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Well, well, well, even Foreign Policy Magazine can occasionally recognize the obvious -- though, of course, they carefully avoid the role of war profiteers -- and the matter of who got the oil !!

The Top 10 Lessons of the Iraq War

From the article :

Lesson #1: The United States lost.

Lesson #2: It's not that hard to hijack the United States into a war.

Lesson #3: The United States gets in big trouble when the "marketplace of ideas" breaks down and when the public and our leadership do not have an open debate about what to do.

Lesson #6: It's very hard to improvise an occupation.

Lesson #7: Don't be surprised when adversaries act to defend their own interests, and in ways we won't like.

Lesson #8: Counterinsurgency warfare is ugly and inevitably leads to war crimes, atrocities, or other forms of abuse.

[emphasis added]

The above "headline" is an absurd summary of the point the article makes.... which is that anything short of a dominant victory will be indistinguishable from a loss. Gulf War #1 was a victory because G Bush Sr. understood this point.

It is a concept well worth remembering in connection with how we may choose to deal with Iran.

and planning an occupation may not remarkably improve the final outcome.

By the way, I would say there is one more lesson that we seem never to learn.....


You really cannot expect your military commanders to come back and report that they have miserably failed and that they have no clue how to turn things around to achieve a definable success sufficient to disengage.

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I would say that your point can be extended to a more general principle :

Until proven otherwise, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS assume that a person in a position of authority is lying like hell to you !!

Corollary: The higher the position of authority, the more vicious, deep and vile are the lies.

I really think that misses the point....
I can imagine a warden or his prisoners lying. I do not think a warden is inherently more inclined to tell vicious lies than are his prisoners.

OTOH, people are people... and if there is a self interest to tell a lie, a person is more inclined to lie.... regardless of position.

Dear, dear, Ardy!!
That depends crucialy on what type of things he is prone to lie about!! · ·

Interesting the "lessons" that were elided, like "don't listen to ambitious exiles."

Numan:

I just looked back at that article, and I found this:

emphasis added

I don't believe NWP was making an attempt at humor. Rather, he was pointing out that when you chose to list the top 10 lessons you omitted several, including the one above which is entitled exactly the same as what NWP had in quotation marks.

If you still believe that he needs censure, you are invited to go to his post, click on notify, and tell the moderators why he should be censured for making a direct quote of the article on which you started this thread.

Otherwise, perhaps an apology to NWP is in order.

Ted Remington, fellow Ranter

Oops, missed Ted's follow up. What he said.