Al-Qaeda In Iraq Welcomes Dem Victory; Can the Dems Prove Them Wrong?
On the audio tape made available on militant Web sites, the al-Qaida in Iraq leader also welcomed the Republican electoral defeat that led to the departure of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. He added that the group’s fighters would not rest until they had blown up the White House.
Can anyone argue that we can negotiate with or run from these people? Will running away from them do anything but give them more recruits and contributions? Will running away bring peace to Iraq? Will it make us safe? Will it make those who hate us, hate less than they hated us in 2001? If you were an Iraqi, wouldn’t you be hedging your bets about now? Not if a bipartisan consensus emerges that we must win this war, no matter how hard it becomes. The tactics can change, but the objective cannot. America cannot let a self-loathing minority take control of one of its great political parties and surrender our security by proxy. [link]
I don’t think the future looks bright, and the problem is deeper than people like Biden and Pelosi gaining key places of power in a dem unified Congress. The society as a whole has probably lost the will to lead or the ability to sustain difficult tasks like this.
We should be looking at Iraq (and much less so Afghanistan) as a mammoth opportunity to set a good stage for the future. Having a viable democracy in that part of the world (that isn’t Israel) would most likely be H-U-G-E for American and world interests.
But, it is a long term committment, and we don’t have the intelligence or stamina for it.
This election defeat for the reps shows their weaknesses or inability to follow through as much as it does the voting masses. They did not rally significant support around the administration and Iraq policy. And generally you would expect them not to – since a common theme with the rep has been getting out of “nation building” — Bush himself said that very early in the Afghanistan preparations, but he quickly reversed himself.
I think the chances we will accomplish anything great with Iraq and/or Afghanistan are less than 10%.
I think the chance we will leave either one or both in a state in which within 20 years we’ll have to go back or deal with them in crisis again is about 30-50%.
And regardless of whether the Islamic fundamentalists really do gain ground or not, I am sure they are going to believe they have been winning for some time now and what we will do will convince them they are still winning. Again, that doesn’t mean they really are winning, but they will see our weakness on full display and believe it means we are losing.
I expect over the next 20 years, we will see a continuation of the fumbling around and opportunities lost that we have seen since the end of the Cold War.
And the fact that our Cold War allies love to dislike us as well will be added to the mix to make sure little is accomplished.
I can sum up what I expect out of the next 20 years with the slogan that Europe will end up labelling this epoch with: “The Withering Hegemon”
While the demos would not let the repubs win the war, when it is their responsibility they will step up, and the repubs will support them. Those jihadis hoping for a respite from the demos will be seriously disappointed, but it will take some time and extra convincing. But that had to happen sometime.
While the demos were in opposition, defeating the evil repubs trumped defeating the jihadis. That will change now, and the repubs will not let defeating the evil demos trump defeating the jihadis.
At least that’s what I tell myself at 3am each morning…
From a PBS interview with Rep. Nancy Pelosi:
MARGARET WARNER: Now, the president said today also he wanted to work in a bipartisan way on Iraq. But then he repeatedly defined the goal as “victory.” And he said at one point, you know, speaking of the troops, “I want them home, too, but I want them home in victory, not leaving behind an Iraq that’s a safe haven for al-Qaida.” And he said repeatedly that victory was leaving an Iraq that was self-sustaining and could defend itself.
Now, can Democrats work with him and embrace that as the goal?
REP. NANCY PELOSI: I mean, the point is, is that our presence in Iraq, as viewed by the Iraqis and by others in the region, as an occupation is not making America safer. We are not even honoring our commitment to our troops who are there, and we are not bringing stability to the region.
So what is being accomplished by our being there? A responsible redeployment outside of Iraq, at the same time disarming the militia, amending the constitution, so that more people feel a part of the new government, and, again, building diplomatic relationships in the area to bring stability and reconstruction to Iraq is really a path we have to go down.
The president — victory is elusive. Victory is subjective. What does he mean by “victory”?
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec06/pelosi_11-08.html
>>>>>>>>>>
Wow!!! … with this statement of Rep. Palosi’s position, what is there NOT to worry about?
Joshua,
I understand that you are fit to be tied now that the foolish peasants have given the Defeato-crats control of Congress. However, your fears over possible changes in Middle-east policy are grounded in the assumption that the abysmal incompetence of the Bush administration in Iraq will somehow be made worse by the Congressional Democrats. What possible evidence do you have to come to such a conclusion? And, how can it get any fucking worse in Iraq?
As for a minority taking control of a great American political party and undermining the nations security, that’s already happened. Only it was the Republican Party that was hijacked and sold a bill of goods by a group of deluded ideologues who led the nation’s military into a quagmire that the grown-ups in the GOP are only now starting to come to grips with. James Baker’s return is good start and Rumsfeld’s ouster is even better (dare we hope for Mr. Cheney to take up full time duck hunting soon?), but it remains to be seen whether this foolish misadventure can be salvaged. (A little focus on hunting down terrorists rather than grand social engineering projects might help restore American credibility.) No matter what happens in the next two years the Iraq occupation and its consequences are on Bush and that crew of American Bolsheviks he rode in with, not Nancy Pelosi.
Political correctness, multiculturalism, and participation in the United Nations will destroy us, regardless of whatever party is in power.
Politics is futile.
It can always get much worse. It could become Cambodia. It could become a haven for terrorists like Afghanistan once was. Yes, there are terrorists there now, but they can’t stop and set up installations to plan large attacks. They can’t hold territory. With time, we could defeat them. Someone must find a coherent way to explain the hard realities to us. We are in this now, like it or not. It’s not Bush’s war, it’s not a Republican war. The Democrats voted for it, too. It’s America’s war.
As for the Dems gaining control, that wouldn’t much bother me if the new representatives are relatively moderate and we reach a new national consensus on our commitment in Iraq. I’m much more worried about the “grown ups” you refer to, who seem to actually believe we can trust in the tender mercies of Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, who are the cause of much of our problems. Incidentally, I have no fucking clue what Bolsheviks you refer to. The old neocon shill works well for a lot of ancient European prejudices, but I really don’t see any grounding in reality for that taxonomy from where I sit.
Now, forgive me for being sharp with you, but it’s not your country that, like it or not, was selected as the prime target of these evil beings. I venture to guess that a good share of Europe would revel in America being attacked again. We don’t share that sentiment. You tell us you want us to withdraw and be chastened, but in fact, you’ll hate us even more when you see what a killing field Iraq becomes afterward. After all, any excuse will do.
Pelosi wants to disarm the militias and simultaneously “redeploy” out? Does she mean to disarm them with gentle persuasion?
Where there’s smoke, there’s crack.
Angus,
Nothin’ like sticking with well-reasoned/supported arguments, hey?
Have you expended your stock of ad-hominems, knee-jerks and non-sequitors … or are you to shower us with yet even more ‘gems’?
I get annoyed talking about Iraq, because it seems to me people talk around it by talking about how they want to percieve it based more on how they want to view American politics and society.
Like with Pelosi — the first part of her statement is implying that the region was stable and that we weren’t already viewed as the enemy enough for constant marches, protests, and thousands of young men marching off to Afghanistan to train in the Jihad against us — all before 9/11.
Then her second part about pulling out and making the Iraqi government stronger as we do so is the typical bullshit that flows out of the mouths of politicians on both sides of the aisle. It is cotton candy for the ear —- and makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever unless she can point me to a plan that has a snowball’s chance in hell of accomplishing these two tracks at the same time — because it seems highly obvious it would take a miracle to both build the Iraqi military up and pull out at the same time. Talk about Vietnam scenerios………or perhaps even South Korea (48) too…..
And Angus is doing the same kind of thing – to me at least.
How can it get worse? Well, at least this is a common argument you hear.
Not only can it get worse, it isn’t even coming close to the worst case scenerios invisioned before the war — all the talk a lot of people were throwing up as objections for going in.
The main fighting was over much sooner than the media led us to believe with many fewer casualties than I had expected.
To date, we haven’t lost 3,000 GIs yet, if I remember correctly from the other days news.
3,000 is a scenerio you can’t imagine being worse?
What about the rampaging civil war with Iraq divided into three waring states? I guess if you want, which it seems most people do, you can call what is going on today exactly the kind of “civil war” many in the media were predicting before the US and others went in —- but I think that is horseshit. We saw greater conflict than this when Hussein was in power. Our planes were circling over head in the no-fly zones often enough when his military was crushing revolts soon after Bush Sr. and his crew decided to stop the war short.
I really wish there was some group in the media that would make people spell out what they expected before the war began and where they though we would be this far into it.
I want to know who thought before the conflict began that by this time in Iraq everything would be hugs and kisses and gum drops falling from the sky.
But the world functions on bullshit……
It is easy to point to each day’s body count and say, “How could it get worse!”
Give me a bleeping break…..
It’s just coffee table politics………..just sitting around the pub bitching about politicians and downing a few beers……..
Too bad collectively it does from time to time add up to something important….
And this time, it will probably end up helping us get out of Iraq before it is able to stand on its own and then it will either fall apart or will revert back to being a destabalizing force in an unstable region —- and leave the possibility open we’ll have to go back in 10 or 20 years from now.
Lastly, Angus,
“A little focus on hunting down terrorists rather than grand social engineering projects might help restore American credibility”
How do you see this happening? Care to give me some ideas on hunting down terrorists? Ideas with some trace of reality to them and how it is going to help out with security? Where are the terrorists you want to hunt down? How would we go about doing it? Whose toes would we step on? What would the reprecussions of that being? What would the net effect be? Is it something we could accomplish?….????
Or were you just throwing out a one liner?
“Incidentally, I have no fucking clue what Bolsheviks you refer to.”
That is part of the game…..and it’s a game………and that is what annoys me……
Iraq is a very complex problem that was never as simple as BushCorp made it out to be. Its great that Saddam was ousted, but its also a huge drain on American resources for us to be there at this point, in my opinion. And huge amounts of that money are being diverted, to God knows what. The troops that we have there are dying and at this point, if it has become a choice of sending in lots more troops without a sea change in the philosophy of management, and lets face it, with BushCorp, that is not going to happen, or cutting our losses and trying to gradulally pull out, the latter is the best choice right now.
Its the same VERY DIFFICULT BUT REAL lesson we learned in Vietnam. That despite our (to us) important and arguably humanitarian goals (and the fact that at the time we thought Vietnam had OIL!) sometimes you have to admit that you are just one country and a country that is having problems economically at that and set priorities. And the people have spoken, (remember them?) and they have said that THEIR priorities are not the priorities of the politicians and the neocons. They want us out of Iraq as soon as possible.. by wide margins..
Anyone who ignores that desire does so at their peril, politically, at this point, I think..
I supported going into Iraq at the beginning, although I knew that the Bush people just wanted to do it for their own reasons and that the reasons they were giving were not priorities to them.. even so U thoght that gettig Saddam out was important.. But now its time to say, hey, the democratic process has spoken, we need to go..
Lets impress the rest of the world with that.. the way we change course peacefully… Its pretty impressive to others.. although they try not to admit it..
1. Yes, war is expensive. We knew that going in. But it’s not accurate to say we’re having economic problems here. We have 4.5% unemployment, very high growth, and a stock market at record highs. When has the economy been better?
2. So you supported going in, but then don’t support it now that you realized that people die in wars. ???
3. Can you answer any of my questions about how just leaving Iraq will affect Iraq, Al Qaeda, and US national security? Have you thought those things through? You can’t responsibly and intelligently advocate a course of action unless you’ve given serious thought to its consequences.
4. The lesson of Vietnam is that you don’t defeat an insurgency without broad popular support. We started off in VN by bombing villages, and with search-and-destroy missions. The civilian goverments were sectarian and constantly overthrowing each other. The elections were neither free nor fair. Later, too late, we started working to build up the SVN government and its allied militias. By 1974, the Viet Cong were defeated almost everwhere except a few areas in Quang Tri, the extreme South near Bac Lieu, and along the Lao/Cambodian/DMZ borderlands. The SVN government controlled 80% of its population and territory. It took a cutoff of US funds for SVN and a full-scale armored invasion from the North to topple the South’s government. So your comparison is inapt.
5. Iraq is not Vietnam. Iraq has a freely elected government. Its enemies are disunited and offer no agenda for a better future. They lack the support of a superpower (they have support of Iran and Syria, two nations we should be blockading now). Most importantly, the United States has learned, clumsily, that it has to work through the Iraqi government. It’s true that the US military cannot pacify Iraq. It’s also true that the Iraqi government can, but only if the United States keeps a large force there for 2 or so years until the Iraqis themselves have deployed a large and capable force to secure their own country. Then and only then, we can begin drawing down our forces and leave only enough infantry / special forces / air cover to ward off the militias, and to launch rapid strike ops against AQ terrorists.
One last point, regarding how we impress the world.
Face the fact: the world hates us. Always has, always will. As long as we’re big, happy, and powerful, Abu Ghraib will always be the new Auschwitz. That’s empirical nonsense, but remember the pyschology we’re up against.
Most of Europe wants to salve its feelings of complicity for the real Auschwitz, and sanctimonious outrage is a balm for that and helps restore some sense of moral equivalence (an unhealthy obsession with “neocons” feeds another ancient apetite, the apetite for scapegoating Jews).
The Middle East simply sees the world in sectarian terms. They like what favors their side and hate whatever disfavors their side. The objective justice of the question couldn’t be less relevant.
For these actors and most of the rest of the world, there are other feelings at work: a myriad of ancient grievances, prejudices, inferiority complexes, persecution complexes, and the “class president” syndrome, which boils down to resentment of our power, happiness, and prosperity.
If you want to make everyone love us, then you have to part with those things. For example, we could go back to 9/11, when we were bleeding, wounded, and unhappy. On the surface, the world acted like it loved us that day. Just one level below “we are all Americans” was an outpouring of schadenfreude. I think Saddam Hussein’s televised “condolences” probably summed it up pretty well. That’s certainly the sense I got in Korea at at the time, and that sense was strongly supported by Guardian pieces the Korea Herald was printing.
The columnists at The Guardian hated us on 9/12, so it’s safe to say they’ll hate us just as much if we run away from Iraq. In fact, when Iraq becomes the new Cambodia, they’ll probably adopt the argument that the U.S. had a responsiblity “fix” Iraq after “breaking” it (though it had been broken for years).
“They want us out of Iraq as soon as possible.. by wide margins..”
Do you have some links to support this? I’m not asking as a smart ass. I don’t have the time these days to watch the news or google around for it, and I would like to know if this is true or not….
Any of the polls, however, will be questionable. It would all depend on the follow up or lead in questions: for example, if in a series of questions you asked which they would prefer – pulling out of Iraq and having it split into 3 basically tribal areas with 2 factions that could very well take their taste of “victory” and join up with Islamic fundamentalism that is dead set on working actively against the US and Israel – the Shiites going the way of Iran and the Bathe party Sunnis with Syria or staying to pay the price of trying to be sucessful in setting up a stable democracy, I doubt we’d see an “overwhelming” majority saying we should leave.
And I’ll state something again that I haven’t heard anybody else say yet:
How high have the costs been in Iraq?
I guess people are too afraid to be labelled a cold hearted bastard for “minimizing” the death of any of these brave soldiers and others who went over to Iraq.
But, I can still remember what a good number of analysts said before the war that the media trumpeted — that the war would be the kind of street-to-street, house-to-house fighting that would neutralize US firepower and technology, because we could not politically afford to carpet bomb the cities to the ground like in WWII.
That the nation would split into three waring provinces and have a 3 way civil war that would lead to the wholesale massacre of Iraqs and the deaths of many GIs.
And so on and so forth….
None of this happened or has happened.
What did people expect? Well, I just said what the said they expected before the war started.
But soon after the main days of battle ended, all of a sudden, the doom’s day predictions disappeared and
doom’s day’s arrival was announced.
It’s bullshit.
It seems clear to me a good number of people, and the media, set the bar for failure very high before the war in an effort to convince people it was going to be a disaster…
…then once the war went ahead anyway, they went out of their way to say we were bogged down and it “wasn’t the situation we war gamed for” — convincing the people around the world the war was going terribly —- only to see that phase of the war suddenly come to an end….
but they didn’t skip a beat —
—- they just shifted to lowering the bar on failure so low, they could say the worst case scenerio has actually happened.
If I think about it long enough, it starts to piss me off.
Iraq did not splinter into three waring sections – so far at least.
The main days of fighting did not result in massive US casualties.
An elected government was put in place.
And to date, less than 3,000 GIs have been killed.
I wonder if our nation (Americans) will ever do anything worthwhile again — at anything.
I guess it is a very good thing our current mentality was not around in 1941 —–
—–because what turned out to be a catastrophic miscalculation by the Japanese —- probably would have worked.
Japan did not want to fight a prolonged war with the US. It took a look at American society’s isolationistic tendancies, as expressed by our demanding to stay out of the war between the European powers, and it decided if it could knock out our Pacific fleet —- the Americans would not have the will to maintain fortitude and endurance that it would take to wait for the fleet to be rebuilt then fight a long war with Japan.
In short, Japan thought if they could strike a hard blow at the United States, Americans would not have the will to fight it out, and we’d sue for peace.
They would probably be correct today.
And maybe this would be instructive for American society to think about right now:
there were some influencial voices in American society in 1944 or 1945 who argued against “unconditional surrender” as the terms to end the war. Some argued we should not force that on Germany and Japan. They were war weary and didn’t see how Germany and japan would function after the war if we removed the leaders and such.
And look what we did after the war – split Germany up into occupied zones and occupied Japan (and South Korea) with the intent of establishing a Western-style democracy (in both). People back then also said this was never going to happen because of the culture and the history of power in Japan (and Korea).
Today, I guess we would have gotten out of Germany, perhaps even left a non-Hitler led Nazi or Nazi-lite government in place and similar in Japan, and not occupied Japan or South Korea.
Because the costs were too high….
but even more importantly — it could be done overnight, and going beyond overnight is just too long.
“but even more importantly — it could be done overnight, and going beyond overnight is just too long.”
That should be “it could not be done overnight”.
The point being that today, if you can’t end a war or something mammoth in an instant – it is all a failure.
I don’t think *anybody* would like to see an immediate withdrawal of US troops. But there clearly is a strong feeling that at this point, we have gotten ourselves into the middle of a pre-existing mess that no amount of US money will cure, and that we need to accept that reality and attempt to transition our involvement there in a way which preserves the maximum number of the positive elements of change that have happened in Iraq since the takeover, and minimizes the effect of the negative.
If that means allowing the three ethnic groups to partition Iraq to end the sectarian violence, and allow three separate nations to be created, even over the objections of Turkey vis-a-vis an official ‘Kurdistan’, perhaps that is what needs to be done.
Okay, I must confess that I don’t know as much about this as I should to be talking about it, but I have heard several times stories to the effect that the borders of the states in the area were arbitrarily drawn a century ago, setting us up for this mess. The story as I have heard it was basically that as the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the area fell under British command, that the British then intentionally drew the borders of the provinces, or whatever they were called, in such a way as to minimize the influences of individual ethnic groups on each of their politics, which is to say that they created artificially and intentionally divided artificial ‘nations’ and to this goal, drew borders dividing each ethnic group’s territory exactly in the worst possible way, with the intent being to divide each groups power up and allow them to exploit the area commercially. (For example, dividing the Shiites between what is now Iran and Iraq, and the Sunnis between “Saudi Arabia” and Iraq – although its also clear that Iraq did have a long tradition, in the ancient (Biblical?) past, of being a nation… and so did Iran.. (i.e Persia)
This was done to control the oil in the area. And much of the Western policies in the area since then have been devoted towards maintaining these borders. That, in hindsight, seems to have been a great idea from the corporate perspective but a terrible idea for human dignity of the people of the area, democracy, and self-rule, which was probably the intention.
Of course, we wouldn’t ever do such a thing now.. NOT..
🙂
Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to pour that HUGE amount of money into a new Manhattan project to develop new non-fossil fuel sources of energy, instead of continuing the US addiction to foreign oil indefinitely, terminally, etc. ? If we did, we could be assured of success within five or ten years, successes that could spawn entire new industries. In other words, real jobs, not paper pushing jobs. The kind of real jobs that are rapidly disappearing in the US. (despite your rosy predictions)
If the alternative to that is continuing on the current course, which apparently seems to depend on our coercively preventing the assertions of some natural rights by these competing national groups, gathering us a huge amount of emnity in the process, we need to consider that cost. What is it really buying US? (as opposed to buying Halliburton and Standard Oil) Their interests are NOT the same interests as the US. Those corporations do not recognize any national boundaries (for example, Halliborton was HAPPY to cooperate in helping Saddam beat the UN sanctions against that country before the US invasion..this is a matter of public record.) The corporation is by necessity (the way we currently structure them) amoral.. They will be the first to admit it )and many CEOS also admit that we need to change that.. They don’t like participating in this amorality.)
I guess that is at the root of what I was getting at. Our current path is unsustainable and amoral on many levels, because its motive is clearly economic and not simply for the bringing of ‘freedom’ to Iraq. (Not to say that they don’t need freedom and especially PEACE, but I don’t feel that we – the US – are capable of doing that right now under this current administration, who are too corrupt and profoundly clueless to even understand why they fail.
And Joshua, I also disagree with your assessment of the US economy right now. Its not booming. Some people may be doing very well, but they skew the statistics for the rest and the majority of people are just getting by or falling back. Healthcare costs and energy costs and now, housing costs are taking so much, way too much. We are teetering on the brink of disaster for many families.
I think the statistic to look at is the soaring number of US uninsured, and the dramatic increases in the rates of housing forclosures and loan defaults..
We have to set about to begin a national dialogue that will bring us all to the table and we need to look at the pros and cons of each approach without all this hysteria and politicizing. As Americans we do have common ground and priorities that include real national security. I think the security we have now is an illusion, because its ignoring the needs of most of us to feed the interests of a few. What we end up with in the end then is a situation not unlike that of North Korea, where an untold amount of energy is poured into the black hold of maintaining fictions that could not possibly be true or work, with tensions right beneath the surface caused by human tragedies unimaginable. That is not what any of us want, but it certainly what our enemies (who certainly do exist) want. The glue that holds this nation together is democracy and a committment at the highest levels to not abandon those at the lowest to the jungle of the raw ‘free’ market. Thats what prevented a near-revolution in the 30s and kept us together through World War II and the booming postwar years as well. The promise of things getting better. The way Martin Luther King put it was that the nation had written the working people of the nation a check, but that the rich and powerful had tried to return that check marked ‘insuffiicent funds’. Thats what they are trying to do again today and its really not that different from Kim Jong Il’s love of caviar and $500 bottles of whiskey while people eat each other out of starvation or Marie Antoinette’s comment about letting the poor people eat cake when they were crying for bread.. It represents a disease that indicates a profound disconnection from reality.
Thats what this last election was about, bringing this nation back to reality. If the Bush team does not see that, they ignore this message at their own peril, people won’t forgive them for it and it will hurt the GOP much more deeply.
I think a lot of you really poison the discussion by trying to represent moderates (or leftists as your would put it but I have never considered myself nor do I think any of the other moderates who post here are in any way leftists in the sense that you would like to paint us, and neither are the people you seek to paint with your labels such as Nancy Pelosi, etc. )
Anyway, I was going to go back and answer some of your numbered questions to me but honestly, I think its pointless before first establishing that this counterproductive and accusatory way of conducting debates benefits nobody and in fact, seems designed to assure that the debate as it were, will never be held. And perhaps that is its goal.
Meanwhile, in the case of places like North Korea, millions of people die and the powerful who might be able to actually influence things IF they could agree on anything, simply play further into Kim Jong Il’s bad movie, and he plays further into ours.. assuring continued obscene expenditures on weaponry and further cuts in spending on the real world reduction of human miseries.
The Devil, if such a person/thing exists, must be smiling..
Chris, If you’re the Chris I think you are, I do think you’re very left of center, and would also admit that I’m right of center. We’ve had respectful disagreements about plenty of things, because I think overall, we come from a common nucleus of presuming that all people are entitled to a rebuttable presumption of liberty and dignity.
I think Iraq is about that. The Iraqis voted. If they vote to kick us out, then I say we leave. But I think the consensus I see emerging — and I include you — is that immediate withdrawal would be a disaster. And that’s what John Murtha openly demands.
Everybody — including me — wants us out of Iraq. It’s just a matter of how soon we can do that without creating another Cambodia. In fact, that may be required under the UN Resolution that ultimately affirmed our presence there.
Hi Josh!
Yes, it is ‘me’..
I do agree with you that immediate withdrawal would be insane.
Are you absolutely sure that is what Murtha is proposing?
I’m skeptical, because Murtha has more sense in him than that, despite the way that they are trying to portray him. He’s probably trying to draw the idiots in Washington out a bit and get them talking,if that is his position. The people in the administration need to be shocked out of their complacency.
Not really knowing as much as I should to be commenting on this, all I can say is that think that we need to hash out and set in place a timetable for withdrawal with milestones and accountability. And yes, I think that the #1 concern should be trying to prevent any further bloodshed in Iraq, both of our people and the Iraqis.
How to do that is anybody’s guess, but the problem with all the parties is that they all seem to be men accustomed to getting their ways. Perhaps we should send the women in to negotiate this..*laugh* seriously.. although it would never happen, unfortunately…
Anyway, the administration needs to realize that they can’t go on like they have been, oblivious to public sentiment. I think what we all would really like to see is a situation where the military wasn’t as overextended as they are now, (which would be a tragedy if something unexpected happened in North Korea, for example, because there would be so much more of a limitation on what we might end up doing.)
And I really do try to see the military’s function to be as much waging peace as waging war, and not simply for propaganda’s sake, either. You have to look at where your long term goal is, and try to get there.. which I think always means trying to have respect for the complexity of situations, and not just reacting..
Right now, in the US, that means that there is a lot of pressure on people of all political backgrounds who are involved in the Iraq planning to change the course. Not to just withdraw, but I think many people are probably saying that to shock the Bush crew into some kind of action to compromise with that. Thats what I think it takes, because by all accounts they are very seriously in denial. The money angle is very important too. The amount of corruption going on is mind boggling and one could make a good argument that that is behind a lot of this shenanigans.. (I have been that cynical myself at times.. however, its unpleasant..) To simply go on the way we have been with no end in sight, is like giving a blank check to the various entities who are using Iraq as an excuse to bleed the Treasury dry.
And most importantly – as an ex-military man I’m sure you understand this, don’t you think that its a profound disservice to the young men and women in the military to do anything other than getting us out as soon as is reasonably possible a priority task, given that many of them are being asked to return to Iraq for tours of duty which they were not expecting when they signed up?
That should be a much larger concern for our leadership than it seems to be.
I’ve said too much about this… But it really makes me wince.. And BTW, I *doubt* if Al Quaeda is in any way rejoicing about a Dem victory, and I think you are doing yourself a disservice to say that.
I would think that if anything, our current administration is playing into their hands by being so heavy handed and out of touch with the realities of the area.
And of course, there is the old Binladen-Bush family friendship..
No, as extremists, I think they would like to see things continuing to be driven to extremes, so no, I don’t think that they welcome the Dem victory at all..