http://lobelog.com/mosul-and-americas-quixotic-search-for-the-decisive-battle/#more-36338

Mosul and America’s Quixotic Search for the “Decisive” Battle

by James A. Russell and Donald Abenheim
The Super Bowl-like reporting about the assault on Mosul is regrettably but perhaps inevitably cloaked in America’s desperate search for a clear-cut, decisive battle that will allow the country to bask in the glow of the long-sought and long-denied victory in Iraq.
Chattering heads in think tanks have repeatedly claimed that war has inalterably changed. Yet Americans long for a single climactic battle, made all the more dramatic with citations of George Patton or Douglas MacArthur, our war heroes of yesteryear.
It is a quixotic and fruitless quest—as demonstrated by America’s quarter-century of bloody and expensive wars in and around Iraq, to say nothing of Afghanistan. America’s leaders have promised decisive battlefield victory in the Middle East and Iraq on countless occasions—only to see the supposed victory recede over the horizon just out of reach. From the moment of Colin Powell’s all-star briefing in 1991 of a cauldron battle to annihilate the Iraqi Army in Kuwait, America’s so-called decisive battles in Iraq have never proved decisive. The only result is that the war grinds on, chewing up families and money. http://lobelog.com/mosul-and-americas-quixotic-search-for-the-decisive-battle/#more-36338