‘Turkey has right to cross-border op into northern Iraq’
Turkey Weighs Cross-border Attack on Kurdish Guerrillas
Turkey urges Iraq to delay referendum on oil-rich city of Kirkuk
And even *more * recently, Germany has invaded Poland. Twice.
C’mon now, that isn’t a serious possibility today, not from a Turkey trying to join the EU.
Of course not.
Yes, you do. This forum is called Great Debates, and you don’t get to make unsupported assertions, especially in an OP. “The situation in Iraq is quite crappy” ≠ “we’ve lost”. Or did you want to change the debate and ask war supporters when they will admit that “the situation in Iraq is quite crappy”?
Honestly, this is like asking for a citation that the sky is blue. I could easily pull up a citation for the numbers of deaths and whatnot, but if you believe in your heart that this is “good” or “not bad” there’s nothing I can come up with to disturb your faith.
Which planet did you say you were posting from? I’d love cites for everything in that post. Starting with the Armenian-genocide revisonism, and continuing to how saintlily the Turks have apparently treated the Kurds in your estimation.
Are you kidding me? Do you realize how much money conservatives have made and are making because of the war? All it costs is lives and you get money out the other end, what’s this about losing? Seems like a win-win situation to me.
Poly? Whoooosh?
http://www.alternet.org/story/48437/ heres another take. The Brits are under pressure to leave and appear to bwe doing it. That can only be quitting.
It is the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory.
They’re letting the various Shiite factions in Basra fight it out between themselves now. The central “government” in Greenzonia has no real influence in the matter, apparently.
And Cheney says the coalition’s handover of control of the South to the locals is a sign of success. Jay Leno got a good laugh out of that one. Anything to keep from crying, I suppose.
John Mace, if you’d like to tell us in what ways this situation is not crappy, or in what ways we’re “winning”, please go ahead, by all means. We could all use a reason to hope.
Don’t forget to provide your own definitions, though, not if you wish to make a point that would withstand your own scrutiny. But simply acting the gadfly doesn’t make you Socrates, ya know. And even he got killed for it.
How does the number of deaths = “we’ve lost”? Did we lose WWII because so many people died-- many, many more than have died in Iraq.
I have seriously given little thought to whether we’ve won or lost, so I’d like to see the case made that we have, in fact, “lost”. If it’s so obvious and so easy to see, then it should be easy for you to explain. So far you’ve offered two explanations (that things are crappy and that lots of people have died), neither of which determines whether we’ve won or lost.
As TomnDebb say, whoosh. My point was that we shouldn’t overestimate the reasonableness of the Turks, as they’ve proven themselves capable of genocide not too long ago, historically speaking.
No amount of time will let them do the impossible, and if them holding Iraq together isn’t impossible it’s very close. Assuming they are even trying.
They had all those things; we destroyed them. Religion had nothing to do with it; we did. They didn’t even have the religious fighting before us; Iraq was secular.
We didn’t give them a chance; we destroyed all their chances, and condemned them to misery and death.
No, we didn’t try, but us leaving would still be good for them. Without America making things worse they might have a small chance of making things better for themselves; they sure don’t while they are occupied by America.
If post WWII Europe’s population viewed the United States in a similar way the Iraqi population views the United States (outside the Kurdish areas, anyway), yes, we would have lost the post war.
Correct – to a certain extent. It is a continuum. At some point when such a large portion of the population supports the insurgency either directly or through allowing them to operate freely in their homes and neighborhoods one has to start to wonder.
So I suppose we lost when the first polls showed something like greater than 50% of the population supported the insurgency. I’m not sure when that was exactly; I’m guessing somewhere in early or mid 2004. I know that’s when around 70% of the population wanted the U.S. soldiers to leave and most viewed us as occupiers rather than liberators.
The overwhelming majority of the Iraqi electorate wants the United States out of their country. The fact that we still have over 100,000 troops there and have our enduring bases constructed and ready to, well, endure, put our claims of respecting democracy in a questionable light. Well, there are dozens of other instances of this of course, but it’s just one of the most blatant ones.
I think there could be steps that could be taken to “win” in Iraq but it would require the greatest foreign investment in our nation’s history. I don’t think we’re going to do that though, do you?
Regardless of the above, this thread isn’t about why some people think it’s been a lost cause for the past two or three years. The question is: what are the acceptable criteria with which former war supporters will admit the war is lost, even if these hypothetical benchmarks have yet to happen.
Surely the US won?
Bush got re-elected and the US controls the oil.
What do a few Iraqi deaths matter compared to that? :rolleyes:
Consider me embarrassed. That didn’t sound like you at all; I’m actually glad it was a whoosh.
John Mace, if you use the definitions of the Bush Admin, then yes, we have indeed lost:
1 - No WMD’s.
2 - No democratic, stable, pro-Western government.
3 - Increased, rather than decreased, influence of Iran and Syria in the ME.
4 - Not a stable source of an increasing amount of oil.
By any measure that you could put up, it’s been a failure. By the only measure that should really count, whether US interests in the ME have been served, it’s been a colossal failure. There have been times when I’ve genuinely wondered whether Bush or someone influential in his Admin (other than Chalabi, of course) was an actual Iranian agent, it’s been so bad.
I agree that we are losing the war by all but the most warped standards of losing. However, your OP was not addressed to people who believe the war is lost. You are asking Bush supporters, people who do not necessarily think we lost, when they will admit that we lost.
The question sounds like you are asking “if we have not won already and things stay the same (that is we never win), how long will it take for conservatives to admit we lost?”. So you are not only assuming we haven’t won, but also that we will never win (if we stay the course). It would be OK if you were asking liberals when do they think conservatives will admit defeat, but you are asking an audience that denies the premise of your question.
I think it is reasonable for them to ask you for clarification.
Otherwise this argument sounds like third grade attacks on my sexuality.
3rd grader: When are you going to admit that you are gay?
Me: You would have to prove I am gay first.
3rd grader: That would be like proving the sky is blue.
Me: :rolleyes:
Not exactly. You can witness the internal pain in some Congress critters when you see them speak on our goals – they have to walk the tightrope of backing the war yet admitting, in some small way, that Iraq is a huge clusterfuck. They’ll say something like ‘We’re not losing but we’re not winning, either.’
From this, it would seem reasonable to ask the war supporters what would be the signs we are losing. Even if they don’t think it’s happened yet that’s fine – what has to happen in the future? Besides, one can still support the war and admit we’re losing.
Of course, the other side of the coin is if we’re not losing then why are we still there? Let’s leave.
We fought in Vietnam for 16 years, right? How long did it take then before the majority conceeded that we’d lost? If we do in fact lose it will probably something similar ratio-wise, though I hope to God we’re not there 16 years.