Over and over again I hear the same question and it's starting to drive me nuts. Are we losing the Iraq War? No! We won the war, past tense. In 2003 the US military had an opponent, the Iraq Army. That opponent no longer exists. We thoroughly and completely dismantled that army and won the war easily. The Baathists were driven from power, the dictator was smoked out of his hole, and the Iraqi people were "liberated". Our military did what it was trained to do, and did so like no other fighting force on Earth. I for one, am very proud of the job they did, and I continue to be proud of the sacrifice they continue to make in the name of duty.
The situation we are in right now is not a "war" in the traditional sense. The Shia vs Sunni conflict existed before we got to Iraq. It existed before Saddam. It existed before the British. It existed before the Ottoman Empire. By toppling Saddam Hussein, we got rid of a ruthless dictator, but we also created a vacuum which even our great military could not fill, because it was a theocratic political vacuum. The hard fact is that the conflict in Iraq cannot be solved militarily. If it could be, our military would have solved it by now.
The Iraq War was won. We were victorious. The Iraq Civil War is still raging, and we are caught in the middle, but it is not our war.
Update:
I feel compelled to also explain why we are "in the middle". Of course, the reason we are still in Iraq is for oil. I know, it seems too simplistic. We would like to think our leaders got us into Iraq for a reason more noble, but they didn't. They sold us a bill of goods and we bought it. Shame on us. But now we're in a tragic connundrum. In order for Cheney to secure his investment, we have to stay in country and ensure that the civil war doesn't hinder our efforts to get our hands on the oil. The Profit Sharing Agreements have yet to get through the Iraqi congress (which is truly the benchmark the White House is paying attention to), and that same Iraqi congress has recently voted that US forces should leave the country. We have to stay in country for as long as it takes to ensure the oil flows unempeded to our shores, which could take a generation. I'm all for sticking it to OPEC, but this was not the way to go about it.
