I'm pretty sure we've already set the precedent that if this president doesn't like something he can either issue an executive order to get around it or just ignore it entirely. Isn't that how it works?
I give you credit for recognizing that you are advocating an indefinite presence. The second part you are missing though is that war in a democracy is as much a function of politics as it is military. Really all war is a function of politics as Von Clausitz said. If a leader cannot sustain the public will for war then that leader even he wants to he will lose his job and a successor will be elected who does end the war. You can blame Obama but if he doesn't end the occupation it's possible he loses the election and another president is elected who will.
Well I said earlier that I don't really blame Obama so much as I blame the ignorant masses in America and the infant government in Iraq that he was pandering to with his actions. An indefinite US military presence in Iraq would benefit the Iraqis a lot more than it would benefit us, but their foolish government didn't realize that at the time, and now their country is falling apart as a result of their actions.
We didn't "allow" it to deteriorate, it was going to deteriorate regardless of any real effort the US could make. You're talking about a huge area with millions of young men, a total religious domination of thought with a fundamental divide,no tradition of democracy and no outside threat to galvanize unity of action. There were only competing interest and no sense of Iraq as one nation. Let me ask you something: The US currently carries about $1.4 trillion dollars of debt for Iraq and Afghanistan, we amass about $470 billion a year on just the interest on our DOD budget alone each year. We are committed to spending about $1 trillion on post-war care for vets. We are still running a deficit every year, so, who do you want to tax to pay for the indefinite occupation of Iraq? Corporations? The wealthy? How are you going to get that past the Tea Party? The reality is, sometimes managed failure is the best, most rational option; like a court approved bankruptcy.
So let's review. Obama should have ignored the agreement on the deadline that Bush put in place to remove US forces and should have kept an indefinite presence in a country that didn't want them there. Sounds legit.
Nah, it worked out better this way, now there isn't a country at all to not want us there when we have to go back in and stabilize the region once again. Then we can prematurely abandon them, have them fall back into chaos then rinse, lather, and repeat.
Germany is a base to project power if needed in Europe. it is a post war commitment to NATO, you know, our real allies. And it's not a real life, this or that choice. We will be in Germany so that makes an Iraq occupation less affordable. Germany is a base to project power if needed in Europe. And we are not going back into Iraq, or Syria, other than logistical help, humanitarian help and bombing from the sky to stave off genocide. We could go in to Kuwait or Jordan if it came to that.
And now we need to project power in the middle east.....if only there was a place we could set up a base in order to do that.....
No we don't. Not outside of the mentions above, Kuwait, Jordan or the Arab oil states. We already have bases in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Clearly we do need to project power in the middle east to stabilize the region given that small groups like ISIS are running wild and the issues with Iran, Iraq would be a perfect place to set up a permanent base and help form a stable, successful nation.
Nothing solves Middle East problems more than a projection of US power. That always works. That's right out of the neo-con handbook. Like Paul Wolfowitz himself posts here.
See above. We do not have to solve all the worlds conflicts, I think what we have proved is, we can't where the general population is against us. Like Vietnam, a much smaller place where we kept 500,000 combat troops for 5 years.
This is a mess we caused, and if we hadn't created the mess then abandoned the people prematurely, we would have solved it. Sure that won't help everyone, the people in Syria would still have issues with IS, but the US is responsible for the problems in Iraq and they are responsible for solving them.
Shuck your guilt dawg, this was going to happen with or without us. With Iraq the choices were brutal tyranny or civil war ... it's a religious thing. We made an audacious effort for a massively ambitious, but naive plan and it did not work.
That's just not the case, it wasn't going to happen so long as the US had forces there. The only thing naive about our "plan" was that we could leave as soon as we did. Our presence would eliminate the possibility of brutal tyranny or civil war, us leaving when we did pretty much ensured that one or the other would happen. The adults left town and the kids went nuts.
Just when was that 1000 years of Shia Sunni conflict going to end? 5 years, 20? 50? What causes them to make peace, threats of retaliation by the US? Who would run out of support, the Saudi backed side or the Iranian back side? You still haven't said how you want to pay for that.... tax cuts for the wealthy?
Hard to watch. <iframe width='416' height='234' src='http://www.cnn.com/video/api/embed.html#/video/bestoftv/2014/08/11/vo-wolf-yazidi-humanitarian-mission-chaos-watson-raw.cnn' frameborder='0'></iframe>
It's funny that you only talk about the costs of a potential base in Iraq, but not of the costs of bases in Korea, Japan, Germany or anywhere else around the globe, is only the cost of a base in Iraq significant to you? Also, no one said that the disagreement between those two religious groups would end, but that doesn't mean there has to be open war in Iraq. Please tell me you realize that. There is still disagreement between Catholics and Protestants but that doesn't mean there is open warfare going on. No one "solved" that dispute, but the violence stopped.
