Iraq is a bloody no man's land. America has failed to win the war.

Iraq is a bloody no man's land. America has failed to win the war. But has it lost it?

Ten US troops were killed in action across Iraq last week. The fighting is now sustained and ferocious. Patrick Cockburn, winner of the Martha Gellhorn prize for journalism, reports from the frontline of America's war on terror
The battlefield is a great place for liars," Stonewall Jackson once said on viewing the aftermath of a battle in the American civil war.

The great general meant that the confusion of battle is such that anybody can claim anything during a war and hope to get away with it. But even by the standards of other conflicts, Iraq has been particularly fertile in lies. Going by the claims of President George Bush, the war should long be over since his infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech on 1 May 2003. In fact most of the 1,600 US dead and 12,000 wounded have become casualties in the following two years
There is no doubt that the US has failed to win the war. Much of Iraq is a bloody no man's land. The army has not been able to secure the short highway to the airport, though it is the most important road in the country, linking the US civil headquarters in the Green Zone with its military HQ at Camp Victory.

Ironically, the extent of US failure to control Iraq is masked by the fact that it is too dangerous for the foreign media to venture out of central Baghdad. Some have retreated to the supposed safety of the Green Zone. Mr Bush can claim that no news is good news, though in fact the precise opposite is true
Many of the resistance groups are bigoted Sunni Arab fanatics who see Shia as well as US soldiers as infidels whom it is a religious duty to kill. Others are led by officers from Saddam's brutal security forces. But Washington never appreciated the fact that the US occupation was so unpopular that even the most unsavoury groups received popular support.

The greatest failure of the US in Iraq is not that mistakes were made but that its political system has proved incapable of redressing them. Neither Mr Rumsfeld nor his lieutenants have been sacked. Paul Wolfowitz, under-secretary of defence and architect of the war, has been promoted to the World Bank.

rest of the article
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=638525

To see it spelled out... I mean we all knew, but to see it proven, is something.

"The greatest failure of the US in Iraq is not that mistakes were made but that its political system has proved incapable of redressing them."

This line says it all - this whole operation has been managed with gross incompetence, and those responsible should have been fired long ago instead of being promoted and re-appointed.

that exposes the epic tragedy carried on in our name by a corrupt group of 'businessmen' (a.k.a sociopaths), and paid for by the blood of thousands of innocents civillians.

.. what Iraq has become because the USA is no longer responsible since they had "free and fair" elections.

Sue

the Arabs (or Muslims) that we ready, willing and able to take the war to them, and that we would have the endurance and strength to persist through years of fighting. According to this theory, the Muslim world never respected us because they thought of us as materialistic cowards who are happy to launch hundreds of millions of dollars of cruise missiles, but not capable of defeating committed Muslim fighters in direct fighting. An adjunct to this theory is the notion that we are attracting al Qaeda and like groups to Iraq, where we can engage them directly and destroy them, rather than having them commit more attacks in the US. The lack of significant terrorist attacks since 9/11 is said to vindicate this theory.

If this is the real reason for the war, it is in peril of major failure; if the Sunni insurgency widens into a civil war (said by some to have already begun), there will be nothing we can do beyond getting the hell out.

Of course, at this late date, the only really credible theory for why we invaded Iraq is to secure the middle east for oil exports to the west. This too looks like an historic failure. As world oil demand continues to increase, we will lose control of our economic security because we tried to solve our energy problems using the military.

now a lost art as far as the media are concerned in this country.

It takes awhile before a superpower realizes it has been beaten. It's typical of all major colonial/economic powers. The Russians, the French, the British, the Americans, etc. know what it's like to fight and be defeated by an adversary that seems so much weaker and smaller than themselves.

The group that wins is the group that wants it most. In Iraq, that usually means fighting an occupation force with ridiculous amounts of firepower and capability. It's near-suicidal or suicidal in some cases, but they keep doing it.