I absolutely do not count that one, unless we assume that “turn the place into a civil war economy and enable the formation of ISIS” is a valid win condition. Which is a stretch when they went in there expecting to turn it into an obedient vassal state like postwar Germany or Japan, which is something that Dubya’s administration seems to have seriously believed.
DC’s architects made their money off of rebuilding, mercenaries, and corruption. I’m pretty sure they count it as a win regardless of what ever humble pie the media made them eat for that brief period America pretended to care, back in… 2015/2016, was it?
It only works under the very narrow criteria of “removing Saddam from power,” but yeah by any other metric it was a boondoggle of the highest order. A sort of, I got rid of the wasp’s nest in the attic, I just caused a five alarm fire in the process.
Absolutely. What worries me about Iraq is that it may have tought the US that they do not need to be successful, but that it can already benefit them when they just fuck shit up for real in a strategically important corner of the globe.
I think the first Iraq War is a better example, since they had clear goals (remove Iraq from Kuwait and completely obliterate its infrastructure) and achieved them in a short timeframe.
I think the difference there is while it was successful in stopping the invasion, it’s also clear in retrospect that the neocons weren’t happy with that and wanted to march all the way to Baghdad. So the first one was successful in the abstract but a failure of the ideological project, and in the second they got what they wanted in the first place and got a failure in the abstract as a result.
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I suppose technically the second iraq war counts but that was the absolute textbook definition of a Pyrrhic victory.
I absolutely do not count that one, unless we assume that “turn the place into a civil war economy and enable the formation of ISIS” is a valid win condition. Which is a stretch when they went in there expecting to turn it into an obedient vassal state like postwar Germany or Japan, which is something that Dubya’s administration seems to have seriously believed.
DC’s architects made their money off of rebuilding, mercenaries, and corruption. I’m pretty sure they count it as a win regardless of what ever humble pie the media made them eat for that brief period America pretended to care, back in… 2015/2016, was it?
It only works under the very narrow criteria of “removing Saddam from power,” but yeah by any other metric it was a boondoggle of the highest order. A sort of, I got rid of the wasp’s nest in the attic, I just caused a five alarm fire in the process.
Absolutely. What worries me about Iraq is that it may have tought the US that they do not need to be successful, but that it can already benefit them when they just fuck shit up for real in a strategically important corner of the globe.
Yeah there’s been a distinct shift in pentagon mentality where they don’t see wars as things to be won, but things to be managed.
I think the first Iraq War is a better example, since they had clear goals (remove Iraq from Kuwait and completely obliterate its infrastructure) and achieved them in a short timeframe.
I think the difference there is while it was successful in stopping the invasion, it’s also clear in retrospect that the neocons weren’t happy with that and wanted to march all the way to Baghdad. So the first one was successful in the abstract but a failure of the ideological project, and in the second they got what they wanted in the first place and got a failure in the abstract as a result.