By DOUGLAS REILLYLos Alamos
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi visited Mosul Sunday “to announce its liberation and congratulate the armed forces and Iraqi people on this victory.”
(New York Times, Sunday July 9, 2017 from al-Abadi’s official Twitter account). From the same NYT article, “The victory marked the formal end of a bloody campaign that lasted nearly nine months, left much of Iraq’s second- largest city in ruins, killed thousands of people, and displaced nearly a million more.”
The pictures we’ve seen in news media remind me of Dresden after the allied fire-bombing in WWII. The survivors have little to return to, and the Islamic State (IS or Daesh) has not been defeated, in spite of what we hear.
The term Pyrrhic Victory is named after king Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose army defeated the Romans in battles during 280-279 BC, but suffered irreplaceable loses. The king is quoted as saying “one other such victory would utterly undo him.”
The USA trains and supports Iraq’s armed forces, and the Iraq War* begun in 2003 by the USA and its Coalition bears a large part of the responsibility for the rise of the IS and its brutal actions.
*This war resulted in over 6,000 allied deaths and almost one million Iraqi deaths.
