America floated to the top; we are the world power. You can take the infrastructure at the time of ancient Rome and overlay who we are and what we are doing with what the holy roman empire did in its heyday. All others will be Romans. one way or another. We will police war capabilities and world trade of all nation states and decide if they need toppling. Military might is our hammer and our problems are all nails.
Maintenance of the post-WWII, war-ready status has compromised our democracy. We are ruled by companies that make widgets for war; they pay lobbyists and they employ Me, You and John and Suzy down the at the end of our street. Barack nor Hillary can fix this. McCain will not even pretend to fix this.
Vote for Nader.
or vote for the Band Aid: anything that will get us out of Iraq as soon as possible. I feel for the Iraqi people, but I feel for us domestically more.
Let's assume for a moment that the Iraq war was completely wrong headed, a terrible mistake. Something that most people take for granted.
Currently we find ourselves in a position where violence is down dramatically, political reconciliation is happening, and Iraq's military is handling more and more of the fight against the AQ lead insurgency. Indeed AQ in Iraq is all but defeated. Most of the heavy lifting is done. Most of the cost of our involvement in terms of blood and treasure has already been paid. We're actually at the point where a reasonable person could imagine Iraq standing on it's own as a stable country sometime in the not too distant future.
The argument that any cost payed, from here forward, in order to secure Iraq, is too high, is simply not credible. To argue that we would be better off as a nation to pull out now, to let Iraq collapse, to let the country devolve into all-out civil war, to let perhaps hundreds of thousands to die, to let AQ or Iran to take over in order to establish the entire nation as a base for terror, would be preferrable to continued U.S. involvement reflects non-serious thinking at best, and a desire to see the U.S. humiliated or destroyed at worst.
Iraq won't collapse if we pull out. The same idiots making this argument made the argument that there were WMDs. I never bought that argument for a minute either. Bush is faulted for not having an exit strategy when he went in. However, you only need an exit strategy if you plan on exiting. The American oligarchy never did plan on exiting.
WMDs so go in.
Swift war, will be heralded as liberators.
Defeat Al Qaeda where they are.
Make them pay for 911 in Iraq.
The country will collapse if we leave.
All of these are pure bull shit. Even the concept of Al Qaeda as an entity to be fought with conventional arms is a myth. Al Qaeda is an ideology that can spring up anywhere. It is an ideology that our continued occupation of Iraq is feeding.
While Al Qaeda is not an ideology that can spring up "anywhere". It is an ideology that must be fought on many fronts, politically, philosophically, and yes with conventional arms. To believe we automatically lose in the struggle against Al Qaeda just because we've taken up arms is, in itself, pure bull shit.
We went into Iraq to deal with the threat of Saddam's WMDs, weapons that turned out not to be there. Amazingly, what we found instead was Al Qaeda, willing to make a last stand against the Great Satan. Bush just got lucky I guess.
ha ha. Al Qaeda was there--not. We have been fighting Saddam's right wing Muslim enemies, and the Bath party; we just called them Al Qaeda. At least you admit there were no weapons. Do you like being lied to?
He had the weapons, then the weapons were gone. Saddam was very proud of his chemical weapons capabilities. I think we even provided some WMDs when Iraq was fighting Iran.
Where did they go? I hope we don't find them the hard way, the way the kurds did.
yeah, caribe, I don't think it is any secret that Saddam had WMDs at one point. but his blathering at the time of our invasion was just that....blathering.
this whole "you were lied to" line is a bit dramatic for my taste, and serves no useful purpose that I can see. It is convenient for the libs to throw it out, but doesn't really paint the proper picture. Our intelligence agencies failed miserably, and these are the same data gathering agencies that were in place under Clinton. It could be argued that Clinton's funding cuts of Intel agencies caused the breakdown....but I refuse to play that silly game. Only a completely blind partisan fool believes that 9-11 was a conspiracy, that we went into Iraq strictly for oil, that we have intentionally let bin laden roam free, that 5,000 plus american lives and tens of thousands of innocent iraqis have been killed so W can "pay back" his rich oil friends, etc, etc.
monday morning QB'ing has made Obama look like a genius, and left hillary back peddling. big freakin deal. they both made the call at the time they thought was in our best interests. I chose to give W the benefit of the doubt, instead of turning ove every little rock for a "gotcha" moment. reminds me of the silly little witch hunts the neo cons were on for Bill.
two years ago the libs were given power, and neo cons kicked out on their asses in congress and the senate. the rally cry..."we'll get you out of Iraq"...is anyone crying foul or conspiracy at the dems? if I was as paranoid as y'all, I 'd say they have intentionally abandoned our troops and left them over there to win the white house.
if any of you punters could take a step back and get out of your tunnel vision for a moment......
Last edited by pigsteak on Sun Mar 02, 2008 11:03 pm, edited 2 times in total.
caribe - So you missed the remedial education class that McCain conducted for Obama, didn't you. It's a short course, I'll repeat it for you. "Al Qaeda is in Iraq. They call themselves Al Qaeda in Iraq".
