Bluesman

You have just described the single most important failure of the entire effort.

NOTHING else compares to the primacy of public opinion - American, Iraqi, and World. And we've done dismally on that battlefield. Our troops are matchless, our system, for all its flaws, is superior in every way.

But the war for the minds of combatants and citizens has been fought by one side only...and it wasn't ours.

There were so many, many things that could and should have been done to shore up our own people, to neutralize the defeatism of the opposition party, to bring world leaders and their peoples to the understanding that America must not fail and to convince the enemy that they could not win. But we thought that beating the forces in the field would wrap up our problem, and then democracy would flourish.

So we beat 'em. Then, we had to beat 'em again. And AGAIN. And we've been beating them every single day, but not on the battlefield that counts most. The most crucial piece of key terrain is heavily garrisoned by the enemy, and our heaviest artillery is useless against the fortifications they've erected on the highest of high ground: the human spirit and its twin peak, the human mind.

Our own people are now so used to seeing the war as a hopeless quagmire that when the Majority Leader in the US Senate declares our defeat, instead of an instantaneous and enraged reaction from our People that drives him from office in disgrace, we get a call to debate the matter.

We can only lose if we choose defeat, and more and more of our own people and the people of the world are choosing to lose. It's heart-breaking, and the blame goes to our leadership, from both both parties, as well as a largely ignorant public, and the media that feed them a steady diet of defeatism.

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"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell