Quote from traderNik:
Your troops have definitely taken needless casualties, but I don't think it's to appease the Muslims. I think the thing that has created needless casualties, when you look at the situation as a whole, is the difficulty in defining the ongoing mission in Iraq. You mentioned that the US soldiers have been put in a war-like situation but have been forbidden to act in a war-like manner. Surely a part of the problem is that the US didn't have any of the traditional reasons to go to war with Iraq, and in fact they always claimed that they weren't making war on Iraq, they were there to depose the dictator and murderer Saddam Hussein and establish a democratically elected government in Iraq, thereby undermining the effort to initiate and carry out terrorist attacks on US soil.
It is difficult to explain to people why, now that Hussein is in jail, there is more murder and mayhem than ever before, why it seems to us over here that if Iraq was a hotbed for the development of murderous terrorists before the war, it is now a blast furnace, minting murderer's at a frightening rate. There is a poor level of understanding among ET right wingers about Islam, the problems that exist within Islam, the mindset of radical Muslims, the reasons that more mainstream Muslims aren't rising up and proclaiming there disgust with the actions of the murderous mullahs and their brainwashed followers. What are the American soldiers actually doing in Iraq now? We can't say they are there fighting a war, and this is why they are taking casualties. Whose side are they on, the Shia or Sunni? They are in an impossible situation. They can't hammer the enemy because they have no clearly defined enemies left. Their remaining enemies might be the woman walking down the street with her baby or one of a group of young men watching them on a street corner, but they won't know which one until one of them explodes, taking US soldiers with him.
The war in Iraq is supposed to be over and that is why so many young US soldiers are losing their lives... needlessly, IMO.
A more general statement of the problem is this. It's impossible to take a big template labelled democracy, a template the size of Iraq, and use a thousand helicopters to pick it up, and fly it over Iraq and drop it, then hook it up again and lift it off Iraq and then say 'Look! A democracy!!'.
Another problem is this. There is no proof, as far as I can see, that this war isn't accomplishing all the objectives of those individuals who started it. In their view, it seems to me, things are going along swimmingly.