Time to see if Bush hates our troopsFollow

Christ

What exactly do you love about it?

I agree that the present situation blows. I just don't agree that unconditionally pulling out is the right thing to do.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

i agree.

but no solution will materialize untill Bush and his addministraition is gone. no one likes him, so no one is going to do anything that might help him. this goes for all of our allies, and all of iraqs neibhors, which is exactly who we need help from.

what will be done, with or without our help, is eventually iraq,s neibhors will eventually, either openly, or like now, behind the scenes, gather support from within iraq itself and establish a foot hold towards creating a government there that will be benificial to the security of the reagon. and by security, i mean secure from US.

we can either be part of the solution, or stand alone when it happens.

we need to work with syeria, and iran, make some serious concessions, and instead of dictating what we want and how we want them to help us or we will sanction them.........let them take the lead, and support thier goals.

yes, i know their goals will be very anti american. but they will have controll one way or another eventually, and THEY KNOW IT. it would be better for us in the long run, and better for iraq RIGHT NOW, to support iraq and syeria in stabelizing iraq right now in the short term, and ganing atleast some gruging acknologement of our part in doing so. it will put us in a better position for future negotiations.

we will loose. all we have left to decide is when, and how. we should atleast try to get something out of it. try and set up a relationship for the future. one that is not totally advisarial like the one this addministriation has handed us.

the new speaker i think realizes some of this atleast. she is trying to reach out to syeria and iran. mabe trying to seperate herself and the incoming addministraition from the current one so after they leave, their can be atleast some hope of working WITH iraqs neibhors to find a solution as opposed to dictating to them how we want it done.

if you understand nothing else, understand this. there will be no peace or stability in iraq without the support of her neibhors. not by the end of this addministraition, not ever.

we can either work with them, or be at war with them till the return of Christ.

something this addministraition was too arrogant to admit, which is exactly why we are where we are today.

either way, nothing can be done untill Bush leaves office. the only way we could make it happen faster is with an impeachemnt. personally, im all for that too.

What we really need is a policy that says the west is serious about helping the rest of the world out. Military action shouldn't be off the table, because sometimes you need to fight in order to defend the rights of people, but it shouldn't be applied willy nilly because they *might* have weapons of mass destruction. Going in was a bad idea, in hindsight. It probably should have been a bad idea in foresight too, but it's tough to make a decision when the other side is deliberately blocking your intelligence. Leaving now, though, would tell the Iraqi people that we consider terrorists attacking them to be a "Civil War" and that we aren't interested in policing it. It would tell the Iraqis who voted and signed up to serve as security for the new government that their risks and sacrifices mean nothing to us compared to the deaths of a few American soldiers. It would tell them that when the US invades your country, it will knock out the government that you didn't like and then leave, allowing even worse people to take over your country and kill your friends and family while they do it. It'll tell terrorists that they can easily influence the decisions of US politicians by blowing up American soldiers, and that the U.S. will do nothing to protect innocent civilians if those civilians aren't white. As soon as we leave, insurgents and Al Qaeda will move into the country and kill everyone who supported the democracy the U.S. helped to set up. Everyone will realize we betrayed them, and all will be less supportive of the west and more supportive of Islamist fascism.

You might say that this is true, that the U.S. doesn't care about people living in the middle east. However, 9/11 should have told us that we cannot continue with this attitude. Bin Laden isn't a single, isolated evil terrorist. There are many interconnected networks of terrorists who, given the example of the first attack of such a large magnitude, will continue to plan more and more destructive attacks. We can't stop them all on the defensive, just as we were unable to stop 9/11, attack after attack will get through. Some say that we haven't seen an attack in the last 6 years. This is entirely untrue. As a nation, we have seen no major attacks, but as the western world, we have seen several London and Madrid train bombings. These attacks will only ramp up in the future if we ignore the middle east. The solution is to deal with the cause, rather than the symptoms.

Totalitarianism causes terrorism. A government ruled by a single group of people in order to maintain power must tell lies about a particular group of people. In communist dictatorships, this group was capitalists. In **** Germany the group was the Jews, and in Iran, Syria, and pre-war Iraq, this group was and is the west and Israel. The reason this happens is because it is the only way found to truly keep a populace from questioning their government. If the west doesn't pursue a policy that gets rid of totalitarianism as much as possible, we are doomed to live with terrorist attacks.

Edited, May 25th 2007 9:41pm by Plutonian

/shrug

Yeah. Looks like it could be at that. Not sure I agree with the Globe article's assessment though. As I stated above, keeping an ongoing program in supplimentals does allow the president to "hide" the cost of the war (to some degree), but it also gives congress quite a bit more control over that same war. Not to be obvious, but it also gives congress the ability to "hide" pork inside the supplimentals (as witnessed by all the ridiculous earmarks strapped onto the latest one).


It's not like there aren't a ton of sites constantly keeping track of the cost of the war. I'm reasonably certain that more people (at least those likely to be outraged at the cost) get their info from sites like that then go poking around cbo.gov or digging through a released budget from Congress. So the whole "Bush is hiding the cost of war!!!" argument loses a bit of merit there (at least as presented by the Globe in that article).

Well. Your *original* original point. The one in this thread was about you claiming some psychic abilities because you made a prediction that didn't come true. They didn't split out spending between Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm ignoring the second part since it wasn't a change. "Predicting" that the government would continue to fund Iraq via supplimentals wasn't exactly a Nostradamus moment there Joph...

So nyah!