July 6, 2004

Who's winning in Iraq?

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was easy to call. As American troops closed in on Baghdad, pundits had a hard time coming up with coalition defeats. When, in less than three weeks, American troops were on the outskirts of Baghdad, enterprising journalists had their pundits going on about the bloody street fighting Saddam’s supporters were waiting to provide. When the city fell quickly, with little bloodshed, there was a lull of a few months until the Sunni Arab and al Qaeda attacks could reach the level (a few dozen a day would do it) that gave pundits a reasonable shot at gloomy predictions of “another Vietnam.”

Figuring out who’s winning in Iraq has more to do with who you want to win, or lose, as the case may be, than what is actually going on. If there are any lessons to come out of Iraq, that is one of them.

From StrategyPage.com

Posted by Ted at July 6, 2004 9:12 PM