War Stories

A history lesson in losing the War in Iraq.

The current debate over the so-called "surge" is just the latest example of what Elowitz and Spanier were writing about more than thirty years ago. President Bush is attempting to achieve battlefield conditions that can lead to a political settlement in Iraq, but he is being denied the flexibility and maneuvering space necessary to achieve that goal. Just like Truman and Eisenhower in Korea and Johnson and Nixon in Vietnam, Bush is being pushed into a corner from which he cannot escape, except by conceding that the war cannot be won. In Korea, due to the unique geographical conditions of the country, a stalemate was achievable because the opposing armies held a World War I-style line of trenches stretching across the entire peninsula. The Chinese and North Koreans were finally willing to accede to a cease-fire because they knew that they could not achieve anything more by continued war. In Vietnam, since much of the war was being fought by units passing back and forth over porous borders between the two Vietnams and the border with Cambodia, no such stalemate was possible. The North Vietnamese knew they merely had to wait for our troops to leave and our support of the government of South Vietnam to end before they could take the country by conventional invasion and occupation.

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Read more from this blogger: Why Our Defeat in Iraq is Inevitable