What more can be said than
this:
I forget who it was who noted this, but it's a brilliant point. During WWII, Japan's government and media always claimed Japan was winning every single battle. But careful listeners could divine the way the War in the Pacific was really going by noting the locations of each of these "victories" -- each of these "victories" seemed to be occurring closer and closer to the Japanese mainland.
In a near-exact reversal of that situation, the American media laments each and every American "defeat"... but careful readers will note that the "Zone of Quagmire" seems to be radiating farther and farther out from US power centers and closer and closer to the heart of Al Qaeda/insurgent/Sadrist control.
We began by losing in Fallujah so badly our troops now say there are weeks that go by without hearing a gun shot. It's quiet there -- too quiet.
We then lost Baghdad catastrophically. You can tell we lost because there are so few reports of mortar attacks hitting the Green Zone. The enemy won there by moving further and further out from the city. You know -- surrounding us.
We then lost in Basra so dreadfully it apparently simply vanished from the map entirely, perhaps sucked into another dimension through an interplanar vortex.
Next up we lost in Sadr's last bastion of power -- the slum he's named for -- which you can see by fact that the Iraqi Army is now patrolling the streets and conducts house-to-house searches for weapons. But we lost, because two concessions were made to the Sadrists -- "light weapons" (pistols, rifles) could be kept, one per person, and no US troops would accompany the IA. That last point really stung us, because you know our boys are heartbroken that the IA gets the glamor duty of patrolling this slum. Glory denied.
And now we're losing in Mosul, of course.
If we lose in Iraq, it's going to be because the left decided that they wanted to.
