Why are we still there? Because, to quote Tony Snow, waving the white flag in Iraq is the same as waving the white flag to terrorism. Because, to quote Ken Mehlman, head of the RNC, exposing the hopelessness of the situation displays your “isolationism, defeatism, and a ‘blame America first’ attitude.”
So, you know, we’re going to win in Iraq by sheer force of will. Ignore the past three years – they don’t count.
We’re not building those large bases just so we can leave soon. We will be in Iraq for a long, long time.
Yes, I did. And in a weird sort of way I agree with it.
In a weird sort of way.
In a weird sort of way I agree with it too. I feel a little twinge of guilt for being a citizen of a country that would elect bush twice. I recognize that many many Americans feel exactly the way DT suggests. I just don’t like the fact that he lumps us all in with the bush supporters. This is a diverse country and in this overly militiristic world there is not a lot that dissenters can do to change the course the administration sets. It bothers me that people like DT aim their hatred at people like me who hate the administration and the direction it is taking this country. He is no different than people who hate all muslims for the actions of a few extremists.
If we leave right now, the country will almost certainly descend into bloody civil war. Invading a sovereign nation for no reason is already a huge, horrible mark on our international reputation, but to have nothing to show for it other than tens of thousands of dead civilians and a power vacuum resulting in civil war and perhaps hundreds of thousands more dead is far worse.
Of course, at this point, a civil war may already be inevitable, which would mean at some point we’ll have to admit defeat and pull out. But the fact that it will be the pragmatic thing for us to do won’t soften the fact that it will also be a huge, huge blow to our reputation as a just nation.
It’s arguably already there. If there were presently a viable state to put the “civil” into the war, there would be no controversy about the term. With the forces were able to commit, we’re essentially powerless to regulate anything beyond the Green Zone, and I can see no reason to think matters will improve, whether our troops are there or not. Extrication from a failed state is, I would predict, the inevitable scenerio facing whoever has the ethical fiber and the balls to finally admit it. The major questions are how? When? When we’re gone, what do we do? No one has any answers. So they do nothing except shovel happy horseshit at us. Meanwhile Americans die. Iraqis too, but they will in thousands upon thousands no matter what.
If you’re losing 30,000 civilians a year to intercommunal violence, I don’t see how you can not call it a civil war. The blow to our prestige is a sunk cost. We need to move on. If our three years’ of effort has accomplished nothing but to produce the Iraq of today, I don’t know where we find the hubris to think that that somehow waiting three more years will cause a miracle to appear.
Dude… I was being sarcastic.
We’ll stay the course till the Ice Cream and Stickers are passed out.
You must know some pretty cold hearted and uncaring people then, because no one I know feels that way.
That probably won’t happen until you start acting like Saddam, unfortunately.
I’m not sure that’s true. I keep hearing about how our troops weren’t trained for policing-type duties. I suspect if we got a force in who were trained for this kind of work AND were in sufficient numbers, you could get things back up without being the kind of sweet old guy Saddam was. I don’t think you could do this with the degree of civil liberties we enjoy in the US or western Europe to begin with; there’d have to be curfews and stuff. But I think there’s some kind of middle ground between brutal dictatorship and normal freedom that might be achievable. This would have to stay in place for a while, but it’s conceivable that if an agreement with respect to government could come about, excess security could eventually be relaxed.
Of course, I guess it’s also conceivable that pigs will roost in trees, so again, perhaps I’m being overly optimistic.
But I will add this. I think the day of stand-up battles such as those in WWII are over for the time being. The US military had better start focusing more of its training on policing type duties, and small scale, house-to-house fighting. I’m not saying there’s never any time when it’s appropriate to bring out the big guns, just that to focus solely on battle-winning strategies at the expense of the kind of insurgency/resistance/terrorism thing is probably not a good idea these days.
Once again, let me emphasize that I was vehemently against going into Iraq in the first place, and that I wish with all my heart that a giant squid from outer space had come along and slurped up this entire administration before they could do this to Iraq and to us. Of course, I probably would have thought the giant squid wasn’t a bad idea BEFORE W even mentioned Iraq to the public, so perhaps I’m just a little biased here.
That’s just the thing. I voted the right way (or would that be the left way?) twice, and yet I feel like there was more that I should have done. Even though I did the best that I think I could have done, the blood is on my hands. And yours as well.
Never in my life have I been so ashamed of my country.
I should mention here that I love my brother-in-law to death, but I’m a bit pissed at him. He knew that Bush was wrong, he knew that Bush was evil. But to him, a vote for Kerry was a vote for gays, and that would be a sure-fire ticket to Satanville. So he voted to keep the Man Who Fell Up in office. Shame on him for being a dumbass. And shame on me for keeping family peace above the good of the world.
Same goes for my sister.
It’s funny how nearly every Doper claims this, isn’t it? And yet when the war was gearing up, anti-war sentiment was a clear minority on the boards. Accusations of “you must be a terrorist yourself” were pretty rampant. I wonder what happened to all of those True Patriots.
Seems to me a lot of them, rather than admit they were wrong, have slunk away.
As to how we’re gonna ever end this thing? Find the fat lady and make her sing!
If you’re suggesting that I wasn’t against the war before it went sour, I challenge you to find ANY post in which I supported it or W in any way (or have since, with the possible exception of the whole Dubai World ports business). I’ve been voting since mumbledy-mumble a long time ago. I have voted exactly once for an independent (John Anderson in 1980) and once for a Republican (Millicent Fenwick, former NJ congress-critter). I am not a traditional left-winger in every respect, but my credentials go WAY back, probably farther than you’ve been alive (I worked on my first campaign, Democratic of course in 1968). I lived through the Viet Nam Era, and I have an IQ of 100 or better. You could see this end result in Iraq as a strong likelihood a mile away.
I don’t remember posting against the war then either, but then I wasn’t posting much then. I was very new and very shy about it most of the time (odd, because in real life I don’t have a shy bone in my body!). Hell, in four years I’m not even above 1300 posts yet; it’s not like I post a lot at any time. You people intimidate me! You might ask for cites or other things that require work. Or thought. Or both.
It’s just that I feel very strongly that we as a nation can’t leave Iraq until we make at least some good faith effort to clean up the incredible mess we’ve made. And I really do have a small, but real hope that we can do it. But it then keeps sounding as if I would then think the whole thing was right or worthwhile to begin with, and I want to make it clear that I don’t believe either to be true, and never have.
As for the idea of claiming that my the disagree-er must be anti-American, the idea has made me sick since the first time I ran across it. Boy, if we owe this current administration for anything, that’s one of the things I’d like to tar and feather them for. That approach hadn’t been around at the national level since the Nixon years, and he didn’t use it all that successfully then. The first bumper sticker I put on my bright yellow Scion xB was a quote from Thomas Jefferson: Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
Oh man, I stayed home from work the day after Election Day 2004 and seriously considered whether or not to emigrate to Canada or the UK. I felt SO ashamed, and SO alienated. (Still do, but you get used to it after a while). But my ties here were too binding, my obligations too real, and the fact is, at 48, I was a poor candidate for acceptance anyway. I settled for spending some months avoiding the news altogether; I couldn’t bear to be reminded of current events.
I found that website where US people posted apologies to the rest of the world for re-electing Bush. The posts that brought me to tears were the ones from other countries where the people said in effect that they understood it wasn’t all of us, *comforting * us for what we had done and were going to be doing to them as a nation!
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to feel like I fit in to the US again. Not when over half the voters could vote for W even at that point, when it was pretty clear what that administration had done. I was stunned. I still am. I just don’t understand it. I guess I never will.
I’m not. I wasn’t accusing you in any way.
It’s just that these days we get tons of Dopers saying “I was always against the war”, but three years ago there were tons of hawks on the boards.
I can’t remember who any of them were. I tried doing a search on “Iraq” in the Pit, but the results don’t go bacjk that far.
Hope like hell that you’re wrong, yet look at allegations of torture and wonder how far away the US is.
And I think that the magic phrase is, “. . .in sufficient numbers. . .” because the one constant in Iraqle has been the lack of personnel. And that comes from generals, people who were there as soldiers and pretty much anyone who is or has been willing to look at the facts in an objective fashion. Which no doubt explains why those sufficient numbers haven’t been met.
And I don’t think that anything of the sort will even be attempted until Bush fils and the rest of his happy assholes are out of office, and by then I fear it will be too late. Nifty little pickle we’re in, innit?
May have been a minority, but I was among said minority. And not just here, either. Listened to a lotta blowhards accuse me of being a collusionist, and IRL, just as here, they’ve disappeared since their claims have been proven to be nonsense. Certain amount of Schadenfreude involoved in that, but I still wish like hell that the US had never gotten involved in the first place.