{"id":2508,"date":"2008-05-01T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2008-05-01T17:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2508"},"modified":"2008-05-01T07:22:10","modified_gmt":"2008-05-01T12:22:10","slug":"about-the-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2508","title":{"rendered":"About The War"},"content":{"rendered":"

A commenter yesterday broke into an unrelated thread (as is his wont) to demand that I write about Iraq and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

OK.<\/p>\n

We’re winning in Iraq. The tide turned during the surge, and it’ll stay turned. Iraq’s fractious politlcs will take years to settle, and Al Quaeda and the Ba’athists will try to mount a campaign of harassment to try to affect the US election (because the most important front in that war, since the very beginning, has been inside the beltway.<\/p>\n

And yes – we’ll likely be in Iraq for a long time, if not 100 years. People who read and understand little enough of history to be liberals point at Senator McCain’s statement<\/a> and snigger.<\/p>\n

The more curious among them – the ones that dont’ get all <\/em>their news from Jon Stewart – point out that comparisons to our 60+ year involvements in Germany, Italy, Korea and Japan aren’t the same – and they’re right. Counterinsurgency is a very different cat to skin. The Iraq war is much more like the Philippines; a very brief conventional war (and accomplished mission!), followed by six years of “hot” insurgency and years of low-level troubles from groups that were both unrelated to and utterly provoked by the original rulers, and 35 years of military involvement (that dovetailed into another war that headed off the planned handover of all sovereignty by five years). It’s also got a lot more in common with El Salvador – where an asymmetric assortment of US troops, diplomats, contractors and aid workers conducted a compaign that brought medical care, money and security to the Salvadoran hinterlands, and the rule of law to the Salvadoran military, government, and eventually society as a whole.<\/p>\n

Afghanistan is still very much in the balance. More on that later.<\/p>\n

So – ask a question, get an answer. For whatever it’s worth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A commenter yesterday broke into an unrelated thread (as is his wont) to demand that I write about Iraq and Afghanistan. OK. We’re winning in Iraq. The tide turned during the surge, and it’ll stay turned. Iraq’s fractious politlcs will take years to settle, and Al Quaeda and the Ba’athists will try to mount a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2508\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}