as of 2000 we still had troops in Germany, Japan and South Korea.

It seems clear to me that by those standards we definitely lost World war II. Look at it objectively we defeated their army, held three national elections where more than half of the country voted for a representative government, a free election on the Arabian peninsula! Then they tried, convicted and executed their former president for life, for some of the many crimes against humanity that he was certainly guilty of.

By any historical measure of war, we can declare victory and pull all our forces out tomorrow. As we could have done in Germany and Japan at the end of WWII, but we stayed for 50 years to monitor and help rebuild and now we have two economic trading partners who are relatively friendly and are no threat to us or their neighbors.

Major U.S. War (Source CNN.com) Deaths in Service
Civil War 1861-1865, 364,511 Union 133,821 Confederate
World War I, 1917 - 1918 116,708
World War II, 1940 - 1947 407,316
Korean War, 1950 - 1955 36,914
Vietnam, 1964 - 1975 58,169
Gulf War, 1990 - 1991 269
Afghan War, 2001 to end of 2006 352
Iraq War, 2003 to end of 2006 3,028
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/us/0409/list.us.casualties/frameset.exclude.html