Trust Ted Rall to tell it like it is. WHAT LOST IRAQ is his latest article:
As inexperienced weekend warriors shot up carloads of civilians from rooftops above invisible checkpoints, it soon became apparent that our forces were undereducated, poorly trained and excessively preoccupied with their own safety. The Americans' cultural insensitivity, often beyond the point of brutality, transformed people grateful to be liberated into insurgents in a matter of months...
Winning a war requires a politically unified society, something the United States hasn't enjoyed since 1945. Since then our fractured nation has been unable to summon the unity to issue a formal declaration of war, much less win one. Bush-era America is highly fractured. Because the Administration can't count on most citizens to help, it has had to fight its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on the cheap.
After 2000 most Americans told the CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll that Bush had not won "fair and square." After 2004, the pollsters found, "the nation seemed nearly as divided as it had been in Bush's first election." How can he convince the half of the country that considers him an illegitimate usurper to risk their lives, or those of their sons and daughters? ...
The Republicans' decision to forego consensus made it easy to start their war. It also made it impossible to win.
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