<p>Children are not chattel. Parents don’t “offer” up their children to fight in any war. Young adults sign up to serve their country. I think that the American people should honor that commitment, show some respect for their decision-making ability (when was the last time you tried to convince your 19 or 20 year old to do ANYTHING?!) and support them in any way possible.</p>
<p>As parents though, how many of you who support the troop surge would support your children leaving their cushy college environments and enlisting?</p>
<p>Isn’t it much easier to consider <em>other</em> people’s children dying in this war…than your own? I’d imagine it would be harder to support this war if you were being asked to sacrifice your own children.</p>
<p>No–children aren’t chattel. I agree on that. Still, with Bush’s passion for war, you’d think his girls would at least have the decency to support the Iraq debacle by laying their own lives on the line.</p>
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<p>The vast majority of the suicide bomber attacks in Iraq have been carried out by foreign Arab nationals. Many from Saudi Arabia, by way of Syria.</p>
<p>Saudi Arabia has openly acknowledged that they will support the Sunni insurgents in Iraq to prevent a Shia controlled government.</p>
<p>IMO, the fundamental flaw in the US reconstruction strategy was that we wanted to overthrow the Sunni dictatorship, but NOT replace it with a Shia government, despite the fact that Iraq is overwhelmingly Shiite.</p>
<p>If, on the other hand, American interests would have been truly served by a Sunni minority controlled government, then we never should have de-Baathified.</p>
<p>My own personal view is that the US should keep out of Sunni/Shia sectarian conflicts.</p>
<p>BTW, the Iranian parliament finally met yesterday. The session broke down into a shouting match with Malaki threatening to have a Sunni leader in Parliament arrested. They pulled the plug on the live TV broadcast of the session when things turned ugly.</p>
<p>We have a volunteer army whose goal and mission is to be an effective fighting force, not a tool of social justice.</p>
<p>If you want to put soldiers in danger by forcing people to fight, who dont want to fight, then there is something wrong with you.</p>
<p>19 year olds do not have the experience to make rational decisions about joining the army.</p>
<p>We, as a society, like to pretend they do, because it serves our purposes. They protect us and we don’t have to put our middle aged ***** on the line.</p>
<p>It especially serves our purposes when it is some other kids, not ours, doing the fighting.</p>
<p>And we are fighting for what? I forget what it is this week.</p>
<p>What is wrong with putting your money where your mouth is, so to speak?</p>
<p>You support this war…prove it. Enlist yourself. Or, if your children are supporters, encourage them to enlist.</p>
<p>It’s the best way of proving your support.</p>
<p>“If you want to put soldiers in danger by forcing people to fight, who dont want to fight, then there is something wrong with you.”</p>
<p>There’s nothing wrong with me, Daddude. But I think there’s something very wrong with hypocrites who are frothing-at-the-mouth rabid for war, but have absolutely nothing to lose in a personal sense–certainly not their own lives or those of their children. … And I never said the Bush twins should be “forced” to fight, which I believe is what you were probably alluding to. I simply contend that they should ship themselves off to Iraq with eager willingness, to support their sorry-excuse-for-a-president father.</p>
<p>Their dad checked on his National Guard forms that he “did not volunteer” to go overseas during the Vietnam years. Do you really expect the apple to fall that far from the tree?</p>
<p>No. I knew better than that. I’m sure that serving their country in Iraq is not high up on their list of priorities, and that they have more important things to do with their lives. Oh, I’m sorry. That was Dick Cheney’s excuse during the Vietnam era.</p>
<p>Supporting the troops means expecting your government be accountable for using them wisely and honoring its obligations to them. To suggest that supporting the troops means abandoning them to the whim of whatever administration is in power is the antithesis of patriotism.</p>
<p>i always liked McCain</p>
<p>Well, there are 10-15,000 College Republicans who, like Dick Cheney and Vietnam, support the war in Iraq but “have other priorities.” At this point I honestly don’t want to see anyone go to Iraq but there’s 3-5 combat brigades right there. They should drop their lattes and sign right up.</p>
<p>“Supporting the troops means expecting your government be accountable for using them wisely and honoring its obligations to them. To suggest that supporting the troops means abandoning them to the whim of whatever administration is in power is the antithesis of patriotism.”</p>
<p>It’s the Democrats who are abandoning them, by leaving them in the clutches of the liars, deceivers, and cheats, rather than cutting off the funding.</p>
<p>“Well, on the specific topic at hand - the issue of Iranian source of weaponry used against our troops, I have heard it from enough sources in the military and the intelligence community to have no cause to disbelieve it.”</p>
<p>Yeah, yeah, and 10 years of stories about WMD to boot… And no, we didn’t rendition anyone, and there weren’t any torture (oops! “interrogation”) cells in Eastern Europe, or if there were, there aren’t any in Egypt, whoops, and U.S. troops fought a fierce battle against Sunni insurgents dressed as Americans in Karbala, oops, and there are all these Iranian made weapons, oops (we did find ONE), and … Wanna sell me another one?</p>
<p>I DO believe that Iran is doing everything it can to lessen the aggressive potential of the 200,000 hostile troops on its borders. And to be prepared to defend itself, as it has had to in the past, when the client state of the United States used poison gas against its citizens. Now, I’m no particular fan of the current Iranian giovernment, but if my country was under the same imminent threat of attack, and with the same history of torturing the citizens of my country behind it, I expect my government would do the same.</p>
<p>Just as “the media story” said.</p>
<p>But didn’t Bush already start sending the additional troops, even before he announced it, with money that was supposed to be used for the troops already there? </p>
<p>If the Democrats cut off the funding, it wouldn’t stop them from going. The Republicans would leave just leave our soldiers stranded in Iraq with no food, water, equipment or supplies.</p>
<p>Oh, Republicans wouldn’t do that, would they? We’d have bake sales all of the country, and Tammy Wynnette would cut a new CD…</p>
<p>“There’s something about this situation that appeals to them,” O’Reilly would say, “I don’t think they liked eating. They’ve had plenty of chances to desert and go find food somewhere.”</p>
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<p>The next opportunity to cut off funding will come when the supplemental budget requests go to Congress in April. The Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress until earlier this month and, therefore, had exclusive control over the war effort.</p>
<p>The next two months will be very interesting. I have been a C-SPAN watcher for many years. I’ve never seen Congress like it has been over the past two weeks since the White House announced an escalation of the war in Iraq.</p>
<p>The best estimates of what will happen in Iraq are that the Sunni and Shia death squads will temporarily relocate to “the hills”, laying low for the time being while the “surge” unfolds, only to regroup a few months down the road. As John Burns of the NYTimes put it, these groups are perfectly willing to trade territory for time because time is on their side. This scenario provides some false sense of progress. This is basically the scenario that has unfolded each time the US has tried to clean up Falluja.</p>
<p>Another scenario is that US casualties go through the roof as US troops continue going door to door in Bahgdad – they started last week, moving from house to house to house interviewing and photographing each resident. They are more exposed in these neighborhood police barracks than they have ever been, so exposed that the US military does not even plan to routinely resupply them. Supplies will be sent in with new troops for the duration as troops rotate in and out. There is the expectation that some of the US platoons may be pinned down.</p>
<p>The third scenario is that the Malaki government simply disintegrates. Word on the street in Baghdad is that the US goverment has a new prime minister waiting in the wings. Related to this scenario is the question of whether or not the “Iraqi military” actually shows up in Bahgdad for their end of the bargain. They never have before, largely because there is no “Iraqi military”, at least in the sense of a force loyal to the Green Zone government. To the extent there even are Iraqi forces, they are Sunni militias, Shia militias, and Kurdish militias.</p>
<p>Scenario two, unfortunately is how you win the war.</p>
<p>My problem with this so called surge is that this troop level will not be the highest of the war, in fact it will raise troop levels to what they were 6 months ago. I personally would like to see A. more soldiers, and B. more airstrikes</p>
<p>To the question at hand about the Presidential race I think that the Repubs are going to nominate either McCain or Rudy. Romney’s got an outside chance and Newt has none (nor does Hunter, Tancredo, or Huckabee). I have no idea whether or not any of them is strong enough to win against Hillary or Obama (the most likely candidates in my view). </p>
<p>Does anyone here think that Al Gore might enter the race? Not to engage in lookism - but I will - but hasn’t he put on a lot of weight in the last couple of years? Too many cheeseburgers? donuts? scotch? Don’t you wish that some people would just go away? On second thought it’s why Hillary probably doesn’t really have a chance, and why Jeb Bush’s policital career is more than likely over.</p>