<p>Oh please. I don’t lie. The person who made the claim knows who he/she is.</p>
<p>I have read and heard in several places this week opinions that Iraq is no longer even a “civil war” but a war on four fronts. We broke it, we can’t fix it, and we are in deep trouble.</p>
<p>I have never supported this war and I now support getting our troops out.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Really? You’ve seen my facts shot up? Perhaps you could provide some examples. I have never pulled wildly exaggerated figures such as 20,000 amputees out of my rear end like AM did. As far as keeping everything nice-nice, you clearly have not been paying attention to the posting style of those on your side. When I see you start to chastise them, I’ll take your criticism seriously.</p>
<p>But as to your point of me “understanding” her post, yes, I did understand her posts intent which was to wildly exaggerate horrific injuries in order to claim a moral high ground. Abuse of data like this and for this purpose needs to be called.</p>
<p>Hereshoping: Then move on, if someone is idiotic enough to blame our troops for the debacle in Iraq or insult them. I want to hear from you what you think will be the next steps in Iraq, what will succeed and why, and what purpose it will serve for our security and geostrategically.</p>
<p>Jim Webb put it best about the troops in relationship to their commanders, paraphrased: “the troops offer to put their lives on the line, but they do so with the implied quid pro quo that their commanders will show good judgement and act in good faith.”</p>
<p>Here is his full statement, from his response to the State of the Union:</p>
<p>I want to share with all of you a picture that I have carried with me for more than 50 years. This is my father, when he was a young Air Force captain, flying cargo planes during the Berlin Airlift. He sent us the picture from Germany, as we waited for him, back here at home. When I was a small boy, I used to take the picture to bed with me every night, because for more than three years my father was deployed, unable to live with us full-time, serving overseas or in bases where there was no family housing. I still keep it, to remind me of the sacrifices that my mother and others had to make, over and over again, as my father gladly served our country. I was proud to follow in his footsteps, serving as a Marine in Vietnam. My brother did as well, serving as a Marine helicopter pilot. My son has joined the tradition, now serving as an infantry Marine in Iraq.</p>
<p>Like so many other Americans, today and throughout our history, we serve and have served, not for political reasons, but because we love our country. On the political issues - those matters of war and peace, and in some cases of life and death - we trusted the judgment of our national leaders. We hoped that they would be right, that they would measure with accuracy the value of our lives against the enormity of the national interest that might call upon us to go into harm’s way.</p>
<p>We owed them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us - sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it.</p>
<p>The President took us into this war recklessly. He disregarded warnings from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command, whose jurisdiction includes Iraq, the director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many, many others with great integrity and long experience in national security affairs. We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable - and predicted - disarray that has followed.</p>
<p>The war’s costs to our nation have been staggering.</p>
<p>Financially.</p>
<p>The damage to our reputation around the world.</p>
<p>The lost opportunities to defeat the forces of international terrorism.</p>
<p>And especially the precious blood of our citizens who have stepped forward to serve.</p>
<p>The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being fought; nor does the majority of our military. We need a new direction. Not one step back from the war against international terrorism. Not a precipitous withdrawal that ignores the possibility of further chaos. But an immediate shift toward strong regionally-based diplomacy, a policy that takes our soldiers off the streets of Iraq’s cities, and a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.</p>
<p>FF, would it make you feel so much better if I said, OOPSIE, I meant 20,000 INJURIES, not 20,000 amputations? Does that make you feel like we are all standing on the same “moral high ground”?</p>
<p>Fact is, there have been over 20,000 serious, many of them catastropic, injuries. I don’t know if that number is even accurate, and of that published number, how many of those are amputations. But the fact remains that even our government seems to agree that over 20,000 people have come home from Iraq injured, in some form or another. The extent of those injuries has not been documented.</p>
<p>Why don’t you just agree that the number of serious injuries, whatever their etiology (and these don’t even include mental illness) is horrific? Do you find it acceptable that this many broken people are coming back home after their mission?</p>
<p>I certainly don’t.</p>
<p>Well, AllMusic, if I were to use a bit of logic: </p>
<p>-following your stubborn disdain for the American soldier, the “fact” that, as you say, so many of our soldiers are “drunks” or “junkies” would clearly have some impact on your alleged high casualty numbers. </p>
<p>Just a thought.</p>
<p>Oh, how so, there Dot?</p>
<p>
</p>
<ol>
<li><p>It would offer a concrete example that you are at least sometimes casual with your facts.</p></li>
<li><p>It would show that you are mature enough to publicly admit it when you were wrong about what you wrote.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>
</p>
<p>Assuming, as you do in this thread, that a rather large portion of the troops are “junkies” and “drunkards” (“criminals,” in fact) their debilitation would seem to make them far more prone to getting shot, or simply falling out of moving trucks and helicopters in a stooper.</p>
<p>To be clear, I do not agree with your misbegotten premise.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This question ranks right up there with, “are you still beating your wife?” in terms of having an acceptable answer. Of course all injuries are bad and none are “acceptable” if the mission itself is unacceptable. Obviously this is where we disagree - you believe that it is not acceptable; I believe that this war was entered into with noble intent and, once initiated, the desire to prevail is something that we as both a humanitarian nation as well as a nation which is interested in its own self-interest needs to do. However, if we pull out now and allow Iraq, its people and the region to enter into the level of chaos that is predicted and if the resulting “victory” as seen by al-Qaeda results in more terrorism as also is predicted, then of course each and every one of the casualties that have been incurred are “unacceptable”.</p>
<p>Dorothy–You know full well that none of us “disdain” our soldiers. It’s their so-called “commander-in-chief” we disdain. … We’ve heard a lot in this thread about injuries and amputees, but not so much about the long-term affects on soldiers with no obvious, visible wounds. I have done plenty of volunteer work at a local soup kitchen/homeless shelter. Many of our saddest, most messed-up male “clients” are middle-aged Vietnam veterans, most of them either alcoholic or on drugs, and several who suffer the occasional horrifying flashbacks. These men who had served our country so bravely are now filthy and alone, with nowhere to go and are forced to depend on charity for the simplest necessities. … Our country has never done a particularly good job of taking care of these psychologically damaged soldiers. What makes you think Iraq’s veterans will fare any differently? Think about this when you slap a yellow ribbon on the bumper of your SUV.</p>
<p>ff–Iraq is already in “chaos”–our troops are just another faction there.</p>
<p>And I don’t believe the war was entered into with noble intent. Bush Jr. was showing Bush Sr. that he too could make a difference in the Middle East and even go him one better by removing the nasty old dictator that Bush Sr. left in power after the first Gulf War.</p>
<p>Terrorists? We didn’t enter Iraq to chase terrorists. If that were the case we would have entered Saudi Arabia or possibly Egypt. Or concentrated on Afghanistan.Too many people have started to believe the lies they have been fed. We seem to have short memories in this country. </p>
<p>“We have always been at war with Eastasia/Eurasia.”–Orwell</p>
<p>The generation that lived through Vietnam should have been more proactive in opposing this war. Our young people should have been less self-absorbed and more political. It has been like watching a slow-motion accident that has been going on for years. I have a family and responsibilities but am starting to feel guilty that I didn’t chain myself to the White House fence as a few did. </p>
<p>Yes, I am fed up.</p>
<p>Hindoo,</p>
<p>I don’t know, but from my experience calling a class or even a large part of a group of people “drunkards”, “junkies” and “criminals” amounts to complete and total disdain; not even lawyers deserve this, for god’s sake. </p>
<p>I should expect to be punched in the nose if I ever said such a thing in good company. What’s more it might be the only proper response to such an insult.</p>
<p>Dorothy–I didn’t call American soldiers “drunkards,” “junkies,” or “criminals,” although I’m sure they’re proportionally represented by them–just as the rest of the population is. I was referring to the soldiers who come back from war so psychologically ravaged they can’t survive, and who have since been forgotten. It’s more than sad, it’s disgraceful. And we sure as hell don’t need to be creating more of them. It’s so easy to prate about “supporting our troops,” but apparently much harder to really do it.</p>
<p>I did not think that you had, Hindoo, but this seems to be a representation of at least some of those who share your political sympathies–as above.</p>
<p>As I have repeatedly stated, I did not support going to war, either; I did, however, hope for the success of the intervention after it had become a forgone conclusion. To me, too many on the left actually rejoiced in American setbacks and celebrated the foibles of the ‘liberation’: both for political reasons and to be able to say “I was right all along,” one would assume.</p>
<p>The left does NOT rejoice in the American setbacks and >3000 dead; that’s why we want to get the hell out. And we WERE right all along, which is why we rage as the apologists for the people who have been so consistently and tragically WRONG assert that sending more young men and women to their deaths represents “support”.</p>
<p>Problem is Dottie, we <em>were</em> right all along. Had this war deposed Saddam, and installed a functional government, one that sincerely respected and addressed the needs of all the people of the country, I would have eaten crow big time. </p>
<p>I think you mistakenly believe that liberals “want Iraq to fail”, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. I would have loved to see that country succeed, and would gladly have said that my initial fears were wrong.</p>
<p>However, now that things are so much more devastating than even our worst nightmares pre-invasion, there is nothing left to say but bring our troops home NOW.</p>
<p>as I said, and I stand by it:</p>
<p>
Perhaps it is mere human nature.</p>
<p>Mommusic: Well, I DID go out and march against this war before it began, but I’ll confess I found the experience a bit troubling. There were all sorts of very cogent reasons to at least debate this war (which we never did and now are having to did in the worst possible context, after we are stalemated in a distant land with 10,000s of our troops at risk), let alone oppose it. However, within the media and within the anti-war demonstrations itself, there was a false impression given often that all those against the war were merely “anti-war.” Well, I am anti-war (why would any of us choose to fight wars if there were ways to avoid them), but I am not a pacifist. I think some wars need to be fought. But I, and a lot of others who did march, thought this was a stupid war and bound to dig us into a hole. However, the message of the demonstrations often was a sort of “give peace a chance” kind of idealism. And that’s certainly the way it was portrayed in the media.</p>
<p>We did need our people in Congress to slow the train down, but it was post 9/11 and no one wanted to be seen to be slowing down the effort to respond to the events of that time.</p>
<p>In other words, chaining yourself to a fence wouldn’t have done much good. But make your voice heard every day, now that the nation as a whole has caught on to what a bad idea this war was in the first place.</p>
<p>I am not a pacifist. After 9/11, I thought we should go into Afghanistan, and I thought before the Iraq War that we should consolidate a victory there, if at all possible, before turning attention elsewhere. I thought the run-up to the Iraq War was being badly mangled, even if you thought the war was the right thing ultimately. We basically alienated many potential coalition partners, and financial contributors I might add, by announcing unilaterally that we thought Saddam should be “pre-emptively” struck. I always thought if we had been willing to wait for 6 months for a year and ratchet up sanctions through a UN, multilateral program of escalating threats (and he continued to disregard them), we could have eventually done the same thing but had many more allies on our side with troop and financial commitments. We sure could use those now.</p>
<p>I was digressing. I felt this war would be another lever of division between us and the Islamic world, turning more and more previous moderates against us and serving as a recruiting tool. The Administration constantly bandied around different justifications for why we were going into Iraq and it confused the public and the press. Wolfowitz himself stated that the bureaucratic justification that people could agree on was the “weapons of mass destruction” claim, so they began emphasizing that. The real purpose that Wolfowitz and others had argued for was to install a democracy in Iraq. The thought was that this would serve as a bastion of stability and an example for the rest of the Middle East. And they argued that we would be welcomed as liberators as began this task.</p>
<p>Spreading democracy sounds admirable – as Funding Father put it, of “noble intent” – but it was horribly misguided to think that you could come in and do so at the point of a gun among a population of three distinct ethnic/religious groups and succeed in this kind of nation building where there wasn’t any tradition of democracy. Look at our own Revolutionary War. We wanted to rule ourselves. We didn’t appreciate having overlords from afar. Why would we think the Iraqis would have been any different? Someone said it takes about 5 seconds for an army of liberation to become one of occupation.</p>
<p>There were these and other good reasons to not go into this war. The Administration actively “shut down” intelligence officers who made these points. </p>
<p>It was the Administration which allowed no real debate, which kept confusing the issues about why we were actually going to Iraq, which lied to get us there. They shouldn’t wonder why public opinion has gone far south on them when they didn’t allow the democratic process to take place up front.</p>