Wars ending badly

[Fishrrman]

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/feb/17/wars-in-middle-east-ending-badly/

Wars ending badly
By Jed Babbin
Sunday, February 17, 2019



Excerpt (the money quote):
========================
In his State of the Union speech, the president said that great nations do not fight endless wars. In that he was precisely correct. Great nations fight wars — even long wars — to an end that benefits their national security or until they are defeated.

In Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, we have not reached any ends that benefit our security.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, we have been defeated by our own strategy. Nation-building to create some sort of democracy cannot work among a population whose religion doesn’t permit the separation of church and state. Moreover, and equally important, is the fact that three presidents have failed to fight and destroy the enemy’s ideology. That, alone, propels Islamic forces to fight us. We cannot win without defeating that ideology.

More at URL above...

[Fishrrman]

Back around 2003, I started posting the question:
Who's winning...?

Nice to see Mr. Babbin coming around -- even if it took him 16 additional years to do so!

[SZonian]

For all of Saddam's faults, the US turning left into Iraq in 2003 before the Taliban in Afghanistan were subdued, was, IMO, a huge tactical mistake.

That one should have been a NATO/UN effort.  Laughable, I know, but a coalition akin to DS/DS should have been established in an effort to contain him.

The destabilization of Iraq only exacerbated the problems in that area, as evidenced by the rise of ISIL and the subsequent civil war in Syria.

I agree that "nation building" in a 3rd world $h!t hole like Afghanistan is a mistake and history has shown that to be true for all who have tried.

But, we need to keep the pressure on the Taliban to prevent giving them "breathing room" to possibly stage another 9/11.

We also need to extricate ourselves from the Syria quagmire as well...