This war in Iraq reminds me of the Afghanistan-Russian war that started in
Christmas 1979 with the Russians dropping paratroopers into Kabul.
Follow me below the fold to see the parallels.
The Russians said that they were invited in by the prime minister,
Hazifullah Amin, who they later shot and replaced him with Babrak Kamal.
The Russians claimed that they had been invited in by the Amin government and that they were not invading the country. They claimed that their task was to support a legitimate government and that the Mujahideen were no more than terrorists.
Obviously, the Afghan-Russian war was based on lies.
Mikhail Gorbachev took Russia out of the Afghanistan fiasco when he realised that Russia could not win the war and the cost of maintaining such a vast force in Afghanistan was crippling Russia's already weak economy.
Declassified documents from archives in the former Soviet Union and memoirs of senior Soviet military provide insight into how the war aggravated the internal dynamics that eventually culminated in the dissolution of the country itself. One of the misconceptions was to apply their own Marxist-Leninist doctrine instead of the realities of traditional tribal society found in Afghanistan. Their attempt to create an Afghan communist PDPA was doomed because it was split along ethnic and tribal lines.
The organizing principles of traditionalist groups differed from those of the fundamentalists. Formed from loose ties among ulama in Afghanistan, the traditionalist leaders were not concerned, unlike fundamentalists, with redefining Islam in Afghan society but instead focused on the use of the sharia as the source of law (interpreting the sharia is a principal role of the ulama).
The Russians did not appreciate the influential role of Islam in the Afghan society and they had very few experts on Islam in the Soviet government and the academic institutions.
The Afghanistan war had a major impact on domestic politics in the Soviet Union.
The breakdown of the Soviet Union surprised most scholars of international relations, comparative politics, and Soviet politics. Existing explanations attribute the breakdown of the Soviet Union to the reformist leadership of Gorbachev, and/or to systemic factors. These explanations do not focus on the key contribution of the war in Afghanistan.
The Soviet Army also quickly realized the inadequacy of its preparation and planning for the mission in Afghanistan. The majority of the troops initially sent in were the Army reservists.
Operations to pursue and capture rebel formations were often unsuccessful and had to be repeated several times in the same area because the rebels retreated to the mountains and returned to their home villages as soon as the Soviet forces returned to their garrisons.
There are many parallels to our current war in Iraq. The Iraq war was based on lies about weapons of mass destruction and the non-existent link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaida.
The added cost of this war is increasing our already huge deficit and that will place enormous pressure on our own economy. Our vision of a democratic Iraq is not in sync with the Iraqi tribal society or the division between Sunni and Shi'ite Islam. Throw into this mix the ethnic differences between the Iraqis and the Kurds and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see that we cannot create a US style democracy. The recruiting attempts are falling far short of what is needed to sustain this war. We have used up our reservists with repeated tours of duty. Combined these with the stop loss orders and it is not hard to see that our once mighty military is slowly being ruined. The architects of this war never plan adequately to win and preserve the peace because of false illusions that we would be greeted as liberators. A majority of the Iraqis now see us as an occupying force.
Representive Murtha knows this and the commanders he has been talking to know this. The only ones who don't know this is the civilian leaders who lied, miscalculated and never listened to anyone but their delusional selfs.
It was George Santayana that said, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." It looks like to me the neocons never bothered to read about the Russian-Afghan war.