The 2003 Iraq war was a pretty decisive military victory for the invaders. Iraqi command and control destroyed in the opening stages. About a month to complete occupation of the country.

The subsequent years were a complete clusterfuck. Largely because of a missing theory of victory, the inept neocons the administration selected to run the civilian side, and the lack of strategic military-civilian coordination.

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mmooss 2 days ago | parent [-]

What you say is essentially accurate and we're debating semantics, but about those semantics:

Wars end with political solutions (otherwise, people keep fighting), and the US didn't achieve a political solution the first month, and never achieved a particularly desirable one. One step they took was dissolving the Iraqi army or military, and those people reformed into militias that continued fighting the US. Was the war really over?

The US won initial battles, as expected. The war lasted much longer.

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ethbr1 2 days ago | parent [-]

Granted! But that's insurgencies vs wars IMHO. In one, you have irregulars trying to bleed an occupying power. In the other, you have regular military forces.

The US is great at winning the latter, but sucks at winning the former (largely because of a lack of coherent political-diplomatic-military fusion on the US side).

	▲	mmooss 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> The US is great at winning the latter, but sucks at winning the former Also, enemies aren't suicidal. Why would they take on US tanks, fighter planes, missiles, satellites, etc. for more than five minutes? They know they can't win that way so they quickly abandon it for what does have some success, irregular warfare / insurgency.