Ralph Peters has given up on Iraq. For the sake of the Iraqis, and the larger war effort, I hope he's wrong.

Is there ever a war without setbacks? How many people were discouraged with the announced number of troops lost D-Day when it came out in late June 1944? Or how many thought the Nazis were going to rebound at the Battle of the Bulge? How many people would have been wiling to make a deal with Japan after Saipan? How many people wanted to pull out when we got pushed south by China in the Korean War?

I personally remember the outcry for pulling out of Viet Nam after the Tet Offensive. And don't say "...but we lost that war." We won all the battles and walked away empty handed from the Peace Talks, because of all the political pressures at home. We tried to fight the war from a "holding action" mentality.

Sometimes I think we are making the same mistakes now. I sure as he11 hope not, but time will tell. I know this, the guys I've talked with, my sons fellow Marines, all know they are making a difference. They are seeing it daily. THAT is what needs to be driving our opinions, not journalists with axes to grind. Regardless of how new or old the axe is.

I still want a casualty timeline from WWII. The sketchy bits I have heard seem to indicate we're like 7 years ahead of schedule.

Seven years ahead in what way Al?

There is a breakdown at Wikipedia of total deaths with graphs, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

Just for scope here, Pearl Harbor had 2117 and D-day had 1465 American deaths. Thats a total of 3582 in just a few hours on Dec 7, 1941, and over the first 24 hours of June 6 - 7, 1944.

As of October 31st, there were 2187 American deaths in Iraq, and 341 in Afghanistan. 2538 as a total, for both countries, in 3+ years of fighting.

I'm in no way discounting these current deaths, because they happened slower. Especially since both my sons have been over there, and one will go back next year. And the other is probably going to get recalled to the Marines and THEN go back.

I have no illusions that speed of deaths is how we should gage war. But what I do know, is the story my sons tell me about the people in Iraq. How glad they are that we came and booted out Saddam and his buddies. If I've got a choice between believing my own kids, and in believing the talking heads of the MSM, well that's a no brainer my guys will win hands down.

I don't, thank God, have sons involved as Steve does but from friends of mine who've been to Iraq I hear the same thing. And like Steve I tend to believe them over CNN, MSNBC or NYT.

I'm surprised Rand isn't calling Col Peters a coward
for giving up oon Iraq.

And none of us are surprised that an anonymous moron weighs in with a moronic comment. Colonel Peters isn't afraid to use his name (one of the many reasons we don't call him a coward). Why are you, anonymous moron?

I only remember Peters as the author of "Why Arabs Lose Wars". In my little universe that amusing theatrise was his claim to fame. I find it quite surprising that he won't use that seminal work to argue that any efforts to train Iraqi forces are doomed unless their whole society is secularized and turned upside down. In fact, I don't remember him doing major thinking since that time. He simply turned to by-minute political commentary. That's a tantamount to becoming deprofessionalized in my book.

Maybe Peters is right. I don't know. It seems a bit much to call for a coup against a government that we created, however.

What is really striking is the current extreme level of anti-Administration sentiment and general bitterness among libertarians and conservatives, particularly the latter, on the Internet. On an emotional level it feels a lot like a market crash. I assume that people will become calmer and more reasonable after the election, though I'm not optimistic about the effects on our policies of electing a lot of new Democrats to Congress.

I personally remember the outcry for pulling out of Viet Nam after the Tet Offensive. And don't say "...but we lost that war."

As far as I'm concerned, we lost that war in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Wouldn't that be just one Mann's opinion?

Vietnam was lost in 1965, when General Taylor went
to LBJ and said "It will require 5 million soldiers to
secure and stabilize the south vietnamese government."
and LBJ told him that level of force would not be
available. After that, it was just a matter of time.

Tet was in 1968, the Paris peace talks were in 1973.
All that occurred between was more wasted lives and
treasure.

The fundamental strategy was a failure, the Army was the
wrong instrument for this, The tactics and operations
were useless.

Iraq and World War 2 comparisons don't work. I understand the desire to use historical comparisons such as "what if we'd given up after ____? or comparing Saddam to Hitler, but it opens up an entirely new can of worms by offering real comparisons of the current conflict with World War 2.

First - Germany was the most advanced and prepared military power at the start of World War 2, only falling behind in surface naval power. Iraq is simply a conflicted situation internal to that country akin to a number of countries which, unfortunately, historical precedent shows a withdrawal ending up eventually taking place - Afghanistan, Algeria, etc. come to mind. Vietnam doesn't qualify because not only was it an organized form of civil war between a North and South government, but both governments were being heavily assisted by the two strongest military powers at the time. Ditto for post-WWII Greece, where at least Jim Van Fleet pulled off a victory.

As any student of World War 2 would note, particularly when we consider the time period of American participation following Pearl Harbor, the "turning point in the Pacific" against Japan happened barely six months after Pearl Harbor, in early June 1942. Up until that time, Japan had experienced a seemingly uninterruptible string of successes - aside from the embarrassment to Japan of the Doolittle Raid two months earlier and the stalemate of Coral Sea a month prior. Following Japan's six-month "day in the sun" of early 1942, the U.S. and Allied Forces in the Pacific in their turn had a nearly uninterrupted string of successes, with momentum really building in 1943.

Meanwhile in Europe, the turning point by some historian standards was Stalingrad in January 1943, barely over a year after the U.S. entered the war, and ending German momentum. Within 6 months of that, German forces were pushed from North Africa, Sicily was invaded and Mussolini deposed, and the devastating 1,000-bomber raids had already begun.

If we were to compare the "days at war" timelines for World War 2 against Iraq, we'd see that just about the time of the turning point of Midway in the Pacific, the United Nations Headquarters in Iraq had been bombed, marking the first big operation of a rising insurgency. A few months later, General Abizaid acknowledged the insurgency, but estimated there were only around 5,000 of them. About the time in U.S. participation in WWII when the Soviets won in Stalingrad, Abu Ghraib had been publicized, Spain had withdrawn from the coalition, and the insurgency showed marked strength.

Embarrassingly, about the time in WWII that Soviet forces were already poised on the Oder in the East and the Western Allies were poised on the Rhine about to cross, Louie Gohmert was chastising Jack Murtha that his attitude at this point in Iraq would have been like pulling out after D-Day when things looked bad.

Germany surrendered on only the 1243rd day of U.S. participation in WWII - which would have been this past August 13 in the Iraq war timeline. Japan surrendered on the 1347th day, which equates to about 3 weeks from now on November 25th.

World War 2 involved the greatest military powers in the world clashing against one another, about 25 million military deaths, even more civilian deaths, and the U.S. and its Allies liberating dozens of countries (some of whom then unfortunately fell under the equally bad or worse Soviet yoke).

Iraq is not World War 2. Saddam was not Hitler. He wasn't even Pol Pot and certainly not Kim Jong Il. It's not the Cold War either - another conflict between the greatest military powers. It's the greatest military power up against a bunch of low-tech, barely-trained though highly motivated and misguided semi-organized fanatics. They're not a nation. They won't gain control over Iraq if we were to pull out everything in a month. The Shia majority would put an end to them, along with a lot more retaliatory ethnic violence, then establish control and affirm their alliance with Iran. In fact, the future Iraq-Iran alliance holds a high likelihood no matter when we pull out or under what conditions. It just will be. Sometimes things work that way.

On the other hand, Iran had showed some thawing toward the West, particularly among the sizable younger population, and there is hope that the tensions between the West and Iran/Iraq might not last too long.

Here are the true trouble spots, and truthfully - Iraq falls behind these: North Korea is in all likelihood a nuclear nation with not only a case of belligerence toward its neighbors, but the possibility to force clandestine nuclear development in both South Korea and Japan - both countries which laid the groundwork and are quite capable of developing nukes. North Korea has the sponsorship of China and to a lesser degree Russia, both countries which enjoy seeing America stymied by a pissant little dingleberry of a country that can't keep its people fed and appears as a black hole in satellite pictures at night - and not due to blackout conditions but to an inability to make use of what Thomas Edison commercialized over a hundred years ago. North Korea also has no problem with passing around technology and arms to other countries - like Iran and Syria.

Pakistan through A.Q. Khan helped the nuclear ambitions of both Iran and North Korea. Musharraf won't last forever, and is forced to make compromises to keep his own less-than-unified nation of tribes from getting too restless. There's also their own nukes as well as their off-and-on tense relations with fellow nuclear neighbor India.

Russia, like the proverbial firebird of its own legends arises again from the ashes of the drunkard Yeltsin's less-than-able direction. Putin keeps the trains running on time, probably set Bush up by leaving his mic on to catch Bush at un unguarded moment at the G-8 conference, and ably swats Bush's easy jibes about how Russia might emulate Iraq's road to diplomacy right back at him. There's also little factors like changing their minds about exporting LNG to the U.S. and giving Western oil firms a hard time over existing a negotiated drilling. Plus their growing strategic alliance with China.

China of course has some leverage through its overly tight trading relationship with the U.S. There's also Taiwan, and the Chinese are patient and eventually get what they want. Plus the oil agreements they've been trying to lock in all over the world - including Canada.

I'll be honest that Pakistan with nukes is currently to me more worrisome than even Iran with nukes or North Korea with nukes. Why? Well, Pakistan and India have had recurring military conflicts, and they will continue to recur. North Korea, with China holding their leash, likes leverage because outright military conflict would finally cause China to either pick a side - or sit it out. Iran and Israel both are capable of taking covert and overt action, but Iran in particular is satisfied with the situation in Iraq and its growing influence in its bailiwick.

Less than 40 years ago, it was strongly argued that to pull out of Vietnam would be disastrous for the U.S. - both in loss of prestige as well as the certainly predictable domino effect of cascading countries going Communist, emboldened by their victory. What happened actually? Well, Communist Vietnam invaded Communist Cambodia and toppled Pol Pot, who made Saddam look like a kiddie. Certainly the Sino-Soviet split of almost 20 years earlier should have been some form of indication (if not pure common sense) that just because some countries share a vaguely defined and even more divergently implemented ideology like "Communism" doesn't mean they all like one another - any more than the vaguely defined and divergently implemented "democracy" means those countries like one another (with popularly elected leaders like the hardliners in Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and soon the likelihood of Daniel Ortega assuming the presidency of Nicaragua, that one's pretty obvious).

In fact, rather than Vietnam being the beginning of the end, here we are a year ago in summer 2005 with President Bush welcoming Vietnamese Prime Minister Phan Van Khai to the White House, and a couple weeks from now President Bush will be in Hanoi for the APEC conference.

Domino "theories" - with the emphasis on "theory" - whether predicting cascades of communist or democratic-turning countries face less likelihood than a more straightforward understanding of facts, precedents, and existing trends. They are, in statistical terms, what some might call a 1% likelihood (or less), and for our country and its leaders to hang our collective hats on such an unlikely long shot was always almost certainly to result in just about any outcome than the one we so optimistically desired that we could visualize it. And ditto for the worries of what will happen when we pull out (as we will, just as we did from Vietnam, just as we settled on a stalemate in North Korea, just as France eventually abandoned Algiers, the Soviets in Afghanistan, and so on). Pragmatism eventually does win out, and the fears of what will happen end up being replaced by what actually happens.

I'd call the situation in Iraq a mosquito on our collective behinds compared with the other situations I glossed over above. The "terrorists" are difficult to defeat because they are diffuse - rather than being cells of a highly organized group, they're a collection of semi-related or sympathetic small groups that basically share various dislikes of the U.S. and the West. They're not going to be pooling their money together to come up with the billions of dollars to compensate Kim Jong Il or Ahmadinejad for one of their few precious nukes as well as to assure those two characters that "we will use this responsibly and the U.S. will never trace it back to your country so that you receive a devastating nuclear retaliatory attack because the U.S. is frustrated that they can't find our little band in Sherwood Forest." And to be blunt, countries in wartime experience losses of entire cities and huge percentages of their population and still endure.

Al Qaeda is not taking control of any countries soon (although Pakistan is the most dangerous possibility around, and of course they are our friend so we're not worried about them, I suppose). They can employ painful attacks in loss of life. But they've got less chance of taking down the U.S. than Mexico getting in its wild head to try out a military invasion to get us back for our invasion of Mexico in the 19th century. Fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them in the streets over here? Very visual and visceral images. Anyone care to put some Al Qaeda types up against the Crips and the Bloods in a 3-way turf war in L.A.? Or the large percentage of concealed handgun owners in Texas and similar states?

Matthew, I thought I was long winded but you might want to look up the word 'brevity' my friend.

Josh - I much prefer to stick with zippy one-sentence responses. Sometimes, the muse strikes along with a desire to flesh out the arguments I have for my opinions.

Here's the zippy, one-sentence version: I'm quite puzzled that people - including so-called conservatives - can't recognize a blivet when they see one.

Matthew,

How funny - a blivet!

Indeed.

Now, I shall have to use that word somewhere today...

And thanks for the short history lesson. You make very intelligent and valid points.

I am a fast reader ;-)

Interesting article, but with one mistake. The situation is described as the collapse of a civilisation. Wrong - for the reason that the statement assumes the presence of a civilisation to do the collapsing.