<p>Check out the segment starting about 17 minutes into the interview when she says “Our friends in the neighborhood need to know and the Iraqis need to know that we are not looking to leave Iraq.”</p>
<p>BTW, he later asks her if the she can assure the countries in the region that the United States is not seeking permanent military bases in Iraq. She ducks the question, saying that we have no “processes currently underway” to develop permanent bases.</p>
<p>Charlie just about comes out of his chair while reflexively gasping, “EVER!”</p>
<p>Yes, and then the part that you conveniently left out was Rice’s disdainful look and the words, “Charlie, we are not going to leave an Iraq that is not capable of defending itself”. What was left unspoken verbally but what was conveyed with the look was, “you know damn well what I meant, why do you feel the need to ask such a slanted question?”</p>
<p>Perhaps the need was so that people like ID could take the quote and response out of context and do a Michael Moore on it for the pleasure of CC.</p>
<p>And at what point is Iraq supposed to be able to defend itself, if we keep doing it for them? The only way insurgents have ever been defeated is by empowering the home folks to fight them.</p>
<p>Training and equipping the Iraqis isn’t even on the radar anymore. There has been no increase in this activity since the surge began, and planners have now changed to believing that we must rid the country of the insurgents ourselves and turn it over insurgent-free to the Iraqi government.</p>
<p>Just another pipe dream. So if that’s what’s Condi’s waiting on, we will indeed be there forever.</p>
<p>This is Parent’s Forum. I think we all understand the difference between empowering your kid to do his homework and doing it for him. Condi and the rest of the pro-occupation, anti-accountability crowd apparently plan to keep doing Iraq’s homework in perpetuity.</p>
<p>I gave the link and the minute mark for people to listen to the exchange. She had finished her sentence, which is saying something considering that she’s a one woman filibuster.</p>
<p>How do you explain Rice’s duck of the question about permanent bases? She and the President have never had any intention of pulling US forces out of Iraq. It’s all about the oil.</p>
<p>Why do you think they are dead set against benchmarks or timelines? Because they know the Iraqi government isn’t going to do any of that stuff.</p>
<p>But, that’s a pipe dream too. The Sunni’s have zero incentive to participate in an insurgent free Iraq when they have, at best, a 20% stake (and that’s assuming that Malaki weren’t a Shia puppet, which he is). The Sunnis believe that, with unlimited support from the Saudis, Jordan, and Egypt, they have a legitimate shot of eventually winning a civil war and resuming control of the country. By their calculations, that becomes a war of attrition between Iranian funding and Saudi/Jordan/Egyptian funding. The Saudis have deeper pockets.</p>
<p>“Charlie, we are not going to leave an Iraq that is not capable of defending itself and with a foundation for future reconciliation”. </p>
<p>That’s as clear a statement of administration intent as you’ll ever get. They have no intention of leaving Iraq, regardless of whether the surge works or doesn’t work. That is a goal that is so far off on the horizon you might as well say we’ll occupy Iraq forever. Five years. Ten years. Twenty years. </p>
<p>There is no Plan B. Plan B is to make Plan A work, without regard to cost.</p>
<p>Right now, the fear that exists in Iraq is that we WILL leave prematurely. Rice was answering the question from that perspective to reassure anyone in Iraq that the US will not abandon them like we did in Vietnam. It was clear based on her intial response and even more clear after Rose’s “EVER???” question. Only someone looking to put words into Rice’s mouth that were not intended could interpret her response in any other way. By no means was there any hidden message that we have no plans to leave.</p>
<p>Why do you think Charlie Rose reacted like that? There is NOBODY in the media who has done more in-depth coverage of Iraq. In the last three months, he’s done extended half hour and hour interviews with every war correspondent. With panel after panel of Iraqi experts. With Kissinger. With Patraeus. With Bush. With Rice. It’s not like Charlie Rose is tossing out cable news soundbyte hand grenades. He asked the correct follow up question to Rice: “Do you think you will have the support of the American people for that?” She danced around that one, saying that the American people just want to see progress. That is clearly NOT what the American people want. They want us out.</p>
<p>Seriously, I don’t know how you can interpret the administration’s policy any other way. President Bush said, on the Charlie Rose show last week, that “Plan B is to make Plan A work. Failure is not an option.” That’s pretty much straight from the horse’s mouth. It couldn’t be stated any clearer.</p>
<p>Rose gave Bush, Patraeus, and Rice an opportunity to lay out some sense of how long it would take. All of them ducked the question, refusing to make any commitment. We know from Petraeus’ book on counter-insurgency that he measures the commitment required in years, even decades. He said point blank that his recent deployment in Iraq has confirmed in his mind all of his counter-insurgency manual.</p>
<p>You see, if the surge fails, that will be reason to stay in, because the Iraqis can’t defend themselves. If the surge succeeds, that will reason to stay in, because the Americans are defending the Iraqis from themselves. And if neither is true, Hillary will keep the Americans there to defend “vital U.S. interests”.</p>
<p>They gave up on training the Iraqis almost a year ago. Why train the Iraqis when they universally want to kill Americans?</p>
<p>It’s basically a Cheney interview on Rush Limbaugh to the same effect. The neocons think that to really “win” a country, we can never, ever pullout. If Cheney and friends have their way, the Iraq problem will be inherited down and down, from generation to generation until the end of time. And of course, they don’t bother to say that up on the podium. A surprise for the eternally gullible, I suppose…</p>
<p>The flaw in Cheney’s thinking: if the United States is not providing a target in Iraq, what the heck is Al Qaeda going to do there? Blow up Shias? The Iranians aren’t going to stand for that. Blow up Sunnis? The Saudis might take a dim view of that.</p>
<p>My only question is, what does Bush have in mind for January 20th, 2009? He’s already committed to keeping the current level of troops on the ground into 2008 and I don’t see any prospects of preventing that. The Republicans in Congress, including Lieberman, are going to stay the course. That guarantees a Republican bloodbath in the 2008 elections.</p>
<p>Dick Morris (my esteemed schoolmate) argued on Faux Gnus last night that having Americans to shoot at in Iraq and Afghanistan is what protects the U.S. against attacks here. After all, why kill Americans in North Carolina when you can do it close to home?</p>
<p>So I guess you could say American troops are being sacrificed in suicide missions. :eek:</p>
<p>What would help protect the US against attacks would be to get serious about cutting off Al Qaeda’s head. The British intelligence said at a trial this week that everytime they break up a terror plot, they are finding communications to bin Laden and Zawahiri.</p>
<p>BTW, here’s an “artificial timetable” for you:</p>
<p>Looks like the commanders on the ground are calling for at least two more Friedman Units (FUs) instead of going through the charade of assessing in September:</p>
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<p>The good news is that “surging” until April will decimate the Republican terrorists heading into the election. This guarantees that Senators like Susan Collins in Maine and John Sununu in New Hamphire will be politically executed.</p>
<p>I won’t pretend to be any kind of middle east expert, but after some amount of time “supporting” the Shia side when we were feed a connection between Al Queda and the Sunnis, I hope that I know a bit more. What concerns me most is that fundamentally I think that Shias in general are not the sort of folks we want to back in iraq. My understanding is that if a Shia iman were to say to his run-of-the-mill followers, tear your eyes out, that is what they would do without question. Not so the Sunnis. (Though of course there are extremist elements among the Sunni.) That being said, I don’t view Iranian Shias as being as fanatical. Not sure whatt my point is here, but I think we, as Americans, have a lot of cultural/religious/ethnic/social class/ whatever, learning to do about the Muslim world. And obviously our leaders were (are?) clueless and may still have their head in the sand.</p>
<p>This diatribe about bases in Iraq just goes to prove why modern day Democrats (and mini) can’t be trusted with foreign policy. Everything becomes a black and white issue and they get so fixated on a concept that they fail to see the forest from the trees: war in Iraq is bad, therefore having troops in Iraq is bad, therefore bases in Iraq are bad. </p>
<p>Why all this hoopla about potential bases in Iraq? The US has had military bases around the world since the 19th century at least. They have had bases in Korea, Okinawa, and Europe protecting our allies and US interests for over 50 years. They have had bases in Arabian countries for over 15 years. It has been US policy since the days of Jimmy Carter (the Carter Doctrine) that the Middle East is of strategic importance to the US and that we will protect those interests with military force if necessary. So why all the fuss all of a sudden about the “horror” of potential bases in Iraq? </p>
<p>This fixation reminds me of the way the Democrats dealt with Vietnam. They became so fixated on extricating us from the country that we failed to even provide the support to our allies that was allowed for in the Paris peace treaty. The result was a bloodbath.</p>
<p>Why are you saying that mini represents the thinking of Democrats? mini has made it quite clear that he is not a Democrat and that he despises Democratic foreign policy.</p>
<p>I know it might put a monkey wrench in your thinking, but you should probably know that I voted for George Bush in 2004.</p>
<p>I have no fundamental issue with a goal of occupying Iraq in perpetuity, with permanent military bases. I assumed that was the real objective of the invasion in the first place, along with the stealing the oil.</p>
<p>Alas, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush botched the whole thing due to their corruption, cronyism, and incompetence. The question is not some hypothetical about what might of happened if we had staged a proper occupation of a hostile territory with the 300,000 troops the generals said would be necessary. The question is fact-based. What do we do now?</p>
<p>It’s not the Democrats fault we are in this mess. It’s Bush’s war. He blew it. He’s the Commander Guy. Now, it’s time to take our lumps and get out rather than continuing to double-down on a losing hand.</p>
<p>Seems to me that it is the knee-jerk Republican sycophant supporters who are fixated on “Vietnam”, willing to write any blank check rather than suffer the blow to their party of incompetently blowing the “occupation”.</p>
<p>Secondarily, I am sick of being lied to by the President and his henchmen. They’ve never told the truth from day one regarding Iraq. That’s why none of them have ever made a cohorent statement of our objectives.</p>
<p>We don’t have any “allies” in Iraq. That’s the problem. Right now, we are propping up a government that is a puppet of Al Sadr and his militias: the elements we claim to be trying to supress with the current permanent escalation.</p>
<p>“It has been US policy since the days of Jimmy Carter (the Carter Doctrine) that the Middle East is of strategic importance to the US and that we will protect those interests with military force if necessary. So why all the fuss all of a sudden about the “horror” of potential bases in Iraq?”</p>
<p>No horror here. I think we need to call a hostile, aggressive occupation for what it is, an outgrowth of bipartisan foreign policy. Hillary has made it quite clear, like Bush, that American forces will stay to defend “vital U.S. interests” - it doesn’t matter whether we “win” or “lose”, we will be there. </p>
<p>I just think we need to stop blaming the Iraqis for our own ineptitude, our failure to provide “benchmarks” for ourselves. The only benchmark that seems clear is:</p>
<p>And, if you have no problem with U.S. troops being sent in as “suicide death squads”, a la Dick Morris (and, to quote John McCain, as “wasted lives”), I guess I have no right to complain. If you’re okay about sending young American men and women to the Middle East to die for oil, at least you’ve made yourself clear, and I can respect that.</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone argues with the Carter Doctrine. Keeping free access for international shipping through the Straits of Hormuz is a vital US (and world) interest. For example, I recall little objection to the 1991 decision to drive Sadaam Hussein out of Kuwait.</p>
<p>The Carter Doctrine certainly didn’t include a permanent hostile occupation of Iraq.</p>
<p>The objection to the Republican policy in Iraq is that it is destabilizing the region and driving a wedge between the US and its allies in the Middle East.</p>