why are anti american hate monger so stupid?

[A Black Falcon]

There was a strong, organized resistance, true. But they were hardly an 'enemy we could fight', if you knew the war. How many hundreds of times were US soldiers killed by villagers and other percieved non-combatants in that war or by ambushes and boobytraps concealed in jungles? The whole problem with Nam was that there were plenty of enemies to fight, it's just that you never knew who they were. Of course, we do face that problem in Iraq today, but on a comparatively microscopic scale. These post-war occupation blues are peanuts compared to that, and they are a natural part of occupation. These sort of things happened in other wars of occupation as well, though only now are they publicized so thoroughly. Silly people think of this as an oversight or a blunder when that's far from the truth. The only reason it looks so bad is that while we've been through this before, this is the first time that the media is constantly informing us of it, so those who don't know do think this is some strange new pitfall. The rest of us know better.

If Iraq were anything even remotely approaching a disaster, it would involve all-out battles against powerful organized resistance. Instead, we kicked Saddam's ass, destroyed his regime in less than a month with one of the lowest casualty counts of any war in human history, and we are in absolutely no danger of losing control of Iraq, there is absolutely no way Saddam could ever hope to regain power. By my standards that qualifies as an unmitigated success.

Did you read the rest of my post? I cover a lot of issues... :)

Anyway... yes, its not nearly as bad as Vietnam. There is no nation funding the resistance like there was there... some nations (in the Middle East) are funding terrorism in smaller and surreptious ways, but not openly and nowhere near the extent that it was in Vietnam. But the guerrilla war aspect is similar... again, less bad in Iraq, but similar -- enemies blend in with the general population (which has widespread support for those radicals), strike when they can with bombs, etc... and like Vietnam we've won all the major battles (we did win every major battle in Vietnam, not that it mattered at all...). But so far, yes, this isn't nearly that bad... the problem is that as the occupation lasts longer hatred will grow, and popular resistance will grow... and with it more popular support of terrorism. Will they want Sadaam back? No! But they are Arabs, so they are very easily convinced that the US is evil... remember, we will never get the Arabs to truly accept us until the Israel/Palestine thing is settled.

And it is a major oversight and blunder because the administration just didn't expect this. If they had expected a long occupation and popular anger the war would NEVER have happened as it did... even this Bush would have admitted that his father had the right idea is securing international monetary support for war. I'm sure he still would have attacked Sadaam, but it would have been done differently, and I am sure that more attention would have been paid to the need to rebuild the infrastructure of the nation (power, water, bridges, police, government, army, etc...) -- they pretty much ignored those silly little niggling issues. Of course they could have seen this coming if they had looked, but they didn't want to see the obvious truth, so here we are...