Winning

I was watching a rerun of The Daily Show where Bill Kristol of Fox News and the Weekly Standard was a guest. He and Jon Stewart where talking about Iraq and Kristol made an offhand remark about how the troops say they want to win.

As almost always happens when I hear that word these days, my thought was "What the hell does that mean?"

Win? What is a win?

From the very beginning the goal was confusing. The idea was that we had to remove the weapons of mass destruction from Saddam's control. That was the idea, but it wasn't really th goal becuase we never really tried to do that.

We could have done that with the UN inspection process that was already in progress. We had the Bush administration claiming that not only did we know Saddam had WMD's but we knew where they were.

Okay, if that was true then what was the problem? The inspectors where in country. We had military control of the air in Iraq. If we needed to get troops into the country to escort the inspectors to locations of these WMD we could have done that. It didn't require an invasion, didn't require control of the ground other than the location of these WMD's. But, we didn't do that? Why?

There are a couple of possible explanations. The ones I can think of all involve the Bush administration just flat out being untruthful. Lies to congress, to the American people, to whoever their God is. Just lies.

Maybe they lied when they said they knew where the WMD's are. More likely they lied when they said WMD's where the reason for for the invasion.

But, then, even before we invaded, we kind of switched gears. It became about regime change. The reason for the regime change was the WMD's and the need for regime change was the reason for the invasion.

Then when we acheived that objective we decided the real goal was to have a democratically elected government. We acheived that.

Then it became a need to the new government to establish security. As I pointed out here that quickly became an unatainable goal. No way that's going to happen. I talked here about that.

The whole thing is pointless. We never had a purpose. I don't know why we invaded Iraq. I don't know why we're still there. But I think I do know why we're going to stay awhile. It's because Bush is totally incompetent and doesn't know what else to do because of some kind of psychological fears and because we cowardly congress that is afraid to stand up.