Quote Originally Posted by Menning View Post
What is necessary to remember is losing in Iraq is not the end of the world for the U.S. I feel it might actually suit our strategic goals. The first, keeping extremists divided and fighting amongst themselves in a country far away from our own, siphoning their energy. Two, if the situation escalated into a regional war, Syria and Iran would have to engage. Their involvement would aid our goals-weakening their state governments through fiscal and human loss. Third, if chaos broke out in the Middle East, might the U.S. not have a reason to intervene in the region to "protect our interests?" Our interests would be oil fields and oil production. Who knows where we might cordon off and control.
Pardon me while I stray from history.... I would like to add the particularly unorthodox view that a loss in Iraq might, if handled properly, be useful to American strategic objectives in this struggle. I would submit that the target audience in this struggle is not Al Q or any of the other sub/inter/supra-national insurgent groups. Rather, it is the rest of the world that is mostly on the fence. I think that this population bristles at the way that the US acts in the world -- whether their interpretations are correct is irrelevant -- and that a show of humility might go a long way to mollifying that irritation. If defeat in Iraq were handled correctly, and with a large degree of magnanimity, the US could probably end up ahead of the game.

Quite frankly, as much as there was an intense desire to strike back in the aftermath of 9/11 -- and I'm a New Yorker, the loss is still incomprehensible to me -- a better course of action might have been to work on the problems that lead these young men to join such movements as Al Q. Had American actions been targetted to shore up the support of the world's population as a means of making the existence of such groups increasingly untenable, we might be in a very different place today. (Ok, I'm no Pollyanna -- this problem might have been solved only to be replaced by another, just as the Cold War ended only to be replaced by another threat. But we're dealing with one problem at a time, because otherwise our heads would explode.) Skip the war and go straight to the Marshall Plan. If we were going to send troops to the Middle East, it ought to have been as the Palestinian defense force. Because as people have pointed out in this thread, war winning is not about the battlefield but the peace that follows. How you shape that is what really matters in war.