Not what I am saying. My quoted text was a direct response to:
In my opinion people are dead for no good reason.
But since there is civil debate here, would you please define success or winning here for me? The administration loves to say winning is possible but I have yet to hear what the definition of winning means.
We are not fighting the Nazis where killing off the main madman is going to stop the “war”. These cells are recruiting 14 year olds by the handfuls every day. And these people are not the country of Iraq, they can, do and will go where ever it’s advantagous for them to be.
Further, it is ridiculous to think us being there would prevent them from coming here. What do those things have to do with each other? In fact I think us being there makes another 911 more probable.
Ah no… The liberal pessimists were saying that the surge couldn’t possibly work, that the war was already lost, that the surge would inflame the situation and cause the violence to escalate, and that the U.S. might as well pull out immediately because either way there was going to be a civil war and the U.S. should just get out of the way and let it happen.
Barack Obama said the surge would make the situation worse.
Harry Reid said there was no chance the surge could succeed, and that the war was already lost and there was no hope.
MoveOn.org called General Petraeus “General BetrayUs”, because he was quite obviously lying when he said the situation could be salvaged and that he believed the surge was the right strategy.
Those would be the liberal pessimists.
Evil One’s bet was silly. There was no one on the ‘pro surge’ side that thought U.S. forces would be down to 50,000 by now. In fact, the speed at which the situation in Iraq has improved surprised even the ‘pro surge’ optimists, including Petraeus, who is now revising his estimates for how quickly American soldiers can come home.
U.S. soldiers in Iraq are now in less danger by far than the soldiers in Afghanistan. The absolute number of casualties in Afghanistan has been higher for two months in a row, despite there being 1/5 of the soldiers there.
Now is clearly the time to begin talking about troop withdrawals from Iraq and moving more soldiers into Afghanistan.
On the other hand, had the surge not been followed and people like Obama and Harry Reid won the debate, there WOULD be a civil war in Iraq today, and the U.S. probably have had to go right back in, this time fighting in the middle of a full-scale nationwide conflict. At least now we can talk about moving the focus to Afghanistan. It wasn’t possible before.
gee, 'there was no one on the pro surge side who…"?? huh. wonder who the fuck I bet with, then. \
as far as ‘working’ -don’t think you’ll find the thoughts you ascribe to ‘liberals’ coming out of me in that thread. I just did not believe for one second that it was going to be a short term addition of forces, and it wasn’t.
Is the situation better there now then it was pre serge? huh, guess if you toss another several thousand folks in to keep order, there will be more order. but we still have no fucking idea how to get the fuck out of there. that will be the point I will say ‘ok, that worked’.
I meant people a little higher up - pundits, politicians, etc. You can always find someone to take a crazy position on anything.
No one serious said it would be. Petraeus didn’t say it. The plan all along was to get the ‘surge’ soldiers back out in early 2008, and after that to re-evaluate and see what the next step was. Most people on the ‘pro-surge’ side that I’ve read accepted that there would be at least 100,000 soldiers in Iraq at the end of the next president’s administration. Everyone was talking about the surge being needed to stop the downward spiral and to begin the long process of bringing the country back.
That’s not what Barack Obama said. He said that those several thousand folks would simply enrage the Iraqis more and increase the violence. That was a common opinion on this board as well. At best, the Democrat conventional wisdom was that Iraq was already in a civil war, and U.S. troops were just sitting in a meat grinder doing no good and it was time to get them out.
Let’s face it - The Democrats were wrong about the surge, and had they had the power to do so they would have withdrawn instead of building up forces, and caused exactly the civil war they said Iraq was already in. And the U.S. military would have had to go back in to quell the carnage and protect the borders from Iranian and Syrian opportunism. It’d be a disaster over there right now.
If you believe the Iraq was was wrong, that still makes Bush’s mistake much bigger. But once in the war, the Republican side made the right call with the surge, and the Democrats, including Barack Obama, opposed it.