If the objective of the war was to take Saddam out of power and to remove Iraq as a threat from the world stage, Bush was exactly right - the war had been won.

What happened after that was not much more than terrorism and the policing of it.

In any case, if this really has been a "war" since Bush made his infamous declaration, it probably has the lowest casualty rate per year of any major war in history.

I don't see how you get that from what he said: "We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We are bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous". That clearly implies that pacification efforts were still ongoing.

Well, that's been the whole problem now isn't it?

Who billed it that way? The same people who said that the surge would not work? That the coalition would suffer enormous casualties at the hands of the Republican Guard? That invading Iraq would increase the chances of another 9-11 happening? It's obvious that there was a concerted effort by the media to read negativity into everything that Bush did or said and Mission Accomplished is a prime example of it.

"Pacification efforts" are very different than outright war, or whatever we've been fighting in Iraq since 2003.

The Bush people were the ones who billed it as the end of the war. At the time, it was seen as a good move. It was supposed to be a triumphant capstone on a quick and easy war. The stigma of the speech and the sign didn't come until several months later.

As far as the casualty rate, US casualties have been low for a war. However, Iraqi civilian/'good guy' casualties have been much higher, although getting any sort of a firm number is impossible. As I said earlier, the violence in Iraq can best be characterized as a civil war, not a US vs. Iraq fight.

So what is the difference, in your opinion, between an outright war and a pacification effort? To me it's all just semantics.

Wrong, the stigma began immediately and not just the administration but everyone hoped it would be a quick and easy war, except of course our enemies like Iran, but also i'm sad to say Bush's political opposition who couldn't contain their glee at seeing the war effort run into problems.

Higher civilian casualties than what? WW2? Vietnam? the Norman invasion? Civilians die in large numbers in every war and counting them is at best not an exact science and at worst pure fabrication.

Thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians don't die in pacification efforts.

You can't just blame this all on Bush's enemies and say they wanted the war to fail. I'm no fan of Bush's, but my line throughout this is has been that I think the Iraq War was a terrible idea that will be a disaster for the United States, and I truly hope I'm 100% wrong. I think most people who think like me have the same outlook.
This entire topic was started by a post about how few casualties there have been in Iraq. But when you take civilian casualties into account, even the most conservative estimate give you much higher numbers than the original poster was talking about.

Um, yes sometimes they do:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification

I don't blame it all on Bush's enemies. The administration failed to plan for the worst possible scenario and although hindsight is 20-20 they should have known better.

Well yes once you include civilian casualties the numbers would indeed go up but are they higher, either in actual numbers or percentages, than other wars of similar size?

I don't have the numbers in front of me but my gut tells me no. No other army that i've read about has ever operated under a more restrictive RoE or made more effort to minimize civilian casualties.

Blimey, I hope you don't think that Bush was talking about THAT sort of pacification!

For what it's worth, I don't think Bush was lying on that carrier deck. I think he honestly thought it was all over bar the shouting. My gripe is that he and those around him should have known better (as you said). Hindsight is nice, but it didn't take a genius in 2003 to know that things were going to fall apart in a big way.

As far as casualties, I wasn't comparing it to previous wars. I was comparing it to public perception, specifically the perceptions that the original poster in this topic used.

Our troops have done an incredible job at keeping civilian casualties in their operations to a minimum, but unfortunately they're not the only ones over there. Most of the casualties came from Iraqis fighting Iraqis or foreign Islamists fighting Iraqis.

Agreed.

:up: