Iraqi Geography and "Losing" the War

Ace on the MSM's theme-meme du jour--that of painting victories as defeats.

...the American media laments each and every American "defeat"... but careful readers will note that the "Zone of Quagmire" seems to be radiating farther and farther out from US power centers and closer and closer to the heart of Al Qaeda/insurgent/Sadrist control.

We began by losing in Fallujah so badly our troops now say there are weeks that go by without hearing a gun shot. It's quiet there now... Too quiet.

We then lost Baghdad catastrophically. You can tell we lost because there are so few reports of mortar attacks hitting the Green Zone. The enemy won there by moving further and further out from the city. You know -- surrounding us.

We then lost in Basra so dreadfully it apparently simply vanished from the map entirely, perhaps sucked into another dimension through an interplanar vortex.

Next up we lost in Sadr's last bastion of power -- the slum he's named for -- which you can see by fact that the Iraqi Army is now patrolling the streets and conducts house-to-house searches for weapons. But we lost, because two concessions were made to the Sadrists -- "light weapons" (pistols, rifles) could be kept, one per person, and no US troops would accompany the IA. That last point really stung us, because you know our boys are heartbroken that the IA gets the glamor duty of patrolling this slum. Glory denied; a brilliant psyops tactic to crush the spirits of our troops.

And now we're losing in Mosul, of course.

It's a funny thing -- we keep "losing" by successively moving into the enemy's next-most-dear bastion and taking it for our own.

Meanwhile, they "melt into the shadows," thereby defeating us, because of course they always wanted to be in the shadows anyhow; it was just their bad luck to have wound up in non-shadowy major urban centers. They were sort of trapped there, victims of circumstances, but always had their eyes set on that rich shadowy utopia out in the hinterlands and deserts.
In a way, we did them a favor by finally encouraging them to move to where their hearts had always been from the start.

So neener-neener, we still lose.

Next, the MSM will be reporting that the US Forces are "surrounded" by AlQ forces in Paris, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and (on the western front) Detroit.

Hopeless situation.