<p>A war creates soldiers, and for each one killed in a “religious” war many more are made</p>
<p>In Iraq, we kill insurgents, or rebels, or terrorists, or freedom fighters, and two or three are created</p>
<p>'…As the old saying goes, “You can’t bomb someone to peace by bombing them to pieces.”</p>
<p>Well said!</p>
<p>Would Jesus go to war? Who would Jesus bomb?</p>
<p>The allies bombed their way to peace in world war 2, it worked then it will work now. Israel bombed their way to peace with the jordanians and egyptians. It worked with them it will work with us. And peace is not as necessary as safety is.</p>
<p>Ah, the simplistic world view from LaLa Land.</p>
<p>and golani89 is so ready to go fight the good fight</p>
<p>Its really is more simple than you imagine. To quote the protestwarriors “war has never solved anything except for slavery, facism, nazism, and communism”</p>
<p>That was the old days, Golani. This is not a conventional war, with a conventional enemy, using conventional weaponry. It would have been easier to just blot out all the terrorists were they dressed in combat gear behind their own country’s lines.</p>
<p>There are Islamic terrorists all over the world, in almost every country. There is NO chance, NONE, that we will blot out terrorism (not even in your lifetime, since you, at age 17, are so wise and all) using conventional warfare.</p>
<p>Well, I saw Carville on CNN and he suggested that Clinton had that ‘outrage’ in his pocket, nevermind which reporter was interviewing him. Irrelevant. Carville made it sound like a well-rehearsed bit, part of an unfolding ‘Clinton’ strategy. Carville had a chuckle about the showmanship, frankly. </p>
<p>But the bigger news is the imploding Republicans? Can this really be happening? Here I thought the Democrats were sunk because they had limited leadership, opportunity or organization. Gotta hand it to those Dems, though. They throw a pretty good stink bomb. Heads are rolling (say my sources in Washington. 
). To be honest, I’m incredulous that the famed Republican organization developed and tolerated such massive fault lines. </p>
<p>They done shot themselves.</p>
<p>Israel had done a succesful job against terror in different pts in their history and it has only been when it backtracked from its strategies did terror recurr. The problem with fighintg an effective war against terrorism is that most politicians do not have enough balls to do it as evidenced by Bush and Olmert</p>
<p>bush doesn’t have balls.</p>
<p>He has hubris.</p>
<p>Cheers, what do you think is happening with the imploding Republicans?</p>
<p>Meanwhile…</p>
<p>“Marine Ge. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that the U.S. strategy of training tens of thousands of Iraqi soliders and police hasn’t curbed violence and that senior military commanders were puzzled by its failure. “We do need to take a look” at other factors that might be driving violence, he said.”</p>
<p>Might I suggest to take a look at one, the reason they shoot at us is that, 1) having experience of Americans up close and personal, they don’t like us too much? And 2) maybe it is the Iraqi soldiers and police that we’ve trained who are doing the shooting?</p>
<p>Jumping in here at this late point so exercising the option of being irreverent and irrelevant…</p>
<p>but …if say India occupied the US how many of us would be part of an “insurgency”? After WW 2 the French that fought the Germans once they occupied France became known as “the resistence” and those that worked with the Nazis were known and punished as “the collaborators.” Once we are gone, will the current Iraqi government be seen the same way and will the so called insurgents get elected or take over and replace them and be viewed by their countrymen as “heros”? If occupied by another country would that make our US citizens more or less likely to want to retaliate?</p>
<p>My fear is that we have lost this “war” already. We will be bankrupt over this and the billions of dollars spent on this “war” will rob our children of quality public schools, health care and every thing else that is needed, such as funds for fighting drugs, crime, you name it, to keep us viable as a culture. Take note of the fall of Rome and any other “super power” in history. They all extend themselves too far militarily leaving them with no money to maintain their infrastructure which deteriorates.</p>
<p>It will be a sad day if Iraqis ever view those who intentionally kill teachers, children and other innocents as “heroes”. There is absolutely no parallel between the French resistance and the Iraqi insurgents.</p>
<p>I have often said that the US is teetering on the brink of becoming another Rome, and the apologists refuse to see the danger in what is happening. </p>
<p>Can’t stay on top forever, and we can only overreach so much. It is only a matter or time, and that is not a pessimistic, but a pragmatic viewpoint.</p>
<p>It depends on which Iraqis you ask what. 80 percent want us gone within a year. 60 percent approve of attacks on US troops. </p>
<p>Shiite on Sunni and Sunni on Shiite attacks are obviously approved by many who make them and their supporters. Then you can throw in the Kurd vs. Arab and vice versa attacks. The percentage of violence by “foreigners” in Iraq is a small amount of the total, though tending to be more lethal per attack, but also often being used as proxies for one group or another.</p>
<p>A functioning “democracy” in any sense we would recognize isn’t in the cards. Meanwhile, our presence in Iraq is one of the biggest recruiting posters Al Qaeda has.</p>
<p>AQ and its multitude of clones has to be defeated. But Iraq is hardly the central front of the war on terror, regardless of the propaganda coming out of the White House. Among the most ridiculous of which is the line, “Some say that if we withdraw, the extremists will leave us alone.” I don’t believe that and I haven’t heard any Democrat say that, not even a loopy one. But it’s a nice sound bite that functions as a rhetorical attack.</p>
<p>They clearly aren’t going to leave us alone, although that was made abundantly clear not long ago. </p>
<p>We simply need to become more effective in helping them achieve their martyrdom goals.</p>
<p>Yes, but having 140,000 troops in Iraq isn’t the best way to do this. The problem is, people see all the violence and casualties and assumes that it’s AQ. It’s not, it’s mostly Iraqi intramural stuff. However, our presence is recruiting terrorists faster than we kill them. The technical analytical word for this is “Dumb.”</p>
<p>“Shiite on Sunni and Sunni on Shiite attacks are obviously approved by many who make them and their supporters.”</p>
<p>True, but they are united in their approval of killing Americans.</p>