apparently, neither you nor pg can read, or at least comprehend what you've read. i was not comparing iraq and vietnam, but rathe rnoting how remarkable it is that some democrats would excuse genocide (see my sig, which, btw has been there since early july) for the sake of political expediency. if you have something meaningful to add, please do. otherwise, join your fellow traveler batman in his dark, dung-filled redoubt.
well basso, at the very least, the argument that we screwed this up so badly we have to say because if we leave it will be a blood bath because we never should have been there really isn't a defense. imo
Thanks, basso. But I don't think I will stay the **** out of this thread. (You Republican chickenhawks are so angry!) Every time you rip off someone else's writing you can expect to be ridiculed for it. Sorry. You brought it on yourself, I didn't do it. Go poof now angry, angry basso.
so you're not really bring up the 1.7 million people who were slaughtered after we left vietnam and you really didn't mention that genocide could be the result of us leaving? or you did but not for argument's sake?
basso, 4 of your 6 citations appear in his blog post which was made yesterday, including the exact same passages from the OC Register and the Christian Science Monitor stories. Either you're straight up lying or you ripped this stuff off from some other blog that ripped off Taranto.
Even thought Batman and I disagree on a good many political points, this post just made me giggle. Thanks dude.
You talk about finishing the job. We have to finish the job. Unfortunately neither you nor the people who think like you can come up with a legitimate plan for how to finish the job. Ultimately, I can't say that I really blame you for this failure. It's not your fault that you can't come up with a way to accomplish what is already an impossible task. At this point the job can not be finished. With all of your facts and figures about the bad results of a loss, you still have nothing concrete to say on how to win. The people who aren't so politically invested in this that they can’t face reality believe that the job is already lost. No matter what we do, there will be ethnic cleansing and civil war. We can delay it at the cost of the lives of American soldiers, but it will happen. In fact, yesterday I heard a gentleman who contracts for war games for the US government discuss this. He talks about a phased withdrawal as the best option based on the outcomes of his government funded war gaming. Have you seen Der Untergang? Your 'finish the job' argument reminds me of the many scenes in that movie where the Germany army is in ruins, the Soviets have surrounded the city, artillery falls constantly on the Furherbunker, but Hitler tells everybody who will listed about how Jodl's (phantom) army will swoop in to rescue the day and save the Third Reich. You are engaging in wish fulfillment fantasies if you think there is any chance that Jodl will save the day in Iraq. I know it is difficult. You invested much of your soul into this war. But it is lost and you will be much more at peace with yourself when you stop fighting with reality. There is no chance for victory. We can slow the destruction down at the cost of a steady stream of American lives, but we can only delay the inevitable. I would agree that victory would have fixed much. Victory would have been great. But we have lost and sticking your fingers in your ears, humming a tune, and telling yourself that we are winning will not affect the situation. The time when we should have been having the discussions about ‘a new way forward’ was about three years ago, when Rumsfeld was talking about how “stuff happens” and was refusing to admit that his 'on the cheap' plan was a failure. Perhaps it could have been salvaged if we were quick to adapt, but we couldn’t have the discussion because you and others were too busy with the other fantasy, that “things in Iraq are getting better steadily and we just need to give it time”. You squandered the best options because you didn't want to look at reality then, and you are doing it now as well. I hope you have the self-awareness to admit that you found at that time comfort in a satisfying fantasy. Look at your positions now with the same eye. You are doing it again. If people weren’t dying it might make me feel sorry for your self-induced delusional state. You should not ignore reality just because you don't like it.
It's a tough job. Real tough. But we're making progress. It's slow, as you can see here, but we're training the right wingers to stand up so we can stand down. I believe that all right wingers will one day be able to join the free world and say "I wrote this." Some say right wingers can't write original words, that something in their culture makes it impossible. But I believe God gave them the ability and that it's in the best interest of the United States and the World for them to write real good.
the CSM stories has been out there since jfk and obama made their comments last week. they're duly linked to in my post, and the other quotes are also credited, so not sure what your issue is. i stopped reading opinionjournal some time ago, and haven't read the post you cited. sorry if that's not good enough for you.
IIRC, laughingstocko, it took you a great long time to kind of, halfway admit your plagiarism last time too. We're not in a hurry. Keep dancing.
First of all basso, Biden has a plan that would provide safety from those in the green zone that would coincide with the U.S. troop withdraw. Furthermore nobody is saying Pol Pot was good. And just because you say the Libs are willing to blow off genocide in Iraq doesn't make it so. Almost every plan the Dems and Libs put forward, as well as the one being currently pursued by your boy Bush has other nations helping Iraq with security in order to prevent such a genocide. Deal with your own conscience regarding linking or not linking. I won't get into it right now.
Look I'm only a rookie here but how the heck can you not be comparing Iraq to Vietnam? The first quote in your original post mentions Iraq. You are plainly drawing a comparison between the two.
i love how the iraqdelusionedhawks like to say that hundreds of thousands of iraqis might die if we leave, a number they pull out of their ass, yet try to slander numerous studies that have put the number of deaths already in iraq (which would not have resulted if there was no US presence) in the hundreds of thousands. similarly where were these cries of genocide when hundreds of thousands of iraqis died in the 90s due to sanctions? the only thing worse than genocide is hypocrisy about genocide. and yall are guilty of both.
since you're all such Taranto fans http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110010382 [rquoter]'It Didn't Happen' Democrats go soft on crimes against humanity. BY JAMES TARANTO Thursday, July 26, 2007 12:01 a.m. Barack Obama's latest pronouncement on Iraq should have shocked the conscience. In an interview with the Associated Press last week, the freshman Illinois senator and Democratic presidential candidate opined that even preventing genocide is not a sufficient reason to keep American troops in Iraq. "Well, look, if that's the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now--where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife--which we haven't done," Mr. Obama told the AP. "We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven't done. Those of us who care about Darfur don't think it would be a good idea." Mr. Obama is engaging in sophistry. By his logic, if America lacks the capacity to intervene everywhere there is ethnic killing, it has no obligation to intervene anywhere--and perhaps an obligation to intervene nowhere. His reasoning elevates consistency into the cardinal virtue, making the perfect the enemy of the good. Further, he elides the distinction between an act of omission (refraining from intervention in Congo and Darfur) and an act of commission (withdrawing from Iraq). The implication is that although the U.S. has had a military presence in Iraq since 1991, the fate of Iraqis is not America's problem. Unlike his main rivals for the Democratic nomination, Mr. Obama has been consistent in opposing the liberation of Iraq. In a 2002 speech, he declared that "an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world." But Mr. Obama's side lost that argument, and it is no longer 2002. For America to countenance genocide of Arab Muslims hardly seems a promising way to extinguish the Mideast's flames or to encourage the best impulses of the Arab world. One may take the position that genocide would not be the likely result of an American retreat from Iraq. That is the view of Mr. Obama's Massachusetts colleague John Kerry, the 2004 presidential nominee. Mr. Kerry, who served in Vietnam before turning against that war, voted for the Iraq war before turning against it. He draws on the Vietnam experience in making the case that the outcome of a U.S. pullout from Iraq would not be that bad. "We heard that argument over and over again about the bloodbath that would engulf the entire Southeast Asia, and it didn't happen," he said recently. "It didn't happen"--just as Mr. Kerry predicted it wouldn't. In his June 1971 debate with fellow swift boat veteran John O'Neill on "The Dick Cavett Show," the 27-year-old Mr. Kerry said, "There's absolutely no guarantee that there would be a bloodbath. . . . One has to, obviously, conjecture on this. However, I think the arguments clearly indicate that there probably wouldn't be. . . . There is no interest on the part of the North Vietnamese to try to massacre the people once people have agreed to withdraw." Mr. Kerry acknowledged that "there would be certain political assassinations," but said they would number only "four or five thousand." Here is what did happen: In 1973, the U.S. withdrew its troops from Vietnam, as Mr. Kerry had urged. In December 1974, the Democratic Congress ended military aid to South Vietnam. In April 1975, Saigon fell. According to a 2001 investigation by the Orange County Register, Hanoi's communist regime imprisoned a million Vietnamese without charge in "re-education" camps, where an estimated 165,000 perished. "Thousands were abused or tortured: their hands and legs shackled in painful positions for months, their skin slashed by bamboo canes studded with thorns, their veins injected with poisonous chemicals, their spirits broken with stories about relatives being killed," the Register reported. Laos and Cambodia also fell to communists in 1975. Time magazine reported in 1978 that some 40,000 Laotians had been imprisoned in re-education camps: "The regime's figures do not include 12,000 unfortunates who have been packed off to Phong Saly. There, no pretense at re-education is made. As one high Pathet Lao official told Australian journalist John Everingham, who himself spent eight days in a Lao prison last year, 'No one ever returns.' " The postwar horrors of Vietnam and Laos paled next to the "killing fields" of Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge undertook an especially vicious revolution. During that regime's 3 1/2-year rule, at least a million Cambodians, and perhaps as many as two million, died from starvation, disease, overwork or murder. The Vietnamese invaders who toppled the Khmer Rouge in 1979 were liberators, albeit only by comparison. In the aftermath of America's withdrawal from Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. According to the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees, between 1975 and 1995 more than 1.4 million Indochinese escaped, nearly 800,000 of them by boat. This does not include "boat people" who died at sea, 10% of the total by some estimates. Mr. Obama's blasé cynicism about the possibility of genocide in Iraq is of a piece with Mr. Kerry's denial of the humanitarian catastrophe that followed America's departure from Vietnam. It also creates an opportunity for the Democratic front-runner. In 1998, Hillary Clinton's husband traveled to Rwanda, where he apologized for failing to intervene to prevent the 1994 genocide in which Hutus massacred some 800,000 Tutsis. "We cannot change the past," President Clinton said. "But we can and must do everything in our power to help you build a future without fear, and full of hope." It was in this spirit that Mr. Clinton intervened in Kosovo in 1999, over Republican objections, to prevent ethnic cleansing of Albanian Muslims. Like Mr. Kerry, Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war, then tilted against it before facing the Democratic primary electorate. Her opponents on the left have made much of her refusal to apologize for her vote. But if she can find the courage to defend a continued American presence in Iraq on humanitarian grounds, it will reduce the likelihood that the next president will have to apologize for something far worse. Mr. Taranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com. [/rquoter]
Those deaths were at the hands of Saddam, and have been previously mentioned on this board. Yet, many of the same people who were against the war argued that the status quo was working (ie we should keep the sanctions). Would a war in Iraq to remove Saddam's regime have been acceptable in the '90s so the sanctions could have been removed? Somehow, I don't think the people who were against it after 9/11 would have been for it earlier.
