{"id":38843,"date":"2013-12-13T10:45:26","date_gmt":"2013-12-13T15:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=38843"},"modified":"2013-12-13T10:45:26","modified_gmt":"2013-12-13T15:45:26","slug":"iraq-this-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=38843","title":{"rendered":"Iraq this year"},"content":{"rendered":"

The anti-war left, in it’s many forms, told us that when US troops left, there’d be peace in the country, because the Iraqis would have no one left to kill and they were only fighting against an occupying power. So we set an arbitrary withdrawal date with no other clear goal except withdrawal, much like we’ve done in Afghanistan. So how’s that working out for peaceful Iraq these days. According to the UK’s Telegraph<\/a>, not so well;<\/p>\n

The death toll for 2013 has already topped 7,000, with the United Nations saying that 979 died in October alone, the latest month for which figures are available.<\/p>\n

That is roughly twice the Iraqi death rate when US forces plucked Saddam from his \u201cspider hole\u201d in Tikrit in December 2003, an arrest hailed at the time as spelling the end of Iraq\u2019s insurgency problems.<\/p>\n

The brunt of al-Qaeda\u2019s new onslaught is borne by Iraq\u2019s majority Shia Muslim community, who are classed as apostates in the terror group\u2019s extremist Sunni Muslim vision.<\/p>\n

So far, senior Shia clerics have forbidden retaliation. But in interviews with The Telegraph, both Iraqi politicians and foreign diplomats have expressed fears that the sheer scale of the current onslaught is putting a strain on Shias\u2019 willingness to turn to the other cheek.<\/p>\n

They fear a return to the sectarian warfare of 2006-2007, when up to 3,000 people a month were killed in tit-for-tat violence waged by Sunni and Shia death squads. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is not a plea to return troops to Iraq, but a reminder that the only way to destroy an insurgency is to marshal your entire force and kill all of your enemies, all of the time, every where they hide. War is not something that half-assed politicians should not be allowed to have a say in the way it’s fought. Neither should lawyers nor journalists. <\/p>\n

When your Congressmen stand on the roof of your enemy’s palace and declare that enemy to be more trustworthy than their own president, the war is lost. When history tells your enemies that you’re not willing to see a fight through to the end, their utter and total destruction, the war is lost. When you tell folks that you’re better as human beings than your enemy and you won’t stoop to his tactics, the war is lost. When your generals go out in public and criticize the way the war is being fought, because they weren’t included in the game, the war is lost. When the generals who are engaged with the enemy ask for more troops and you “compromise” with them and give them less than they ask for, the war is lost. When you end your wars depending on the whims of your domestic press, the war is lost.<\/p>\n

The war is won when the enemy doesn’t exist any more and his army is planted in the soil. Period.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The anti-war left, in it’s many forms, told us that when US troops left, there’d be … Iraq this year<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38843\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}