Well then, the set of premises that more closely matches reality should be the one that trumps the other one.
No offense intended, but what in the name of hell are you talking about? I never used the term “insurgent.”
There are many, many other terrorist organizations operating within Iraq with financial and logistical ties to al-Qaeda. Tawhad. Khalid bin Al Walid Brigade. Ansar al-Islam. Al Qaeda itself (has claimed responsibility for several bombings in Iraq). Again, our fault. Doesn’t matter. We created the situation in which 100,000 are dead. It’s our responsibility to make it better.
Question: are you stupid, or do you just act that way in public? I’m slapping the label “terrorist” on those groups, and only those groups, who have confirmed ties with al-Qaeda. And yes, receiving support from al-Qaeda = terrorist.
That’s just inhuman. You should be ashamed of yourself.
Many of us are already ashamed of ourselves for being citizens of a nation with an administration such as this one.
It can be argued that the only way in which the U.S. can possibly be involved in “making it better” is to open the checkbook, and stand aside while someone without so much blood on his hands does it.
I am on board with the “you break it you bought it” idea but I also thought that there were some limits.
As far as I can tell, most of the armed insurgents in Iraq these days are NOT al Queda. The country is mostly Shia so you have to wonder how al Queda would get overrun by al Queda a Sunni group. Heck even most of the Sunni’s are either nationalists (trying to get the foreign occupiers out of Iraq) or anti-Shia (trying to regain the power they had under Saddam Hussein).
Do we have an obligation to support the current democratically elected government in the face of civil war? Because then I don’t see ANY path to getting our troops out of there, these guys are not going to just agree to disagree and move on with life. I don’t think the majority will ever give the minority as much as they want and the minority is never going to roll over and just take what the majority gives them… not without enough bloodshed that everyone gets sick and wants a solution even though they don’t get everything they want.
Heaven forbid I sound defeatist but can someone show me how our presence in Iraq will help create a self sustaining stable government? Right now it seems like we are just holding on and hoping for a miracle. Do we even know what sort of miracle we are hoping for?
This may very well be true, but I can’t realistically see it happening…at least not until looooooong after this administration is gone.
For those who just couldn’t understand why the Democrats couldn’t get behind Holy Joe, this is why. It isn’t that he supports the war; it’s that he uses the Bush administration’s rhetoric. War is no time to criticize the President. Agree with us or you’re emboldening* the terrorists.
If Lieberman had any honor at all, he would stand up and loudly denounce those who in any way attempt to equate his opponent with terrorist groups. Instead, he’s right there with them.
It’s no wonder President Bush is not planning to support the GOP candidate in the race, getting behind Joe’s Bullshit Moose Party ticket instead.
- It’s a perfectly cromulent word.
Actually, pretty fucking accurate; I was vehemently anti-invasion, just as I was vehemently anti-Bush and all of his minions since before the 2000 election. I can’t prove the former (I was pretty new here and quite shy about posting - still am quite a bit of the time), but if you do any kind of search on me, you’ll find that I have been close to Reeder rabid about Bush at times (and consistently anti-Bush at all times), and it’s certainly not a recent development.
I am not a reformed sinner. I have either been a saint all along or a sinner all along. But my feeling from before the day we set foot in Iraq was that once we went in, we had a responsibility to do everything in our power to fix the mess we made (which was pretty obviously what was going to happen to anyone who was paying attention, although the degree to which it was fucked up still manages to astound me). The fact that it’s now costing American lives and American money is not reason enough to me to turn our backs on what we’ve done and just go home as if everything were okay. The one thing we can do to make this worse is to just walk away, maybe tossing out a mumbled semi-apology over our shoulders as we go.
I understand the desire to make Shrub fix what he broke. But it’s not going to happen, and what we Dems had better figure out pretty damned quick is how to keep the Republicans from blaming this crap on us. Because they’re damned good at doing that, in case you hadn’t noticed, and while Bush is a lame duck, Rove isn’t. He’s still alive and well, and just as well positioned as ever to weave his ugly webs.
I said what kind of miracle I was hoping for in your other thread, col, but as I’m always happy to talk too much, I’ll repeat the jist here:
I’m hoping that we can elect a government that the nations of the world can consider credible. If we can do that, we may be able to put together a coalition of nations, most visibly from the Middle East itself, who would be willing to replace the US military presence in Iraq. Unfortunately we can’t do this with our soldiers; they have pretty much lost all credibility with the Iraqi citizens, predominantly because of our government’s policies, and secondarily because of the inevitable bad actions of a few young men in a situation where violence is often the appropriate first reaction. But we will have to pay for a lot, if not most of this effort, and even then, we’ll go for a long time with the moral superiority/IOU edge held by the nations that are able to get this done when we haven’t been able to.
Will this work? I certainly can’t guarantee it. I can’t even give it better than, say, 25% chance. But I think it’s our moral obligation to try. Because we broke it. We broke it bad.
Oy! I meant the word “terrorist.” And you’re right, there are real live terrorists in Iraq right now (and we put 'em there). But I think there are more real insurgents than terrorists, and I think there are probably even more real thugs and criminals than insurgents. The choice of the word terrorist just sounded to me like Bush-speak - a way of labelling the people who were fighting against us in Iraq as all being enemies in The War Against Terror[sup]TM[/sup]. They’re not.
I am ashamed only of those who would prolong the bloodshed in a delusion that any other outcome is possible.
But it doesn’t work like that, because both sides work from the same set of facts…they just choose to use different indicators.
Where’s the brain bleach?
About as likely as that McCain/Giuliani ticket that someone was pining for in another thread. As much as Bush fils finds Lieberman convenient in ducking charges of partisanship, the man is still pretty fondly viewed by NARAL and a host of other organizations that the RR find anathema. If he doesn’t run as an Independent, then he might have to roll over and accept that the voters of CT don’t want him to stand as their senator. And he would sooner take back his bullshit pronouncements about those who disagree providing aid and succor to the enemy.
Who wants to start a pool inre him pissing and moaning about voting irregularities if he gets his ass handed to him in November?
Shit, you think that simple buckshot could slow down Barbara Bush? That woman eats napalm and craps enriched uranium. Buckshot wouldn’t even rise to the level of minor annoyance. Give Cheney a bazooka and I’ll still put a C note on Babs.
Here’s a “… prediction from former New Republic magazine editor Andrew Sullivan …” from 12/2005:
Sen Lieberman’s trouncing by Lamont appears to dovetail nicely with this little nugget. Divide and conquer, I always say. This rag also wrote about it.
OP: SECDEF sounds like a pretty plum “task,” if you ask me. 
BRILLANT!
We can’t decide what kind of Iraq there will be. My Og, haven’t we done enough yet to these people?
What we can do, and what hopefully other forces can do effectively is to hold the lid on long enough that an administration that can manage minor things like basic police services can be established. I hate and despise the current administration with the heat of 1000 suns, but there is a point I can’t deny: there are undoubtedly people in Iraq whose agenda it is to heat things up enough that we will pull out and leave, and they can step in and pick up the pieces, and these are not nice people. They know the American people pretty well and they recognize that we aren’t very good with the “long haul” stuff. We want to plunk down our money and get our pretty stuff and go home. We’re all tough and beating our chests after 9/11, but as soon as it starts costing money and lives, we start getting upset. This isn’t flowers and trumpets, like apparently we thought. This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen, where America swoops in and beats the crap out of The Bad Guy[sup]TM[/sup], the locals throw flowers and a tickertape parade, and all the heros come marching home, hurrah, hurrah. This is costing real lives! And real money! Hey, wait a minute here!
This is how people have managed to get their citizens to support war for endless centuries, as long as the citizens have had any say. But the big difference is that Americans are spoiled in a way that probably no people on earth have ever been spoiled. Politically speaking, we have an attention span of roughly 30 seconds, and we will elect anyone who promises a minute reduction in taxes. We’re only marginally aware of the existence of the rest of the world, and we have stunningly little interest in it or knowledge about it, except when it directly affects us.
So if I were a Sunni in Iraq, or a radical Shiite or someone else who’d really like to seize power in a serious way, but can’t because of the US military presence, I’d try my best to make it as painful and expensive as possible for the US to stay. Hell, it worked for the US - do you really think we beat England in the American Revolution? They were arguably the strongest military power in the world, and we were a tiny colony. We made it expensive and painful to keep up the struggle, and they decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
Well, I’d really rather not leave Iraq and find it a year from now with a dictator of some kind no better (and entirely likely quite a bit worse) than Hussein, and a quarter of the infra-structure that was there in early 2003, and a million people more dead. But America doesn’t have the credibility for the long haul effort that will convince the wanna-be power seizers that they’re not gonna get their big break soon, and maybe it makes more sense to actually try to change things within the structure of the government. So they’re not going to stop for quite a while, and yes, at this point it’s probably a matter of a waiting game. Gradually, the real government can establish little things like a real police force and a real military, but that will probably take decades because we fucked it up so badly and because they’re trying to replace a dictatorship with a democracy and the structures are of necessity different. So yeah, it’s gonna take time, and we’re almost certainly not the country that will be able to see Iraq through to the end on this. But if we leave now, we practically guarantee that the outcome is bad, really really bad. If we stay, there’s a chance that a real government can eventually mature to the point where it can handle its own criminals and insurgents. See, the insurgents and terrorists don’t like waiting any better than we do, but they think they’re better at it, that they can hold out longer. And maybe they can. But I hope not.
I read this as Oy! meaning insurgent as a better word than terrorist for most of the fighters.
I suspect that once we’re gone, the home-grown insurgents will turn on the foreigners, and either expel them or kill them. And they’ll probably do a better job of it than we could. Remember, while Saddam killed innocent people, he also killed some of the same people we’re killing today.
That wasn’t clear. The receiving support = terrorist piece is a bit problematical, and reminds me of those who said Saddam supported terrorism because he sent money to the widows of suicide bombers.
Bull. People killed by insurgents are just as dead as those killed by terrorists.
So, how is it going to happen even then? Which country is stupid enough to want to get in the middle of the mess we created. (Besides Iran, that is.) An Arab or Islamic force would be seen as supporting either the Sunni or Shia side.
Do you think a Democratic administration is going to triple the size of the occupying force, which will bring higher casualties and might not even work? They’d more likely withdraw on a timetable, which would have the neocons jumping up and down about giving it more time. (Vietnam showed us that hope springs eternal in the hawk’s breast.)
Hell, throw them some money. There will be graft, sure, but at least the stolen money will stay in Iraq and not go to Halliburton. But I repeat my suggestion - let the Iraqis decide. And try to get the schools and hospitals finished before we leave.
But Cheney and Lieberman and the rest of the pro-war dim-bulbs have already demonstrated that they’re starry-eyed fools. Why should we trust their judgement on anything?
Here are the conditions under which I think it would be morally acceptable to leave Iraq:
a) As Voyager suggested, a true election not controlled by various insurgents or terrorists preventing people from voting as they truly believed, expressed their preference for the US to leave.
or
b) The Iraqi government, again, clearly not controlled by insurgents or, for example, radical Shiites promoting an Iranian agenda (which I do not believe is what the Iraqi people voted for), requested the US government to remove its troops
or
c) It became clear that the current “legitimate” Iraqi government was making no progress in creating government structures such as police or military that could eventually handle their problems internally. This is a hard one to call, because particularly at first, this progress is going be very slow. It’s not easy creating a new nation, especially not when you’re dealing with three groups who dislike and distrust one another, but all of whom must cooperate to some extent.
or
d) It became clear that the “legitimate” government of Iraq was not actually representing the people, and there was no way to get one in place that would. For example, if it became clear that the government was either completely corrupt, or simply a puppet of Iran, and there was no way to re-boot and get a truly legitimate government in place.
In the latter two cases, I would have to agree that, hard as it is to accept, the situation was not one that we could fix; it had been broken beyond repair. In the first two, presumably the Iraqi government would have reached the point where it felt it could control things adequately without us. In those cases, we could be called back if necessary.
Much as it galls me to agree in any way with the current administration or Joe Lieberman in any way, I have to agree that the worst thing we could do would be to set up a timetable for withdrawl unless it also entailed a realistic assessment that our place could truly be filled by the legitimate Iraqi government or other forces with whom Iraq and we had negotiated to take our places. It would simply be providing the would-be power-seizers with a schedule of when they could get things done. This is not the same as saying that expressing doubts as to the legitmacy of our presence in Iraq is tantamount to support for terrorists. It is recognizing that there are people out there who are waiting for the US to withdraw to use that opportunity to seize power, and who are doing everything in their power to make that time come as quickly as possible.