Leave the Course!Follow

He never had a problem with sounding retarded before. Wonder what's changed.

I could openly question whether or not the sudden shift from "stay the course!" to "Umm... we think we'll be out of there in a year... Yeah, that sounds about right" had anything to do with mid-term elections and flagging support for Republicans on account of the war but...

...oh hell. We already established that anything with coincidental timing was really an election ploy. Might as well ride that pony.

More things you can hate Bush for saying.

Why does Bush hate democracy?

prolly somewhere around here.

I've gotten past the point of hate to wondering if, in their hearts, any Pubbie can look themselves in the eye and be proud of electing him to office.


They realize it was a disasterous decision, but blame Clinton.

The terrorists haven't won Shit. The Sunni-vs-Shia fighting has taken over Iraq and driven the terrorists back to Afghanistan.

In fairness to the US administration, it's a lose-lose situation for them. It's been that way since 2004, if not before. At least now they have the balls to kinda, almost, implicitely, admit it.

There's no "good" solution. It's just too late for that. As long as the US stays, the Sunnis will continue to attack them, and the Shais, who will respond in kind. Everyone in Iraq will blame the "occupiers", and the weak and corrupted government. If they leave, its a civil war, plain and simple.

In both cases, the rest of the world will blame the US adminstration for this. And rightly so. They fUcked up. They fUcked up in the build-up to the war, they fUcked-up during the first days of the occupation, and they fUcked-up during the occupation itself. They also fUcked-up domestically, with Guantanamo and rendition flights. Iraqis are not completely impervious to the rest of the world.

Now I know some of you are gonna karma-bomb me cos I'm a commy, and you think this is an attack on the US. But it's not. It's a realistic assessment of the situation. You can look at it through a million rose-tinted glasses, it doesn't change anything. The US army "controls" the Green Zone. And, that's about it. Out of a country the size of France, it's not much. The government is weak, corrupt, and a bastion of partisanship and rival clans. The police is a joke, and the Iraqi army is only marginally better. Unemployment is sky-high, the economy is screwed, and a whole new generations of terrorist has just been given a 2-year practical course in mayhem, murder and destruction. And when they're fed up with Iraq... they'll mvoe somewhere else.

The legacy of these cumulative fUck-ups will last for generations.

So what can the US do now? Not much. Thats partly why the Democrats sounds tupid on this issue, there is really not much that can be done. A time-machine would be everyone's best bet. Failing that, there is one thing that can be done, and that's to focus on Afghanistan. The other front on the "war on terror". It's getting worse and worse over there, but unlike Iraq, there's still a chance.

But it will requier troops, investment, time and a lot of careful planning and attention.

If we lose Afghanistan as well, then everything since 9/11 will have been a waste. Worst than that, it will have been a detrimental-to-our-interests waste.

In my humble opinion, thats what the Democrats should be saying. Iraq if gone, but Afghanistan is not.

Finally, I'll never understand why the US didn't make more diplomatic efforts to get Muslim troops to help out in Iraq. With some bribes and some rethoric, the US could've gotten Turkey, or Pakistan, or the Saudis, to help out. They could've talked to Iran and Syria, and give them incentives to quell the violence. Instead, it has chosen the only path this administration knows, which is conflict and threats.

And you just can't go to war with half teh planet, no matter how pwerful you might be.

The Iraqi government is getting feisty!"WTF? Sure that militia is killing the government police and soldiers and taking over towns but he's my friend and you have no right to stop him!""Bush told me he'd stay the course"

Dunno about anyone else, but to me "stay the course" has always meant "keep going until the race is won." It's a sailing term, I believe; so logically one expects changes - tacking back and forth in order to move forward, if that makes sense. However to suddenly tell your allies, whose country you invaded and basically fUcked up royally, to set a timetable.... does not scream "stay the course" any longer.

Kind of like "Cut & Run"?

It's funny as hell that you're blaming the Democrats for the carefully crafted Pubbie soundbites and catch-phrases biting Bush in the ***. If nothing else, I guess I should take pleasure in the fact that you're giving the Democrats that much credit.Took ya a year but it's good to see you're agreeing with me.

Edited, Oct 25th 2006 at 8:40pm PDT by Jophiel

Absolutely. I dislike that phrase as well. If you'll notice, I've *never* used it.

On the other hand though, the Murtha plan of having a fixed timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq, while perhaps not "Cut and Run", is still a silly and horrible idea and deserving of scorn all by itself. While I have not and will not use the phrase "cut and run", it's certainly a more accurate representation of the "withdrawal" and/or "redeployment" arguments that we've seen then what "Stay the Course" has been morphed into.




Except for the fact that you're taking my original statement completely out of context, sure. When I said "timetables" I was talking specifically about the Murtha style timetables, meaning a set timeframe in which you commit to something. I was talking about the fact that you can't set that type of timetable and stick to it.

I've also on several occasions argued that clearly the Bush administration does have timetables. They'd have to. But those are of the "flexible" and "goal oriented" type, and not the "we must move out X troops by Y date" that people like Murtha were trying to push. Also, you can't publically state those timetables, for two very good reasons:

1. Those who might want to stop you will know exactly what actions to take when to most prevent you from succeeding. If I know that you've decided that July is when you'll have that bridge done, and I want to stop you, I know exactly what thing to target to make you fail.

2. You set yourself up for criticism for "failing to meet the timetable". Timetables are guidelines. You start with them. They're intended to be faster then you actually think you'll get stuff done so that you can motivate people to work towards them. They *always* slip. In 10 years at the company I work for, I don't think I've ever seen a project completely exact on time with regard to the original timetable. That's deliberate. You assume wiggle room so that when milestones slip (and they will), you'll still get the thing done in a reasonable amount of time. If you actually set your timetable such that failure causes disaster, you're going to hit that disaster a heck of a lot.

Which is fine, except that the media/public wont understand that. They'll only know that we were supposed to have something done by X date, and that date passed and it's not yet done. You know darn well that if we had publically known timetables, that the media would be posting them and following them and pointing out every single date that is ever missed. This would result in timetables being created that were too slow (in order to guarantee that we don't miss a date), and therefore invalidate the entire pupose of having them in the first place.


I never said timetables by themselves were wrong. I said that publically stated timetables and/or timetables involving things like withdrawal (upon which we can't set a date because we can't leave until other stuff is done that we don't have control over), are both bad ideas.

And if you went back and read the thread you posted from, you'd know this.

Except he's not opposing the Iraqi government Joph. He's trying to be a major player in that government. That's a *huge* shift of goals.

That's the shift that I think alot of people don't seem to understand. They see "civil war breaking out", and assume that means negative progress. That we're somehow going backwards. I don't think that's an accurate assessment at all though because it assumes that from day one of any conflict that every measure of "progress" towards an end goal must be accompanied with a reduction of violence.

Clearly, that's not a correct assumption. In WW2, we lost far more soldiers in 1944 then we did in 1942 or 1943. Yet I think we can all agree that much more "progress" was made towards winning the war during 1944, right? I'm not trying to equate Iraq with WW2. I'm just showing that it is false to assume that progress in a conflict must be accompanied by a lower body count. And by correlary, it's wrong to assume that an increase in body count and/or violence must mean that we're "losing ground" or that we're progressing backwards instead of forwards.

We've "progressed" from a state in which there was no real Iraqi government, the US held provisional control over the state, and insurgent groups attacked primarily US targets to attempt to prevent the US from aiding in the formation of an Iraqi government. When the violence shifted from attacking US soldiers to attacking other militant factions, that showed that most of the "insurgents" aren't trying to prevent the formation of a government, but are trying to gain the most power within that government structure as possible.

While there are certainly some who'd like to see the whole thing collapse, I believe that most of the violence we're seeing right now is essentially an extention of democracy itself. Each faction is the armed portion of a political faction/party within the government. When they aren't happy with a decision (or on something broad like power sharing and oil revenues), they turn their militias loose to attack the power base of the opposition faction. This manifests as "civil war", but isn't quite that. It's actually not even unusual for new democracies to go through. The concept of using a faction militia to push an agenda is a pretty basic one. It actually takes awhile for those involved in the political process to be comfortable enough with it to realize that votes and parlimentary proceedures can completely replace faction militias and violence.

In the US, we had a number of militia uprisings and rebellions during our first 10-20 years. It's really not that unusual. Obviously, the violence in Iraq is worse because of the degree of foreign influence (on all sides), but that's not something that can really be avoided at this point.


I think the major point I'm making is that this is still "progress". It shows a shift from fighting to prevent a government from being formed, to fighting for a bigger share within the government that has been formed. At the most basic, it means that most of those involved in the fighting have accepted that the government structure in place is the government of Iraq, and that any path to power lies through that structure.

And that's "progress". You may not like that the violence level has increased, but it's violence for a totally different reason then it was 2 years ago. Progress does not always equate to lower violence...