We were where the enemy was not.
In Vietnam we contained ourselves for the most part to the South, against an enemy which operated there but based in North Vietnam and transited through Cambodia.
In Afghanistan we kept mostly to that country with its hundreds of routes over the nominal border to Pakistan, against an enemy that came and went between Afghanistan and Pakistan which was sometimes and in some ways an ally of ours but too often played host and enabler to the other side.
And presently in this Third Iraq War we constrict our halting, little-as-we-can-get-away-with semi-war in large part to Iraq, against an enemy that forms effectively a state covering a swath of Syria as much as Iraq and approximate in its territory to Jordan.
Analogies to the Second World War are frequently facile but occasionally useful, and had our civilian leadership in that war directed that we fight Germany in France or Holland but not in Germany, then Hitler might've been contained, at least until his war machine devised some means of breaking the containment, but there could've been no defeating and dismantling the Third Reich and neutering its menace.
This diminutive post will go mostly unread and wholly unheeded, and I can't think why it should be otherwise: I can't claim to be a scholar of military history and certainly I'm no holder of public office. But I do presume to have just a little sense, and it strikes me that so long as a considerable element of the enemy is in safety, with a base for supplying and regrouping and recruiting, and for undertaking fresh offensives, then there can be no prospect of victory.
In Vietnam we contained ourselves for the most part to the South, against an enemy which operated there but based in North Vietnam and transited through Cambodia.
In Afghanistan we kept mostly to that country with its hundreds of routes over the nominal border to Pakistan, against an enemy that came and went between Afghanistan and Pakistan which was sometimes and in some ways an ally of ours but too often played host and enabler to the other side.
And presently in this Third Iraq War we constrict our halting, little-as-we-can-get-away-with semi-war in large part to Iraq, against an enemy that forms effectively a state covering a swath of Syria as much as Iraq and approximate in its territory to Jordan.
Analogies to the Second World War are frequently facile but occasionally useful, and had our civilian leadership in that war directed that we fight Germany in France or Holland but not in Germany, then Hitler might've been contained, at least until his war machine devised some means of breaking the containment, but there could've been no defeating and dismantling the Third Reich and neutering its menace.
This diminutive post will go mostly unread and wholly unheeded, and I can't think why it should be otherwise: I can't claim to be a scholar of military history and certainly I'm no holder of public office. But I do presume to have just a little sense, and it strikes me that so long as a considerable element of the enemy is in safety, with a base for supplying and regrouping and recruiting, and for undertaking fresh offensives, then there can be no prospect of victory.
