Letters to the Editor
Retired Military Patriot
Published Letters: 2275 Editor's Choice: 11
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After invasion, the rest was very predictable
[Read the article: The Iraq war is lost]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What this article and almost all others fail to mention is the goal of the Shiites well before the invasion. Once they learned that aligning with our government as they did in the Bush 41 confrontation with the Iraqi Sunnis and subsequent slaughter of Shiites by Sadam, their goal was to support an invasion, let us destroy the Bathists, let a civil war ensue and then finally control and run Iraq. The al-Maliki or any Shiite driven administration is only interested in pretending to install a secular Iraq while waiting for us to become impotent and leave. Prolonging our stay or getting involved in a civil war where the enemy of my enemy is my enemy is only killing and wounding more of our military.
If we had any realistic foresight, which our political and many military leaders certainly did not, on what the goal would be for a post Sadam Iraq, it would have had to be partition. Realizing that, realistic leaders would have concluded not to invade and empower al-Qaeda and create millions of refugees and deaths. Realism and humanity have certainly not been part of the equation.
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My theory
[Read the article: Isn't it good, Norwegian oil]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]My grandmother came from Norway as a four-year-old and settled on farmland in the middle of North Dakota on the Canadian border. I wished I could have asked her before she died about a theory I have of why settlers stopped in such God-forsaken country with such severe winters and the puny Turtle Mountains only 400 feet high. My theory is that the wives who were worn out traveling in wagons told the men who had just stopped for the night on the way west, that they were not going to ride one more damn day and that this is where they were going to set up a homestead or else the men could head west on their own.
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Titus Pullo and Matt Sanchez
[Read the article: The Iraq war is lost]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Troops and Matt Sanchez on the ground in Iraq are studying one sand pile in a vast desert. If they want to learn about the complexity of war, politics, history and culture to understand some of what Iraq is all about, they would be far better off reading blogs.
I was a member of the U.S. Central Command when it was created and spent four years focused on that part of the world. I was appalled at the ignorance of any civilian or military leader who did not understand the consequences of an invasion and praised G.W. Bush’s father, actually his advisers, for having the intelligence to not proceed to Baghdad. I am far from a foreign affairs or Arab expert, so that makes the invasion decision reek even more of ignorance and arrogance. Military leaders have to learn from this experience, although you would think Vietnam would have been sufficient, to never let civilians drag them into war until there is absolutely no other choice.
Matt, you should stick to overturning the discriminatory “don’t ask don’t tell” policy and leave foreign and military affairs to the experts. Then spend time reading the thoughts of those who are, many of whom post at Salon.
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Titus Pullo
[Read the article: The Iraq war is lost]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I’m sorry that you get angry at me for trying to get you to face the truth. If you don’t understand the current Iraqi mind set that the enemy of my enemy is my enemy, then you have little chance of understanding what is going on in Iraq as a result of our massive interference. This is a political problem that goes well beyond what is happening on the ground. Your kind of shallow thinking, while well intended, is why we got into a mess we could have easily avoided. I wished that callous civilian leaders would never have put our brave troops into a situation where the military and political mission was so ill defined and then having to face the realization that the deaths, wounds and destruction should never have happened. That is tragically unfair to our military and your anger would be better served if you directed it at the arrogant ideologues, hypocritical Christians and senators who keep the tragedy going for purely political reasons.
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reeva, you're blaming the wrong party
[Read the article: The Iraq war is lost]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Please ask the Republican senators why the Dems have been “ineffective.” If you study how we got out of Vietnam, you will find it was a very slow, step by step political dance and that was with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets. People, like you, who blame the Dems, force them to put on a show like they did overnight, to prove who keeps the surge and war going. Tell me what you would do to speed up the process.