I dont know all the details of the factions in Iraq. I understand that there are insurgents [the resistance] and A Q [the terrorists]. Maybe your assertion is right, that the terrorists will be annihilated. But they will still point to an American withdrawal as victory. I do not share your optimism that there are gains to be had in leaving Iraq. I expect things to get worse and settle into a power struggle between various factions.
In Afghanistan after the Russians left, there was a period of all round fighting after which the Taliban [aided with American money and Pakistani politics] came in to power. The main economy today in Afghanistan is drugs and the export of terror. Young men dont have other skills and entire generations dont know what it is to be a peaceful nation.
Afghanistan is an extreme case, but what are the odds that Iraq wont go that route ?? What is the advantage in American military leaving?? Again , i re-iterate that i do not speak of loss of lives - civilian and military. I mean gain in political terms.
Bush and his enablers made sure that America assumed a direct connection between Iraq and Al Quaeda/911, even when they knew it was a lie. Continuing to support him while knowing this to be true is … difficult to understand.
No argument there. I expect things to get much worse when we leave also. But, I also believe things are going to get much worse if we stay. This vain belief that if hold our mouth just right, we can avert a bloodbath in Iraq is just wishful thinking.
I am sure it will; but the burden is on you to show why escalation will not result in the same outcome. I believe it makes no difference, withdraw now, or withdraw later, Iraq will be a failed state. All the Kings horses, and all that…
There is at least as much chance of Iraqis taking responsibility for their own future without Americans standing between them as there is with us there. That is to say, very little. Sometimes when life gives you lemons, you have to just shut up and eat your goddamn lemons. Wishing they were gumdrops doesn’t make it so. So, IMO, it really does boil down to blood and treasure. 100 American lives and $8 billion a month are very compelling reasons to leave when the political outcome is the same no matter what you do.
Nothing can avert a bloodbath in Iraq. If someone wanted to do that, the time was before, not now.
American troop presence in Iraq will also result in more violence … not less. It might get really dirty BUT there is a chance that the military will come out on top. Even if by a slender margin. Take the troops out today and you save a few American lives which will be forfeited at a later point anyhow.
A terrorist would see it like this – first the americans invade an already weakened country, then they make a real mess of it. When push comes to shove, they leave. Thats what they did everywhere. If i keep up my policy of bleeding America wherever i can, at some point they will cave. History shows it as thus. He is likely to be encouraged.
And should the American military always use such a ham fisted approach at all times?? Is there nothing known as strategy? Why cant the troops in Iraq be on a holding pattern with low intensity engagements and use the time to capture and kill OBL and break the AQ power structure? Having done this , stipulate a 6 month withdrawal period from Iraq and give a blank checque to the Iraqi Govt. Organise a high level delegation of muslim Senators to go on a Hajj and make noises about how Israel should accept the idea of a Palestine state and make concrete efforts to talk to them. Obiliterate all terrorist feeder camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan and cover up all war crimes in Iraq. Why wont this work??
Leaving is the easiest option – but it wont solve your problem.
I don’t believe that staying the course has any more chance of success than withdrawing. If we withdraw, there is an equally slender chance that the Iraqis with take responsibility for their own future.
It is not the loss of troops that I object to. It is the loss of troops without making any progress that prompts my call for withdrawal.
Because we cannot enter Pakistan. If we do, the Musharraf government will fall, and a Muslim extremist government will take power, one more sympathetic to Al Qaeda. Then we would have to open yet another front on the war on terror. We don’t have the military resources to expand the war into Pakistan.
Staying is the hardest option, and it won’t solve our problem either. There is no military solution to the war in Iraq. We must engage all the countries in the region, including Iran and Syria, to reach a political solution.
A good point and thats the ideal case [used without sarcasm]. But i fear thats not going to happen. There are vested interests which wouldnt allow that. In any case the idea that Iraqis should take responsibility for their own future should have been thought about before the invasion.
The US is already present in most frontier areas of Pakistan. And defenitely in most arms of the govt. there. Launching covert strikes in Pakistan on terrorist camps which are “not there” should be no problem. Even India could do that if it had to.
Musharraf IS the Taliban. He is being grandstanded by other fundamentalist “politicians” which makes him queasy. Apart from that he IS the guy who uses terror as an instrument of state policy [like other ppl before him]. His country runs on US aid and good will. The minute US pulls the plug he is gone.
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Iraq was not about the war on terror was it? I have serious doubts on whether Bush wants to even capture OBL. If he really wanted to, US ought to have got OBL by now.
There is no “solution” to this problem any more. Your country has hurt people in ways they will find difficult to forget, leave alone forgive. Between those guys and you, i picked you to support. Not because it is right, but because it is neccesary. You created the mess, now stay and clean it up – even if its only as well as you can. Even that effort will count.
You almost had me, but then you said this. You are, as you have been told, begging the question. Why were they both parts of the war on terror? Just saying “Iraq is part of the war on terror so it’s linked to 9/11 because that was terror” is BS unless you can actually make out a case that Iraq is part of a war on terror. You are yet to do that.
So, just to make this clear - you are saying that a politician who claims that Saddam gave aid to al-Queda is a liar, and deserves to be impeached and removed from office. Right?
No, he is saying that a politician who deliberately skewed the information so that a false belief in a connection that did not exist should be impeached and driven from office. A politician who, in good faith, not realizing the the president of the U.S. would deliberately distort information and who publicly based her support on the false information provided by the president should not bear the blame for anything more than believing a dishonest president.
From the link:
However, the emphasis added was placed in the wrong position. The emphasized statement should have been “**intelligence reports show **”. Since the intelligence reports had been manipulated to present lies, making a claim that Senator Clinton should be held as culpable as the people who created the lies is, itsself, dishonest in the extreme.
I honestly don’t understand what you are looking for here. Do you need a cite that there are currently about 130,000 US troops in Iraq? What would “make the case” to you that Iraq is part of the war on terror?
Are you one of those who disagrees that there even is a “war on terror”? If so, nothing I post will convince you that Iraq is part of something you don’t admit even exists. If not then, well, what is part of it if Iraq doesn’t count?
Misparaphrased? I was intentionally mocking him using sarcasm, as he had just done to me.
Here’s the whole exchange…
I was just responding to him in kind. On the next page, he again put words in my mouth but seemed less sarcastic about it and actually came across like he thought that’s what I meant. Since I never said anything like that I corrected him (with a pinch or two of snarkiness I admit).
What a typical exchange. Poster A gets into the mud. Poster B (a conservative poster) foolishly gets into the mud with him. Predictably, Poster B gets called out for mud slinging when Poster A walks away smelling like roses.
I’m not done reading your cites yet, and I need to be afk for a while, but don’t mention Al Queda and 9/11 together like that. We’re taking about a link between 9/11 and Iraq. Not a link between Al Queda and Iraq. That’s a different animal.
I’m betting that you’re cites never show that Bush said Iraq was responsible for 9/11. As I said, he mentioned them together a a lot. That doesn’t mean he’s being dishonest.
No. That is not “the whole exchange.” David was in an exchange with other posters when you snipped a phrase of his and changed his language:
So you changed his “hard to be more serious than” to " impossible that anything of equal importance". So, rather than a claim that poor righty Poster B was dragged into the mud by nasty lefty Poster A, we have Poster B modifying A’s words just enough to establish a dishonest exchange, then later going back to claim the exchange started after the point where it began.
Pretty much a classic case of the four year old defense “He hit me back first!”
As for being called out for mud slinging, all I did was point out that his responses were on a par with yours.
You are free to make snide remarks; others are free to point out where they are more snide than accurate. What’s the problem?
So Cheney, who has repeated claims of an Iraq/9-11 connection even after Bush has reluctantly confessed that there was no evidence of such a connection is a rogue who cannot be controlled by his boss? Bush is incapable of ordering his VP to stop including false claims in public declarations?
It would seem far more plausible that Bush’s quiet demurring was intended to simply provide “plausible deniability” while the water carrier, Cheney, pushed the administration’s propaganda campaign as hard as possible.
Iraq is part of the War on Terror in the same way that the Soviet invasion of Finland was part of the War on Fascism. It was a sideshow that had nothing to do with a legitimate effort to stop terrorism throughout the world. Unfortunately, the Iraq war has now become the centerpiece on the War on Terror becuase the adminstration stupidly invited the terrorists to come play in Iraq and demolished the internal Iraqi forces that could have prevented that. And even if the outsiude agitators had been held at bay, the internal civil strife that is chewing up both the Iraqi people and the U.S. military is not related to any War on Terror, but is simply an independent action that we unleashed on that country by making no provisions to keep the country secure once we destroyed their government.
Oh, give me a break. I challenged something another poster said. That’s it. I didn’t unfairly attribute an argument to him. I simply challenged what he was saying. That happens all the time. This is a completely different thing than what occured later with both of us deliberately being hyperbolic about eachothers responses. (Well, mine was deliberate, maybe his wasn’t.)
Sure. No problem. Just like I’m free to point out that conservatives get called out for doing things that other posters get a pass for.
Sort of how Bush has failed to act on taxes that affect middle-class famililes, yet middle class families love him. Sort of how he is a silver-spoon Yale-educated elite, yet the rural folks think he’s folksy becuase he spends time on a “ranch”. Sort of how he’s a draft-dodging baby boomer who craps on veteran benefits, yet he’s loved by active and former military of all ages.
So, why support Bush? I guess it comes down to:
1: People who hate “liberals” so much that they’ll vote for anybody
2: People who are too stupid to see through the Bush PR machine
3: People who are aligned with Bush on a small set of issues that they consider of paramount importance, i.e. eroding access to abortion, defeating the terrorists, ensuring that no A-bombs are dropped on 1223 Mockingbird Lane, Kenosha, WI
I don’t see anything in Contrapuntal cites where Cheney claims an Iraq/9-11 connection. What exactly are you talking about here?
The cites linked above simply show what I already posted: Bush mentions Iraq and 9/11 together often. This makes sense. They are both part of the war on terror. For some reason, anti-Bush people including the press insist on seeing this as a campaign of dishonestly designed to decieve the American people. I just have never seen it that way. Every time Bush does a prime time speech or a state of the union address I’ve been watching. I’ve never gotten the impression that he was claiming Saddam was responsible for 9/11.
Whatr silliness. Where were you “called out” for something that anyone else “was given a pass”?
If you are pretending that my observation was “calling you out,” then you are simply playing the martyr schtick. You and David had an exchange and when you began to whine about misattribution I noted that the two of you were doing the same thing.
If that is “calling you out,” then you need to stick to MPSIMS.
They are only “both” part of the War on Terror because Bush abandoned the real War on Terror to go haring off on some irrelevant expedition that had nothing to do with fighting terror. Iraq was not a serious supporter of terror and did not export any terror (except in trading sabotage with Iran). Now that he screwed up and put thousands of U.S. troops into Iraq, he created a situation to promote terror. It is a pretty stupid claim to invade a country under false pretenses and then claim that it is “part” of what we are fighting when we are the ones who introduced the problem to that country.