This may be the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time…BUT I think it’s going to be a while before we know the outcome. Let’s give our president the benefit of the doubt for the sake of our fine soldiers. I’d hate to think that an Islamic terrorist might read the words on this website and take comfort from them. We have to be successful in Iraq…we HAVE to. We MUST outlast them or kill every last one.

The insurgency is like a hydra, we chop off a head and another immediately rises in its place. We subdue Fallujah and Mosul blows up.

I agree with Mr. Girin. But I’m not going to do it in public. Or did I just do that? Cancel that last thought. Semper Fi!

The idea that frank discussion at this website would have any effect on what jihadists and Ba’athists are doing in Iraq is not, I think, something about which we need to worry. :-)

Mmmmmm! Mmmmmm! Mmmmmm! (Tape firmly over mouth)

Remember, Americans won virtually all the battles in Vietnam, but lost the war. Why? The left and the left media combined to convince most Americans the war was morally wrong and unwinnable. Americans have short attention spans and don’t like problematic, drawn-out conflicts. The outcome in Iraq will ultimately be determined by domestic politics in the USA.

Mr. Elkblight suggests that the success or failure of the war in Iraq is a matter of political will. There is doubtless some truth to that. But along with political will comes accepting reality, and part of accepting reality is setting achievable objectives. The problem with the current situation is that we don’t have either of the necessary prerequisites to victory: an achievable objective and the political will to achieve it.

An example of an at least potentially achievable objective: a pro-US Iraqi strong-man, a base in Kurdistan, a middle-eastern cordon sanitaire, and dramatic improvements at the US border.

An example of an unachievable objective: widespread adoption of liberal democracy in the middle east as the Moslem response to American smart bombs, the magical disappearance of the terrorist threat despite wide-open US borders because of a universal world-wide embrace of liberalism.

No doubt Bush personally has the will to pursue his unachievable objective to the end of time. The country doesn’t though, and since Bush is not a leader there is no chance that nation’s resolve will increase. That lack of political will in the end is a good thing in this case, because firm resolve to do the impossible is a sure sign of impending defeat.

That is a superb summary by Matt of the issues that we’ve been discussing at such length for so many months.

Matt

Can you please email your summary to the powers that be?

The problem is that in such a war as this, winning battles doesn’t mean anyhting unless the enemy is destroyed and unless the enemy doesn’t regenerate.

The enemies’ goal isn’t to win battles, it’s to radicalize the populace against us and to bleed us slowly.

Sorry, that last post was me. I forgot that I generally don’t use my pseudonym on VFR.

It has been interesting to watch Lt.Gen. Sattler in action. When I was a Second Lieutenant in the Infantry Officers’ Course at Quantico in 1980, then-Captain Sattler was one of my tactics instructors. He was an excellent instructor, and what he taught was useful to me over the next few years as a platoon and company commander in the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. He has gone far - there are not many Lieutenant Generals in the Marine Corps - but I wonder if he doesn’t find his current assignment somewhat thankless.

The Marine Corps breed characters. One of the things I remember best about Capt. Sattler is his curious habit of referring to an appendage he believed all Marines should keep well-exercised as the “pink-helmeted Spartan.” HRS

US MARINE CORPS. SEMPER FIDELIS AND THANK YOU.

Click on “Justice is Served” to see photo.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=13592_This_is_For_the_Americans_of_Blackwater#comments

Small world. 3/5 is the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines I referred to in my previous post. They must be getting sick of Iraq. In Spring 2003, 3/5 participated in the invasion. 3/5 was afloat off Kuwait at the end of Desert Storm in 1991, but did not go ashore during the fighting. 1/5 was the only 5th Marines battalion that fought in Desert Storm. HRS

————

The Marine Corps breed characters. One of the things I remember best about Capt. Sattler is his curious habit of referring to an appendage he believed all Marines should keep well-exercised as the “pink-helmeted Spartan.” HRS

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I guess some things never change. In Leon Uris’s Battle Cry, a good novel of the Pacific war (though I forget at the moment if it was about the Marines or the Army), in basic training, in order to wean the recruits from calling their rifles “guns,” the drill instructor had them chant:

“This is my rifle,
This is my gun.
This is for fighting,
this is for fun.”

Assuming Centcom’s enemy casualty counts are accurate (and that’s a shaky assumption, as they’ve been known to lie about this kind of thing before), we’ve killed 1200-1600 insurgents. Against this, we’ve lost about 61 personnel killed and another 400-450 wounded, who’ve been shipped out to Landstuhl. In terms of effective attrition, we’ve only attained a 3-4:1 advantage. A counterinsurgency needs to attain a ration of something between 15-20:1.

Most of those we killed in Fallujah were dirt poor Iraqis whose training consisted of being shown which direction to point their RPG or AK-47. It cost the insurgents next to nothing to lose them. It costs us somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 per grunt (more for officers and non-coms). Add onto this all the money we now have to spend on “reconstruction.”

As a famous Greek general once commented, “Any more victories like this, and we’re done for.”

Battle Cry is about the Marine Corps, specifically about the 1st Marine Division (in which the Fifth Marines is one of three infantry regiments) on Guadalcanal in 1942. Uris didn’t make up his jingle. Many a private (and not a few officer candidates) has found himself chanting it with his rifle padlocked to his leg after unwisely calling it the wrong name. It is almost as infra dig to call a pistol a g-n. Machine guns, yes, also howitzers. Personal weapons, never.

Anyone looking for a decent novel about Marines might try one from closer to our own day: James Webb’s Fields of Fire, inspired by his tour as a 1st Battalion, 5th Marines rifle platoon and company commander in the An Hoa Valley in 1969-70.

Mr. Copold’s point is worth thinking about. How long do we want to keep this up? How important is the security of Fallujah to Americans in the long run? HRS

I hope there is an actual investigation of why we suffered so many casualties in Fallujah when we had such enormous advantages. We need to know if this was another politically-run war like Korea and Vietnam. Can you imagine how many more American dead there would be if we had the primitive medical resources of the insurgents?

“That lack of political will in the end is a good thing in this case, because firm resolve to do the impossible is a sure sign of impending defeat.” I must be reading the above comment wrong. Is this a call for an American defeat in Iraq?

Well, Paul, when you give the enemy something like four to six months’ notice of your intentions, he’s not going to go on vacation. He’s going to set up ambushes, kill zones and booby traps, as well as evacuate his more valuable personnel and equipment. He’s also going to take some time to figure out which sectors have been weakened by our deployment, and attack there: See, Mosul, Baquba, Ramadi, Sammara, and other cities in the Sunni Triangle.

Mr. Henri wrote:
“I must be reading the above comment wrong. Is this a call for an American defeat in Iraq?”

It is a call for an adjustment of objectives from unachievable ones to achievable ones, followed by the accomplishment of the achievable ones.