<p>No, SJMom, I do not support the draft. But if we must send people to Iraq, send those who support this !@#$%^&! madness and their children. They are not “defending” America. They are damaging our interests and long-term security to an incalculable degree. (All while giving lip-service to Afghanistan…would that we had poured half the resources squandered in Iraq there…and Pakistan, an unstable country with strong Islamist sentiments and nuclear weapons already a reality. But, hey…Pakistan didn’t serve Bush’s interests in waving his weeny around the Middle East to prove that he was a bigger man [sic] than his father.</p>
<p>“They had an automatic edge in the elections, which were probably held way too early.”</p>
<p>The edge was NOT automatic, but created by the aggressors in the formation of the puppet provisional government.</p>
<p>The secular, educated Iraqis will hate America forever. The Shia can come to terms with the Americans. The Sunni can as well. The Kurds follow which way the wind blows. But the western-oriented Iraqis will never forgive the occupiers, and the destruction of their dreams by their erstwhile allies.</p>
<p>I don’t particularly support a draft either, obviously, with a near draft age son.</p>
<p>But here’s the way I look at it. It is really easy for most Americans to avoid thinking about this war. It is, after all, a war that doesn’t affect them much, as long as they don’t read the paper or watch news (which plenty of people don’t). It is someone else’s children dying to “protect us”. What a load of hooey.</p>
<p>If this is a war worth fighting, those who support it should be first in line at the recruiting office. Not a Republican in America should be at home heralding this war, unless they have a loved one on the front lines. </p>
<p>Were their loved ones in harm’s way (instead of some other poor schmo’s kids), the support would wane. And, if this is REALLY a war worth fighting, there absolutely should be collective sacrifice…this should not be a war fought by poor people, but by wealthy college students too. If Americans really believe in this mission, whatever the heck it is, let’s see the effort to have everyone involved. </p>
<p>There would be no greater way to test the will of the American people than by calling a draft. Then we would see the lack of support, because as I have said, it is realllllly easy to say one “supports the war” when they have nothing to lose in the proposition.</p>
<p>That’s why I support a tax increase to pay for the war instead of borrowing the money from China. The Government Accounting Office has already said that the rate at which we are borrowing has us heading for economic disaster, maybe in as little as 20 years.</p>
<p>I think alot of people who currently “support the war” because it doesn’t affect their lives would suddenly change their minds if that support meant they had to give up family vacations or send their children to lower priced schools in order to pay for it. But as long as posterity is picking up the tab? Why not.</p>
<p>TheDad, you are still talking about “send those who support this !@#$%^&! madness and their children.” If you want to suggest that FundingFather or I enlist, that’s one thing. But you, and others, continue to suggest that we “send” our college age kids. The last time my 19 year old really went somewhere that I told him to, was probably in HS. It’s not up to me, or any other conservative, to “send” my sons. If they chose to join a branch of military service, I’d support that goal, just as I support all of their goals. But I don’t own them, and when you talk about “sending” our kids, you ARE talking about the draft, whether you want to admit it or not.</p>
<p>My feeling is that if Bush had said, “this war is over, we’re bringing the troops home, even if we leave anarchy behind in Iraq” then all of the liberals would be shouting from the rooftops that we can’t abandon the people of Iraq. I think it’s always opposite day in Democrat-land. It’s always Vietnam, because that’s the only point of reference most baby-boomers understand. Everything is viewed through that prism. We ignore how this country turned its back on South Vietnam and allowed communist toatalitarians to take over Laos, Cambodia and all of Vietnam, leaving carnage left and right. I always ask, “What do you think will happen if the US pulls out precipitously?” I’ve yet to hear an answer – maybe I should just pull out old footage of the helicopters scrambling from the embassy rooftops in Saigon.</p>
<p>SJMom, I totally get that your party’s leadership has made such a mess in Iraq that increased chaos will result when we leave. What I don’t get is how the “surge” is supposed to change that, especially given that the same people will be in charge of it. You do understand that we would need many, many times the troops we currently have in Iraq to approximate even the imperfect level of “control” we had over Iraq? </p>
<p>All this mini-escalation will do is delay the inevitable by a couple years so the next President gets the blame for what happens when we withdraw instead of this one. I don’t find that kind of cynical political machination an acceptable reason.</p>
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You don’t see how the number of troops makes a difference? I can’t understand why that’s a difficult concept to grasp. I believe that General Petraeus is new, yet experienced, and will make a difference in Iraq. I don’t believe that any conflict follows a play book.</p>
<p>I only hear the left talking about failure. If this were a sporting event, I sure wouldn’t want to be on your team.</p>
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<p>General Petraeus told Congress it would take about 100,000 more troops to be effective; not 21,000. </p>
<p>If we were willing to send enough people to be effective, I would agree with it. We aren’t. We aren’t even sending enough to be as “effective” as we were in Vietnam. It would take about a million more troops to have that level of “effectiveness” in a country as large and populous as Iraq.</p>
<p>If we are going to sink to trivializing what is going on in Iraq by using sports metaphors, what the right is doing is akin to the guy who loses his paycheck trying to handicap football and then comes home and blames his wife because she “didn’t believe” he would win. You can “want to be on his team”–and castigate his wife for not “believing in him”–all you want, but it’s not going to suddenly make betting on football a winning proposition. </p>
<p>There’s a difference between “hoping” that a surge will work and actually having a workable plan.</p>
<p>SJMom, from what you’re saying, you think a troop size of 150,000 is adequate to quell violence in a population of over 5 million in Baghdad alone. </p>
<p>So if it fails, you’re going to have to blame our troops. They had enough boots on the ground to do the job, right?</p>
<p>Sorry, but no, I can’t be on your team, if it means playing like that. Give the men and women in our military what they need to do the job or at least have the guts to look them in the eye and take responsibility for not doing it.</p>
<p>Unfortunately we have a president/vice-president who’s understanding of war is about as deep as playing a football game.</p>
<p>I’ll be rooting to Impeach if Bush escalates to Iran. We need to spread a little democracy right here in our own country.</p>
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<p>I think we all understand the difference between Vietnam and Iraq. George W. Bush had a plan for getting out of Vietnam.</p>
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<p>What else is there to talk about? From the deception (or incompetance) that led to the invasion of Iraq, to the lack of a reconstruction plan, to the billions poured into the country with no results (less electricity today than the week after the invasion), to the rejection of diplomacy. The Bush administration has, quite understandably, lost the trust of the American people. Their policies in Iraq have produced a nightmare and they are incapable of presenting a credible rationale for our presence.</p>
<p>I can only speak for myself. I supported the Iraq invasion and voted for the current administration’s reelection. Today, I believe that every word out of Bush’s, Rice’s, and Cheney’s mouths is a bold-faced lie. That’s just the way I feel after watching them in action.</p>
<p>It goes beyond the messy end-game in Iraq. Frankly, it doesn’t much matter what we do. If we want to kill hundreds more American soldiers before we pack it in? If we don’t? The outcome in Iraq is the same. At this point, there won’t be any stability in Iraq until the Iraqis wear themselves out during a sustained period of killing each other. Two years, five years, ten years. Whatever. We can sit around and get killed along with them. Or not. </p>
<p>I’ll tell you what I’m more concerned about. The Clint Eastwood “make my day” sabre rattling towards Iran. I’ve seen this act before (in the early days of the lead up to Iraq). I think Bush will do everything he can to get Admiral Fallon’s new carrier group fired on in the Straits of Hormuz in order to justify a bombing campaign against Iran. Cheney’s got an itchy trigger finger. He’s dying to wheel around and plaster Iraq in the face with buckshot. These cowboy quail hunters scare me to death.</p>
<p>If there are new scenes of helicopters from embassy rooftops, it’s falls to Bush’s responsibility, not his opponents. He’s the one who blithely has made the Middle East more unstable, provided the recruiting poster moments for the Islamist radicals, devastated a country while pretending to save it, has been a brick wall when it comes to listening to advice against what he wants to do, beginning with the State Department’s “Futures of Iraq” study all the way up to the bi-partisan Iraq Study Group’s report. Bush thought he was clever using Iraq as a divisive partisan tool where he could get all the political credit. Well…it worked. I’m more than willing to give him all the credit for what’s happened. </p>
<p>Btw, about a year or two ago, I read a monograph that Petraeus wrote for the National War College or some such. Had a number of points in it that served as a blazing indictment of how this administration has viewed Iraq. One of the more salient points was that an army of liberation has a very short half-life on the way to becoming an army of occupation.</p>
<p>If I were to stipulate that invading Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein was justified–and I don’t–then I surely would have wanted to recognize and understand the terrain when we invaded. The geographical terrain is trivial, the Iraqi political terrain paramount. We tried to impose our satraps, first in the person of Chalabi and then Allawi. The two largest political groupings in Iraq are Iranian-sympathizing Shiite…and we’re mystified and angry at the growing Iranian influence and how the Iranians are protected by current Iraqi government factions. Most Iraqi army and police units are in no way “national” forces…they are regional proxies for various political groups. There is no Iraqi “center” to hold…as Mini accurately notes, the Iraqi secularists, a minority to begin with, were politically emasculated and are fleeing the country as fast as they can. More to the point, very few Iraqis trust the United States…we’ve been a [Republican] elephant blundering around in a china shop, smashing bodies, infrastructure, and institutions every time they turn around.</p>
<p>Comparing Iraq to a sporting event is ludicrous…except that it’s the war supporters who are doing it. When Bush was asked what would make this new “surge” work when other strategies hadn’t, his response was that he told his generals “…it had to.” As if this were a sporting event where just trying harder would make the difference…trying harder doesn’t do a damned thing if you’re working stupidly. GMAFB.</p>
<p>“Frankly, it doesn’t much matter what we do. If we want to kill hundreds more American soldiers before we pack it in? If we don’t? The outcome in Iraq is the same.”</p>
<p>Americans do tend to be afflicted with this particular grandiosity thought disorder that assumes WE are the ones that actually determine the outcome. History suggests otherwise. </p>
<p>Petreaus already disagrees with his future boss. Casey says we need only 10,000 additional troops. Petreaus says 250,000, for Baghdad alone. They can’t both be correct. The reality is that they are both wrong. The U.S. can’t maintain an additional 100,000 troops (just for Baghdad), and the paltry escalation of aggressive, hostile occupiers is just an attempt to pin blame on the Iraqis.</p>
<p>I AM concerned about our Pres. His speech is slurred, his speech patterns are repetitive, he can’t seem to stay focused on a single subject for more than three sentences without a prepared script. He has expressions of grandiosity. I think if I were his doc, I’d get out my DSM-IV.</p>
<p>War is still doing well by some folks:</p>
<p><a href=“HAL Interactive Stock Chart | Halliburton Company Stock - Yahoo Finance”>HAL Interactive Stock Chart | Halliburton Company Stock - Yahoo Finance;
<p>Mini:</p>
<p>The administration could establish a little credibility if they were talking about Iraq in a way that suggested any recognition of reality on the ground. I understand that extricating ourselves and attempting to minimize the collateral damage throughout the region is an immense challenge with no easy answers. Something as simple as a statement of fact that we can’t stay there forever and that we are pursuing every angle (including diplomacy) to move to the next stage would give me some hope that the administration “gets it”.</p>
<p>But, that is NOT what we are hearing. We are hearing open-ended permanent commitment in Iraq. We are hearing a total rejection of regional diplomacy. We are hearing a complete absence of specific benchmarks. We are hearing no definition of our goals in Iraq, no rationale for a continued occupation. And, we continue to hear a degree of sabre rattling toward Iran and Syria that belongs in an old John Wayne cowboy movie, this despite specific diplopmatic overtures from Syria to Jim Baker (who is all but BEGGING the administration to pursue them).</p>
<p>The timeline in Iraq is now such that we are there until after the 2008 elections and a Democratic President is stuck with mop-up duty, probably after another 1000 or more US fatalities. Bush won’t budge. The “surge” takes us through 2007. Then, we are in an election year. A cut-off of funding is such a ham-fisted, messy approach that they’ll never round up the 60 Senators required.</p>
<p>At this point, the real concern has to be Bush’s efforts to provoke a shooting war with Iran. That has me worried sick. We’ve seen this all before. The sabre rattling is unmistakable.</p>
<p>“The administration could establish a little credibility if they were talking about Iraq in a way that suggested any recognition of reality on the ground.”</p>
<p>Credibility with whom? Take away our guns, and the U.S. (not just the Administration, but the U.S.) has NO credibility virtually anywhere. Name your continent, or your country - it doesn’t matter. No one believes anything Madame Secretary Mendaciousness has to say about anything, no one believes U.S. “intelligence”, no one believes Republican “victory” speeches, no one believes the Democrats are serious about getting out of Iraq. If you go abroad, you’ll find most folks will avoid talking with you about any of this, except to express commiseration (if you invite it). You don’t see editorials in the papers anymore, columnists don’t write about it, and there aren’t any letters to the editor. It is simply assumed that Americans lie, and there isn’t a lot more to be said.</p>
<p>And then we have yet another report:</p>
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<p>And what’s all this about an additional $200+M in war spending, while cutting domestic programs? Aren’t conservatives sick of seeing their hard earned dollars funneled into war funding? What about American people? Don’t we deserve some funding for programming that affects our own citizens?</p>
<p>What cred. does this bland piece of claptrap have?</p>
<p>Probably about as much as any of the other bland pieces of claptrap have had.</p>
<p>And will effect just about as much change.</p>
<p>It was so worthless that the new nominated head of national “intelligence”, Mike McConnell, said on National Public Radio, on the day it was released, that he hadn’t even bothered to read it.</p>
<p>Now THAT is a statement.</p>