Iraq enterprise "Dead Man Walking."

[trof]

We're Winning Battles, Losing the War

George W. Bush's elective decision to besiege Fallujah in revenge for the killing of four Western private commandos produced revulsion throughout Iraq. It is an example of how the US can win the battles but lose the war. And, some senior officers are afraid that US policy in Iraq is producing such a dire result, according to veteran military affairs reporter Thomas E. Ricks of the Washington Post.

Ricks writes, hauntingly: ' Army Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who spent much of the year in western Iraq, said he believes that at the tactical level at which fighting occurs, the U.S. military is still winning. But when asked whether he believes the United States is losing, he said, "I think strategically, we are." Army Col. Paul Hughes, who last year was the first director of strategic planning for the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad, said he agrees with that view and noted that a pattern of winning battles while losing a war characterized the U.S. failure in Vietnam.

"Unless we ensure that we have coherency in our policy, we will lose strategically," he said in an interview Friday. "I lost my brother in Vietnam," added Hughes, a veteran Army strategist who is involved in formulating Iraq policy. "I promised myself, when I came on active duty, that I would do everything in my power to prevent that from happening again. Here I am, 30 years later, thinking we will win every fight and lose the war, because we don't understand the war we're in." '

Some military analysts apparently are privately calling the Iraq enterprise "Dead Man Walking."
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