<p>The merit if remaining in Iraq indefinitely has already been more than adequately discussed and everything that could be said has already been said. I’ve only pointed out that you lack the courage of your convictions.</p>
<p>And no, I’m not in Iraq, I’m comfortably ensconced at my computer here at work. But I have a son in the Army and so this issue has more than rhetorical importance for me, and for hundreds of thousands of other families in America with sons and daughters in the armed services.</p>
<p>Concerning Iraqis, they’ve had four years to come to a consensus; we’re not the world’s police. And we’re not going to convince the various religious factions to forget their differences and share power equitably. There will be winners and losers no matter what, and independent of what, we do.</p>
<p>Great post, yes, the second option is what I would support, (though not a repressive occupation) provided it is a full draft, male, female, gay, straight, drawn from all socioeconomic classes, and starting with the Bush twins and the children of congressman and representatives who voted for the war.</p>
<p>Also, I’m confused by why you think that that kind of occupation would necessarily have to be repressive. I’m thinking less along the lines of Germans-in-France and more like Americans-in-Japan type reconstruction. After WWII, we stuck around in these countries to help them rebuild, and that war wasn’t even America’s fault.</p>
<p>If that were the case, I would put my education on hold, and though scared ****less, get on the plane for Iraq.</p>
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<p>The way I see it, if we pull out of Iraq immediately, then because of a horrible decision by the American president, Iraq ends up paying the price and America gets off more or less scot free. At least this way, maybe the cost of war will really hit home, and a future President will think twice about going to war.</p>
<p>Realistically though, what’s going to happen is the war is going to drag on for another 3-4 years and then the US will pull out, leave Iraq in a shambles, and extend our reputation for meddling. Then another ten years down the line we’ll invade another country, fool around for a while and pull out again.</p>
<p>Don’t think that’s true but it’s a great line.</p>
<p>WPSON, as you’re one of the few (only?) here posting with offspring in the military, a question or two: </p>
<p>My sense is that support for the war, as opposed to covering each other’s ass, drops with rank inside the Army, that the enlisted ranks are about as divided as the general population while your company grade and even more so field grade officers are more hawkish…and also don’t have an effing clue what the lower ranks are privately thinking. Yes? No? Maybe? </p>
<p>Also that opinion about the war is a lot more divided than it was a couple of years ago. My main exposure to the current Army is via some company & field grade officers, active, including in the sandbox, or recently retired.</p>
<p>I’d love to see Jenna deployed. She might be able to detonate IED’s at a distance by sticking out her tongue at them.</p>
<p>“3 years, 5 years, 10 years? Who knows, we have a duty to stay in until we’ve cleaned up our mess.”</p>
<p>What if the mess is actually impossible to clean up?</p>
<p>What if nothing short of American-against-Iraqi genocide will get Iraqis to accept an occupation? Do we just kill them all and say “we won the war” because there aren’t any more people there?</p>
<p>By “repressive,” I really meant a strong martial law to settle things (if possible). I thought, for example, that we really really really screwed up when troops stood by as the entire city of Baghdad was looted. Also, I meant a massive presence. IF choice number 2 were to be viable, it might need ten times as many troops,</p>
<p>“My sense is that support for the war, as opposed to covering each other’s ass, drops with rank inside the Army, that the enlisted ranks are about as divided as the general population while your company grade and even more so field grade officers are more hawkish…and also don’t have an effing clue what the lower ranks are privately thinking. Yes? No? Maybe?”</p>
<p>Unfortunately my experience is limited to a very few, and not necessarily reprehensive, lower ranking West Point officers and cadets. But what I can say is that Army Officers in general, and West Point graduates in particular, are extraordinarily well educated and informed; these are some of the sharpest folks you’ll ever meet anywhere. With that caveat, my experience is that support for the war decreases dramatically as you go up the ranks, at least to the lower level ranks, and is conversely, greatest in the enlisted ranks. I think the reason is that to become an officer you must have a college degree; those officers are a bit older, better educated, and have learned not to believe everything they read or hear. The enlisted men and women are usually fresh out of High School, and tend to be more accepting of rhetoric that “sounds good”. They’re likely to be a bit more “gung ho” and support the war. I imagine perspectives adjust a bit once you’ve been to Iraq once, twice, or more times.</p>
<p>Here’s the part of the equation you are missing. The civil war in Iraq will not end until the Iraqi people have finished killing each other. Whether that takes 10 years in a lower grade civil war or 3 years in an all out bloodbath, the basic math does not change for the Iraqis. It does change for the US soldiers.</p>
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<p>That ignores fundamental differences Iraq is not Germany or Japan. Both German and Japan had extremely homogenous populations, with advanced industrial economies, and traditions of democratic and/or stable governance.</p>
<p>None of those condiitions exist in Iraq. The concept of democracy is not ready to take hold in the Middle East. Perhaps the closest thing to democracies in the region are Egypt and Iran – and neither of those come very close.</p>
<p>We are, literally, the little Dutch boy holding our finger in the dike trying to stop the floodwaters in Iraq. If we want to continue spending $10 billion a month, we would be better off spending it on refugee camps because there is a desperate humanitarian need and the massive numbers of refugees are destabilizing the region.</p>
<p>" How long are you prepared to commit substantially all of our available Army combat troops and $10 billion a month in Iraq?
Three more years? Six more years? Ten more years? Fifty years?
Is there any point where you say ‘enough is enough’?"</p>
<p>I am prepared to commit to it one day longer than the other side. Why you ask? because the war is not going to end when we pull out. The enemy is going to follow us. We’ve already sacrificed our freedom for security - you know that when you are standing in the airport wueue holding your shoes in one hand and a fi****ll of ID in the other. Ultimately all you semi-isolationists have to offer is more of the same - more cops and checkpoints everywhere but at the borders.</p>
<p>Honestly I feel your pain and I do think W mucked some things up. Nobody likes to be at war but there is one thing I know for sure from all the way back in grade school. No matter what the principal said it didn’t take two to start a fight but it only took one to end it. Since those days I have had two rules. Never start a fight. Never lose a fight.</p>
<p>People of goodwil and integrity, and I count you among those interesteddad, can disagree on who started what and what Iraq has to do with 911, clash of cultures and a lot of other things. history yet to be made and yet to be written will tell who is right.</p>
<p>“It’s one thing when a sucide bomber can get up, have breakfast and walk to the marketplace and set himself off. It’s another to find the money, get the passports, get on a flight, go through customs, and do it here. All we’ve done is make it easy for joe average terrorist to kill Americans.”</p>
<p>We have 20 million illegal aliens in the country right now. Some went through customs most didn’t. If you have the resources to make a car bomb you have the resources to get here and there are few if any impediments to your doing it and little likelihood that either political party has a mind to make it harder.</p>
<p>What about the erosion of civil liberties at home? The suspension of habeas corpus for non-citizen terror suspects, domestic surveillance, expanded search and seizure, erosion of expectations of privacy, unchecked expansion of executive power, etc. etc."</p>
<p>I don’t know. The Democrats just extended the franchise to individuals with multiple felony convictions here in Maryland so not everybodies rights are being eroded. A lot of Dems want to extend the franchise to illegal aliens and they have done it in some local jurisdictions. Is that an extension or contractions of my civil rights?</p>
<p>Which “other” side? The Kurds? The Sistani Shi’a? The al Sadr Shi’a? The rogue elements of the Sadr Shi’a? Chalabi’s secularists? The Baathist remnants? The Saudi terrorist suicide bombers? The Sunni tribal lords? The Iraqi “government”?</p>
<p>You can’t talk about “the other side” in Iraq without identifying who you think we are fighting.</p>
<p>Al Qada stirred this civil war up because they couldn’t stir up a general insurrection against the American occupation. They are willing to sacrifice their co-religionists by the the tens of thousands to gain a base of operations in a sovereign country so they can extend their Islamofacist ideolgy. These folks are not going to go away when we leave Iraq. They are in Iraq precisely to oppose us and will follow onour retreat all the way to New York, Washington, and Pigwallow, Georgia. We are the Great Satan and the mission is to destroy us or convert us. That might seem an outlandish and impossible mission to you, but they have no shortage of individuals willing to strap on suicide vests to promote it.</p>
<p>BTW, it may not be included in your Bush talking points memos, but US intelligence believes that Zawahiri pulled the plug on at least one major post 9/11 attack on US soil and that al Queda made a strategic decision to reverse course and stay out of the US.</p>
<p>BTW, $10 billion a month would buy you a ton of port and border security.</p>
<p>Actually, Zawahiri warned the Saudi terrorist franchise in Iraq that provoking a broad Sunni/Shi’a conflict would be a mistake. I doubt very much that the Iranian Allatollahs are pleased with Sunni suicide bombers blowing up Shi’a mosques.</p>
<p>I’m joining this discussion way late…there’s so much to be said about so much mindless-ill-informed-lacking-in-historical-perspective-liberal-hateful-group-think drivel - but the hour is late and the I’ve grown tired of the discourse. So I’ll just offer these two bits for now:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>GWB may not be the greatest at communicating what we’re doing in Iraq and elsewhere in this war [and it most certainly is a war] that was started by others intent on our destruction, and the war may not be the made-for-television event we somehow have come to think war is supposed to be, but I thank God every day that GWB was President on 9/12 and not Al Gore and that he has been again since 1/2005 and not John Kerry. Do you people really think its mere coincidence or luck that we haven’t had a repeat of 9/11 in the last 5-1/2 years?</p></li>
<li><p>Someone in this thread posted their bumper sticker offering. Here’s mine in response to “War Is Not The Answer”:</p></li>
</ol>
<p>“Whether War Is The Answer Depends on
The Question, Who Asked It and How”</p>
<p>America never chooses war [and GWB certainly didn’t choose this one], but when those bent on our destruction choose war for us we damn-well better fight it and win it. We always have. I pray we continue to - including this one.</p>
<p>a) It was lucky that KSM wanted to generate some publicity and contacted an Al Jazeera reporter to come visit him in Pakistan. It’s lucky that the CEO of Al Jazeera reported the visit to his cousin the Emir of Quattar who passed the info to the CIA who were able to trace KSM’s whereabouts.</p>
<p>b) It’s good fortune that KSM and other captured murderers left trails of leads on their seized computers.</p>
<p>c) Notwithstanding the legal implications, the data mining of our phone, internet, and financial records produced a map of the world that “lit” up from terrorist activity, identifying the financial connections within Al Queda. Although the terrorists finally figured out how they were getting nabbed and the network “went dark”, it is extremely difficult for Al Queda to function in the US these days.</p>
<p>d) That difficulty may partially explain why Zawahiri called off US operations and opted to shift attacks to other places, primarily against Western interests in Saudi Arabia.</p>
<p>None of this had anything to do with the invasion of Iraq. In fact, Iraq has hindered our efforts because the military lacks resources to apply presssure on Al Queda in Afghanistan. Had there been troops available, it is possible we would have killed bin Laden when we had him cornered in Dec. 2001</p>
<p>The assertion that “America never chooses war [and GWB certainly didn’t choose this one]” has been consistently discredited, despite its endless repetition by what can only be described (in this case correctly) by “a few dead-enders”.</p>
<p>“America never chooses war [and GWB certainly didn’t choose this one]”</p>
<p>That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve read in weeks, and trust me, I’ve read plenty of ridiculous things.</p>
<p>Next you’ll tell us Iraq was developing nuclear weapons, orchestrated the attacks on the twin towers, and possessed weapons of mass destruction.</p>