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Top Ten Ways We Know We Have Lost In

Juan Cole 11/04/2006

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Top Ten Ways we know We have Lost in Iraq

Top Ten Ways you can tell we have have lost in Iraq:

10. When your daily news frequently includes an item like this: Reuters reports that

‘Police found 56 bodies and a severed head in different parts of Baghdad over the last 24 hours, an Interior Ministry source said. The bodies showed signs of torture and bullet wounds.

Then you know you have lost in Iraq.

9. When 7 US GIs are announced dead on an ordinary day in Iraq, then you know you are not exactly winning.

8. When the Shiites, the primary beneficiaries of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, think the US is too pro-Sunni, you know you have lost in Iraq.

7. When the US military is so clueless that it planned to send a notorious Abu Ghraib figure, Sgt. Santo Cardona back to Iraq to train police then you know that you have lost in Iraq.

6. When 3,000 Iraqis a day are fleeing to Syria and Jordan and United Nations High Commission on Refugees is being overwhelmed, then you know we have lost Iraq. (That is a million a year! Iraq’s population is 27 million).

5. When you start having teach-ins in Ann Arbor (shades of 1965) then you know it is all over with.

4. When even cities the US has destroyed like Fallujah are again becoming centers of insurgency, then you know you have lost in Iraq.

3. When finding Saddam guilty is so controversial that it may provoke waves of violence among Sunni Arabs, you know you have lost in Iraq.

2. When the Neoconservatives are suddenly against having invaded Iraq, then you know the Iraq War is lost. Talk about rats and a sinking ship! [Vanity Fair link here.]

1. When the Bush administration freely gives out to terrorists Iraq’s old 1980s blueprints for building an atomic bomb, then you know we are just screwed as long as these people are in power. And they say they are better at protecting our security!

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About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

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Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires



Click here to Buy Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam


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