Yes, I served during the Vietnam war...
Thank you too.
You fight wars to win them and that isn't what we did in Iraq.
I agree with that completely.
I don't think there was ever a point at which we fought the war in Iraq (or the war in Afghanistan) "to win it".
I don't think we fought in such a manner under President Bush, I don't think we fought in such a manner under president Obama.
I think the "surge" was a stop gap that kind of prevented things from sliding completely over the edge, but I can't think of any point where we were even close to saying, "yeah, we can chalk this one up as a victory and put it to bed."
I don't think the desired end state of the war in Iraq was ever defined in such a way that winning was even a possibility.
Well, that's not entirely true.
There was some vague notion early on that the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms and transition peacefully into Jeffersonian democracy and submit to our authority as some kind of vassal state if only we would depose Saddam Hussein.
By July or August of 2003 it was clear that whoever came up with that idea was a retard but at that point we just sort of shifted to fighting the insurgency by pretending they were terrorists and nobody came up with any revised idea of what victory might look like.
Things eventually got better from the perspective of the unmitigated violence lessening, and that was good, but we never arrived at a point politically where both we and the Iraqis knew what we wanted to achieve and were either working toward that goal or even working on a plan that would start us out toward that goal.
In the end we were just throwing good money, and lives, after bad and stringing things along to the degree that only Halliburton and Lockheed Martin were coming out ahead.
So yeah, at that point it's time to cut and run.
And now you want to wade back in to that same political cesspool because of ISIS?
Sorry brother, no thank you.