I’m a former Marine, and I have a number of friends either in Iraq now, or have died serving. They died (and serve) to defend this country and help the Iraqi people, no matter what the administration had in mind when they send them there.
Nope, what I said was it doesn’t matter why we went; what matters is that we are there now. You want to spend your time and effort blaming people for sending the troops, I would rather spend mine on helping those troops, and fixing the current issues; so they can come home.
How is it that they are defending your country? What tasks are they doing to this end? Could you point out something that’s been done and say “look, there, that helped defend our country”?
The problem is, if the leadership is to blame, then we have *poor decision makers * in office. Removing those poor decision makers would be helping the troops, and fixing the current issues, as well as (hopefully) making sure that there will be less future problems occurring as a result of their actions.
Good luck with that; as a country we have not been very successful in keeping out of issues that don’t directly involve us.
Sure, but would you agree it was helping? I don’t know. Short of holding back a wave of attackers on the border, I don’t know of a universal acceptible criteria for defending the country. Give me your definition and I shall try to relate an example.
Which is a moot point (if we are talking about Bush), he won re-election; and going to Iraq was not illegal (and thus can not be used to kick him out).
I guess it is a question of priorities, there is nothing that can be done to chage the past, and the actions taken in the past can wait; the ones going on now, can’t (or shouldn’t). I have no issue with letting the ‘who was wrong’ question wait until those things that CAN be fixed are resolved.
And in my humble opinion a very worthy task; I’m just not sure how successful you can be, esp when we can’t (as a nation) agree on what ‘unecessarily’ means.
I do wish you good luck (in all honestly) in the task.
“Ensuring that a future enemy will not present itself, fighting against an already present enemy, protecting the U.S.'s resources and/or people, or improving the opinion of the international community of the U.S. (technically part of the first definition)” would be my rough definitions of “defending”.
Whether or not the U.S. (or coalition) forces are helping Iraqis, which is certainly another debate, I don’t think you could reasonably claim that their presence and actions constitute defending the U.S. - the U.S.'s international situation, if anything, has worsened because of their actions.
Fitting in with the OP - They were sent in because of the threat of the use of WMD’s against the U.S. soon. That’s been proved to be false, and while you could make an argument that the U.S. forces* thought* they were defending America, they pretty certainly aren’t now (though i’m willing to consider any evidence or situations you provide).
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and I have a number of friends either in Iraq now, or have died serving. They died (and serve) to defend this country and help the Iraqi people, no matter what the administration had in mind when they send them there.
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I am a former Airman, 10 years active duty, and I too have friends and family over there. So why don’t you take some of that sanctimony and go find someone else to intimidate and pontificate too.
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Nope, what I said was it doesn’t matter why we went; what matters is that we are there now. You want to spend your time and effort blaming people for sending the troops, I would rather spend mine on helping those troops, and fixing the current issues; so they can come home.
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And I want to make sure that the people who sent them there pay for what they have done. Everyone one of those chickenhawks in the administration who were too scared, or had too many “other priorities” to raise there right hand and serve
should face, every single day, the fact that they have killled close to 2500 young men and women, and have wounded thousands.
So yeah, I want to blame them. I also support the troops, I want to bring them home.
Stupid coding. Stupid operator error.
Going to rearrange your statement for ease of answering (hope you don’t mind)
That was one of the reasons for going to Iraq (there is a bit of a list in the Resolution allowing the use of Armed forces [url=http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021002-2.htm
Amoung others were al Qaida ties, Sadaam’s refusal of weapons inspectors (over time), his breaking of cease fire (as terms of the first Persan Gulf War), and some others.
The current thought is, there are no WMD’s and there was little or no like to al Qaida (Congress’s spelling). It doesn’t invalidate the other reasons (we can argue if they were enough to go to war or not; my arguement is, it doesn’t matter any longer since we are already there).
Be it your belief or not; many who served believe that by fighting insergents there, they are keeping them off American soil (which would fall under your current and/or future enemy critiera). If we are talking about in the begining (when there was no such fight) Sadaam routinely fired at Aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones (imposed as a part of the cease fire for the first war and/or after the chemical attacks on the kurds); making them a current enemy.
Believe it or not, one of the two friends I have lost in Iraq; died while trying to shield a child (bystander) when some resistance started firing at the patrol (this was before the large pockets of resistance was put down). I would have to believe that was an act (albiet it unintentional) of improving the opinion of the international community HIS desire was simply to save a child (which he did).
That again is worthy of debate, we have insurgents to worry about (that is true) but we also have closer and better allies than ever (Pakistan USED to be our one of our defacto enemies).
Well thank you and just for a point of reference (don’t know if you know and made a mistake or simply didn’t know) you do not need a / with the first quote in each nexting arguement
I’m sorry, are you actually upset that I believe that those who have lost their lives were doing so for a noble cause; no matter what the adminstration’s purpose?
I’m sure you will agree with me, that of your desires; helping those who did have the courage to serve is much more important at this point. It is too late to keep the war from occuring; and it even if we locked all of them up right now, it wouldn’t stop what is going on in Iraq.
I agree. The issue of whether or not the U.S. was being defended when the armed forced went in isn’t we’re debating, but whether or not the forces are defending the U.S. now.
Belief isn’t fact.
We’re not talking about in the beginning, but presently.
I mean no offense, and your friend was very heroic in his actions here, but this isn’t a story that’s well known. It hasn’t improved the opinion of the international community. It is an action that helped Iraqis (specifically, the child and his/her family) but not one that defended the U.S.
True, there are stronger links with some nations. I’d argue though that the total negative opinion of the U.S. internationally far outweighs the positives.
Motivation for service is important (just as motivation for going into the war in the first place was also important); and this is one of those ‘belief’s’ that can’t be proven. They are fighting enemies of the US (not sure them being enemies of the US can be debated, as their IED’s are set up to do as much US damage as possible). The belief that they are also keeping them off American soil isn’t what makes them enemies, but it is a motivation.
There is no way for a Service man or woman to know what will/will not be reported; and thus what will ‘improve’ the international opinion polls. That aside, I’m quite sure he didn’t give a rat’s backside as to what people would think of his actions.
I’m not even sure how to measure them against eachother, but there has been both positive and negative international opinion.
Umm thats really true. The US always had a close relationship with Pakistan. Prefering their authoritarian military dictators over India’s left-leaning democracy. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan we funnelled all our aid to the Muhjahadeen through Pakistans intelligence service the ISI (thus ensuring it ended up in the hands of some very unsavory characters, who were close to Bin Laden’s foreign Jihadis, and by no means the most effective anti-soviet fighters). After the soviet withdrawl we stood by while Pakistan helped set-up the Taliban (it was effectively a Pakistani creation).
One of the many reasons Bush’s claims to be supporting democracy are not taken serious by the Muslim public is that even while he makes them he continues to support dictators in places like Pakistan and Uzbekistan.
Then why does it matter? Again, no offense, but defending has to have a basis in reality, and not just opinion. If you believe you’re defending the U.S., certainly that explains why you’d be willing to do something, why you think it’s the right thing to do, etc up to whether or not you think what you’re doing is defending. But if we’re going by this critieria, an insane person who thinks aliens disguised as dogs are planning on taking over the earth, and who then goes about killing all the dogs he finds, is also counted as “defending” the earth. Is he?
If he wasn’t defending the U.S., and he didn’t think he was defending the U.S., then he wasn’t. That said, his actions were heroic because he was defending an Iraqi bystander.
Yes, I’d agree to that. I’m not sure how you’d measure it either - perhaps we could count the number of media sources from other countries who are derogatory to the U.S., or the amount of censure the U.S. has recieved from other nation’s governments, or polls on the people of other countries, etc. There’s a lot of ways of measuring public opinion - and, from what I personally have seen, a larger proportion of non-U.S. peoples do not think highly of their current actions than do.