Did conservatives ever say mea culpa re:nationbuilding?

Major, you would have an excellent point if Saddam reported all the people he killed to the hospitals and police.

Somehow, I don't think that happened.

I know you are intelligent, so please don't insult my intelligence and imply that Iraq is a more dangerous place for Iraqis now that Saddam is gone.

 

McMark, you didn't think about that question before you posed it to me.

The answer is an obvious yes. If people are pointing guns and cops in our society, we tell the cops to shoot to kill.

 

Holy freakin' smoke.

Macbeth has joined the discussion, just in time to defend summary executions by a dictator.

Macbeth, I really appreciate your mind, and I think you are a highly intelligent guy, despite our political differences.

This is officially your low point.

 

Granted, you have a point about the police.

And I don't know if you are privileged to more information than the average mc mark, but do you know that they're "pointing guns"?

But from all indications the administration as given a mandate of "keep the peace at all costs", including shooting people.

Do you really think that is going to engender the US to the Iraqi people?

 

If you are talking about our forces shooting looters on sight, then I agree that is a terrible idea.

That story was discredited as being false I believe, so hopefully it will never happen.

 

Major, you would have an excellent point if Saddam reported all the people he killed to the hospitals and police.

Somehow, I don't think that happened.

I know you are intelligent, so please don't insult my intelligence and imply that Iraq is a more dangerous place for Iraqis now that Saddam is gone.


What are you talking about? This is about a deteriorating situation since AFTER Saddam was gone. Iraq is having more crime this week than last - this has nothing to do with Hussein's killings. We're not looking at crime this month vs 2 months ago. Our security is not securing Iraq successfully as of yet. Even as we increase our attempts to bring order, crime and murder is spreading in Iraq.

 

Oops, I was wrong. I am talking about the wrong scenario.

I reread the article, and apparently the increase in shootings is the result of "revenge killings". It seems that the Iraqi civilians are lashing out at their former oppressors.

Seriously, how can we stop that from happening? These are crimes of intense passion, and unless we completely restrict the movements of 5 million Baghdadonians (I made that up), then we can't keep the former Baathists safe.

 

Actually, old sport, I am against capital punishment of any kind, so was hardly defending anyone...Was explaining difference between homiced and excecution, however trivial the distinction in the eyes of true justice.

 

We are responsible for security in Iraq ever since we took over, even if we are scared of the title occupying power. It's a moot point to compare it to what happened before, the only valid frame of reference is what is when we started being in charge, and where it goes from there.

 

Now the U.S. has decreed no Baathists can be part of any future Iraqi government. First we say the Iraqis can have any government they choose..so long as it's a democracy, now we are telling them who they can or can't elect?

 

That stood out to me in the first place as well.

'We have given you the freedom to do what we want with the people we want doing it.'

Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the __________ party?

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,965067,00.html

Pentagon was warned over policing Iraq

Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday May 28, 2003
The Guardian

In the months before the Iraq war the Pentagon ignored repeated warnings that it would need a substantial military police force ready to deploy after the invasion to provide law and order in the postwar chaos, US government advisers and analysts said yesterday.
Some 4,000 US military police are now being deployed in Baghdad, but only after most Iraqi government services have been crippled by a wave of looting and arson.

The anarchy and crime in the Iraqi streets was predicted by several panels of former ambassadors, soldiers and peacekeeping experts, who advised the Pentagon and the White House while the invasion was being planned.

They urged that lessons be learned from previous US-led military interventions and a post-conflict police force be established before the war.

Robert Perito, a former diplomat who had designed a similar police mission in Haiti nine years ago, put together a detailed plan on how to deal with postwar lawlessness, warning that regular troops, trained to shoot to kill or retreat, were not right for the job.

He wrote a report for the United States Institute for Peace and briefed the defence policy board, a Pentagon advisory panel, in February. He said the board had appeared to agree with his conclusions but no action was taken.

"The need for specialised forces was widely anticipated, but they have only just got there and are going to be just in Baghdad," he said. "The damage has already been incalculable. The bombing campaign was conducted in such a way by the air force to meticulously preserve key government facilities, cultural sites, hospitals and other civilian buildings. But as soon as the conflict ended, those facilities were destroyed by looters."

Similar warnings and recommendations were made by experts at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. The Council on Foreign Relations study was overseen by a Republican former defence secretary and member of the defence policy board, James Schlesinger. It was presented to White House officials but its recommendation, that a police force be sent alongside the combat force was not acted on.

The breakdown of law and order in Iraq has several precedents in US military history.

It resembles the Panama invasion of 1989, where much of the damage to Panama City occurred after combat operations were over.

Five years later, in Haiti, the lesson appeared to have been learned, and an international constabulary force, which Mr Perito helped to assemble, was standing by in Puerto Rico to follow US troops into Port-au-Prince.

But after the 1995 Dayton peace accord US-led forces in Bosnia were unprepared to deal with a wave of arson, looting and thuggery by Serbs abandoning the suburbs of Sarajevo.

Eight years later, in Iraq, Mr Perito said the Pentagon had made a "colossal miscalculation over what they thought the Iraqis would do".

"They thought the Iraqis would just get over the trauma of the war and go back to work on the first day," he said.

The deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, rejected the criticism, saying the fighting in Iraq was not over.

"We need to recognise that this situation is completely different from Haiti or Bosnia or Kosovo, where opposition ceased very soon after our peacekeeping troops arrived," he told Congress last week. While Mr Wolfowitz and the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, have been at odds with army generals over many aspects of military doctrine, they are in agreement over peacekeeping.

Most US military police are reservists who are given just one day's instruction in dealing with civilian crowds, and the US army peacekeeping institute is being closed in September. The state department is consulting other governments over creation of an international police force.

 

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0306.carter.html

Faux Pax Americana
The lesson from Iraq is that using fewer troops can win a war, but can't keep the peace.

By Phillip Carter

During the lead-up to the Iraq war, hawkish Pentagon appointees like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz predicted that the conflict could be won with as few as 50,000 troops. Meanwhile, senior generals like Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki and CENTCOM Commander Tommy Franks said that it would take at least 200,000 for the offensive and far more to police and rebuild the country after victory. For a brief week at the end of March, as U.S. troops met stiff resistance in Nasiriya and found their supply lines harassed in the south, it seemed the generals' doubts about fighting the war on the cheap might be confirmed in the worst way. Then, almost overnight, resistance collapsed. That rapid victory proved the contention that Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld had been pressing for more than two years: that America's new high-tech, highly mobile military could win wars with far fewer troops and armor than traditional war-fighting doctrines called for--and with far fewer casualties. (At the height of the war, the United States and the United Kingdom had just 90,000 combat troops in the country.) That was a crucial test of the broader Bush administration policy of using America's military might to crush determined foes rather than simply "managing" them, as previous administrations were wont to do. If America could "preempt" future threats without overextending its military, as Iraq seemed to show, then the argument for the Bush Doctrine would be vastly strengthened.

But the hawks' gloating proved premature. The generals' argument had never been just about what forces it would take to decapitate Saddam's regime. It was also about being ready for the long, grinding challenge after the shooting stopped. By that measure they have been proven dizzyingly correct. April and May brought daily news reports from Baghdad quoting U.S. military officers saying they lacked the manpower to do their jobs. As the doubters predicted, we may have had enough troops to win the war--but not nearly enough to win the peace.

When victory arrived, we lacked the troops on the ground to prevent Baghdad--and most of the rest of the country--from collapsing into anarchy. We had tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles galore in the capital, but not nearly enough soldiers to guard such facilities as the key ministries, hospitals, and the National Museum. Ministries torched and looted during the first days are now unavailable to house the planned interim government. The plunder of hospitals set the stage for a still very possible humanitarian crisis. Looters who ransacked the National Museum stole many of the priceless historic artifacts that connected contemporary Iraq with its ancient roots, inflicting a mammoth public relations disaster upon the United States.

Things have not gotten much better over the following weeks. Lawlessness and chaos continue to reign. Women are raped, law-abiding citizens have their property stolen, those who have anything left don't go to work so they can guard what they still have. The prize the United States sacrificed so much to gain--freeing Iraq from Saddam and clearing the way for its democratic rebirth--is being squandered on the ground as ordinary Iraqis come to equate the American presence with violent lawlessness and immorality, and grasping mullahs rush into the vacuum created by our lack of troops. Mass grave sites, with no troops to secure them, have been unearthed by Iraqis desperate to find remnants of relatives killed by Saddam Hussein's regime, but those same Iraqis, digging quickly and roughly, may have inadvertently destroyed valuable evidence of human rights violations and crippled the ability of prosecutors to bring war criminals to justice. Perhaps worst of all, the prime objective of the entire invasion--to secure and eliminate Saddam's weapons of mass destruction capacity--has been dealt a serious blow. Even Iraq's publicly known nuclear sites had been thoroughly looted before American inspectors arrived, because, once more, not enough troops had been available to secure them. Radioactive material, perhaps enough to make several "dirty bombs," has now disappeared into anonymous Iraqi homes, perhaps awaiting purchase by terrorists. Critical records detailing the history and scope of the WMD program have themselves been looted from suspected weapons sites because too few soldiers were available to guard those places. "There aren't enough troops in the whole Army," said Col. Tim Madere, the officer overseeing the WMD effort in Iraq, in a recent interview with Newsweek. Farce vied with disaster when the inspectors' own headquarters were looted for lack of adequate security. Triumph on the battlefield has yielded to tragedy in the streets.

Belatedly recognizing their horrendous miscalculation, the Bush administration last month replaced the retired general in charge of Iraq's reconstruction, Jay Garner, with former diplomat L. Paul Bremer, who immediately called for 15,000 more troops to keep order. Even if he gets that many, however, Bremer will still be woefully short of the manpower he'll need to turn Iraq from anarchy to stable democracy.

The architects of the war might be forgiven for misgauging the number of troops required had the war come a dozen years ago, when the United States had little experience in modern nation-building. But over the course of the 1990s America gained some hard understanding, at no small cost. From Port-au-Prince to Mogadishu, every recent engagement taught the lesson we're now learning again in Iraq: America's high-tech, highly mobile military can scatter enemies which many times outnumber them, in ways beyond the wildest dreams of commanders just a generation ago. But it's not so easy to win the peace.

A Muscular Peace

Consider the lessons of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. In Bosnia, America won its war with a combination of muscular diplomacy, air power, and covertly armed Bosnian-Muslim and Croat proxy armies on the ground. That mix of tools brought about the Dayton Accords in the fall of 1995. But when it came to making that treaty work, America had to send in its heaviest armor divisions, putting a Bradley fighting vehicle on nearly every street corner to enforce the peace. NATO initially sent 60,000 soldiers into Bosnia, and almost eight years after Dayton, America still has several thousand soldiers on the ground in Bosnia, as part of a 13,000-soldier NATO force. Winning hearts and minds took a backseat to overawing malcontent factions with an overwhelming and, for all intents and purposes, enduring show of force.

Like Bosnia, Kosovo was taken without any American ground commitment. There the United States won its war by unifying air power with what now-retired Gen. Wesley Clark calls "coercive diplomacy." But to win the peace America had to send in substantial ground forces. NATO quickly deployed a force of nearly 50,000 troops to the tiny province that is roughly 1/40 the size of Iraq. Truly pacifying Kosovo--a process that has really only just begun--means leeching it of its toxic ethnic hatreds and endemic violence. Most indicators hint that NATO will have to maintain its mission in Kosovo for at least a generation.

In Afghanistan, the pattern was much the same. It took only 300 U.S. special forces on foot and horseback--supported by 21st-century aircraft, GPS-guided bombs, and a force of Northern Alliance fighters--to bring down the Taliban. But once the government in Kabul had fallen, thousands of U.S. and allied troops had to come in to secure the country. Today, 15,000 American and allied soldiers remain there, 50 times more than it took to win the war.

Even the failures of these previous missions demonstrate that manpower is less important to the achievement of military victory than to coping with victory's aftermath. In Kosovo, according to retired Gen. Montgomery Meigs, then commander of the Balkan stabilization force, we were forced to "do less" because the Pentagon claimed it could not send more peacekeeping troops. As a result, says Meigs, "we were unable to run operations inside Kosovo to interdict the internal movement of arms and Albanian-Kosovar fighters to [neighboring] Macedonia." Those armed separatists set off a civil war in Macedonia--stopped only by the timely deployment of more Western troops, including Americans, into that country.

Something very similar happened in Afghanistan. Our biggest failure there occurred in the mop-up stage, following the flight of the Taliban government. Because we had so few troops on the ground, we failed to cut off and destroy the remnants of al Qaeda--including, most likely, Osama bin Laden himself--as they fled into the lawless mountain regions of the Afghan and Pakistani frontier. Our subsequent efforts at nation-building on the cheap have yielded similar results. Our unwillingness to put many troops on the ground has made a mockery of the president's promise for a "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan. The Western-oriented, U.S.-installed president, Hamid Karzai, controls little more than Kabul, and the rest of the country has already drifted back into warlordism.

Shooting the Inspectors

Not only did Wolfowitz and Shinseki publicly disagree over how many troops would be needed to win the war in Iraq, they also disagreed on how many troops would be needed to win the peace. Shinseki testified to Congress that we would need "several hundred thousand" and Wolfowitz, very publicly, argued that the situation called for far fewer. What's become clear in the aftermath is that Wolfowitz simply didn't grasp, as Shinseki (who's commanded Army units in peacekeeping operations) clearly did, just what this kind of mammoth peacekeeping and nation-building operation would entail.

First, the simple question of keeping order: "It's frustrating; we do not have the personnel or the training to be policemen," Army civil affairs Maj. Jack Nales told The Washington Post in Baghdad. In one encounter, Nales had to explain the lack of order to civilians. "I'm sorry the police agencies and judicial system isn't [sic] here. I'm sorry we don't have enough soldiers to help you."

Second, only a few soldiers--civil affairs specialists, military police, and medical and engineering units, mostly--are specially equipped for the actual work of nation-building. The vast majority of the rest provide security for these lightly armed units. An engineering platoon of 40 soldiers might need an entire company of infantry (120 men) for security, depending on the terrain. A lack of security entails cutting the number of nation-building missions. If only three infantry companies are available, then only three missions can be undertaken at any one time--essentially the problem in Iraq today.

Third, without a secure environment, no one else can do their job. Weapons investigators are hamstrung if they are constantly getting shot at or inspecting sites whose security evaporates the moment they leave. Oil crews and aid workers don't want to be shot on the job any more than soldiers do, and security concerns have slowed progress on every project in Iraq--from opening the port at Umm Qasr to reopening the oil fields at Kirkuk.

Young Men in the Mud

In many ways, the contrast between warfighting and nation-building resembles the difference between productivity in the manufacturing and service industries. Businessmen have long known that you can rather easily substitute capital and technology for labor in manufacturing. Until very recently, however, it's been far more difficult to do so for the service industries. A similar principle applies to military affairs. In warfighting, everything ultimately comes down to sending a projectile downrange. How you send the bullet (or bomb) makes a difference--you can use an infantryman with a rifle, or a B-52 launching a cruise missile. But the effect at the far end is the same--the delivery of kinetic or explosive energy. Over the last 50 years, American strategy has made increasing use of effective technology, substituting machines for men, both to reduce casualties and to outrange our enemies.

But this trading of capital for increased efficiency breaks down in the intensely human missions of peace enforcement and nation-building. American wealth can underwrite certain aspects of those missions: schools, roads, water purification plants, electric power. But it can't substitute machines or money in the human dimension--the need to place American soldiers (or police officers) on patrol to make the peace a reality.

On the shelf of nearly every Army officer, you'll find a book by retired Col. T.R. Fehrenbach on the Korean conflict titled This Kind of War. At the end of World War II, confronted by the military revolution brought on by the atomic bomb, America cut its military from a wartime high of 16 million down to a few hundred thousand. Bombs and airplanes--not soldiers--would now protect America's shores and cities. After fighting as a grunt in Korea, Fehrenbach thought otherwise. Transformation was great for the Air Force and Navy, but for the Army and Marine Corps, the essential nature of warfare remained unchanged.

"You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life," wrote Fehrenbach. "But if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud." It's time Don Rumsfeld brushed up on his Fehrenbach. The book is on Gen. Shinseki's official reading list for the Army, so it's a good bet that one of his generals has a copy he can borrow.



Phillip Carter, a former Army officer, attends UCLA Law School and writes on legal and military issues.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55903-2003May29.html?nav=hptop_tb

In Searching Homes, U.S. Troops Crossed the Threshold of Unrest


By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 30, 2003; Page A01


HIT, Iraq, May 29 -- For U.S. soldiers, the trouble began Monday night. After two weeks of scattered reports of stone-throwing at military vehicles, a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at a U.S. convoy on the outskirts of Hit. Soldiers were rattled but unhurt.

For Iraqis, the trouble began the next day. After a fairly relaxed occupation since the collapse of Saddam Hussein's government on April 9, U.S. soldiers in armored vehicles and Humvees, backed by helicopters, moved aggressively to search homes -- by residents' count, more than 30 -- in answer to the attack.

Iraqis said the soldiers who entered their homes that day, and talked to the women inside, crossed a line established by tradition and honor. Within a day, this conservative town on the Euphrates River 110 miles west of Baghdad, in a relatively well-off region that is home to much of Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority, became the scene of what seems to have been the first popular uprising against the U.S. occupation.

By morning Wednesday, hundreds angered by the house-to-house searches had poured into the streets, marching to the police station whose officers had accompanied the soldiers. In a tumultuous scene, stones and a grenade were thrown, and U.S. soldiers fired warning shots. By afternoon, the U.S. troops withdrew. The crowd, having swelled to thousands, hauled the station's furniture to a nearby mosque. Then they set the station on fire, hurling a few more grenades for good measure.

The two-story station, its windows shattered, still smoldered today. An air conditioner and an unhinged metal door were propped up against the entrance, blocking anyone from returning. On a wall, a slogan read, "God make this country safe."

"We will defend our houses, our land, our city," said Salman Aani, 42, a businessman with an ice-making factory, dressed in a white robe. "We are Muslims, and we will defend Islam. The first thing we will do is defend our houses."

Since Sunday, five U.S. soldiers have died in clashes and ambushes in the territory that forms the heartland of Iraq's Sunni Muslims, who were the basis for Hussein's Baath Party and the country's traditional rulers. The U.S. military has blamed the attacks on Baath remnants. But in Hit, along verdant fields and orchards crisscrossed by canals, the trouble seemed to revolve around the day-to-day details of occupation -- an invader, however well-intentioned, unfamiliar with traditions running up against a fiercely conservative people infused with ideas of pride, dignity and honor.

Their traditions, the people of Hit said, were not respected.

"They are provoking us," said Fawzi Saud, 46, a teacher whose house was searched Tuesday. "This is a violation of our dignity. They have no right to enter our house and search it. I'm not a soldier, I'm not a policeman, I'm not a party member."

U.S. soldiers, stationed a few miles outside town, said they were baffled by the unrest. When they arrived, they said, people waved and shouted hello. As the weeks dragged on, those greetings were fewer, occasionally replaced by rocks. By late afternoon today, the troops had not returned to the town of 25,000, asking journalists about the mood in Hit and the status of the police station.

"I couldn't speculate as to what the cause of the anger in the town has been," said Capt. Andrew Watson, a staff officer with the 3rd Squadron of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. "For us to say it was one thing or another would be, for me, speculation."

He and other soldiers said their intent was never hostile. In fact, they said, they had gone to great efforts to speak only to the men and avoid being too intrusive with the searches that followed the rocket-propelled grenade attack.

"The golden rule applies here," Watson said, "just like it does anywhere else."

"We try to be as culturally sensitive as possible, but we want to make sure everybody goes home alive," said Capt. Paul Kuettner, an intelligence officer. "We're not going to risk the lives of one of our soldiers to be culturally sensitive."

Residents blamed the eruption of unrest on the search of a particular house Wednesday morning, the second day of inspections. They said a tank, three armored vehicles and a jeep pulled up to the one-story home of a widow with three daughters and a son. The 14-year-old son was in school, but the soldiers, accompanied by two Iraqi policemen, entered anyway. They stayed for 90 minutes.

"Nobody knows why," said Khaldun Saud, a 51-year-old neighbor. "They didn't find anything, no weapons, nothing."

Neighbors heard the woman start yelling, apparently frightened. After the Americans left, a friend took the woman and her daughters to a relative's home. But word of the search raced through the community, and within minutes, the crowd began marching on the station.

"We consider the city one family," said a neighbor, Tareq Deham, 55.

Iraqis who gathered at the police station today said they had put their demands in writing at the station, but given the chaos, they never had a chance to deliver them. The demands were blunt: The Americans had to withdraw from the town; they could no longer search homes, particularly with women inside; and the police -- employed under Hussein's government -- had to be replaced.

This afternoon, neighbors gathered in the house of Fawzi Saud, Khaldun's brother. They traded stories that were perhaps rumor, perhaps fact, in seeking to explain the uprising.

Soldiers, they said, had entered homes without knocking, and they kept their fingers on their triggers. In the early morning, helicopters had flown low overhead, they said, allowing soldiers to see families sleeping on their roofs to escape the summer heat. The soldiers then entered homes without the men present, addressing wives and daughters. No rooms were left unsearched, the Iraqis said, including bedrooms. All these actions, they complained, violated their sense of what is right.

"We have traditions and customs in this city," said Fawzi Saud, a high school teacher. "For them it may be natural, but not for us."

Five soldiers entered his home at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, Saud said. He was not home, but his 20-year-old son, Ahmed, was. When the soldiers knocked, Ahmed asked them to wait, Saud recounted. They did not, he said. Three soldiers entered with two policemen, he said, and the two other soldiers circled behind the house.

They stayed for 10 minutes, checking the six rooms. Throughout the search, Saud's 11-year-old daughter, Taysir, cried, he said. Ahmed said no weapons were found. An AK-47 assault rifle -- a possession of virtually every family in the town -- was hidden outside, but Saud would not say where.

"We can hide artillery," Saud said, smiling. He promised that he would die before U.S. soldiers entered again.

The Baath Party ruled Iraq for three decades, drawing much of its support from Sunnis, with a program that made Baghdad one of the Arab world's most secular cities. Hit, with its Sunni population, had its share of Baath Party members. But in rural regions such as this, it is the traditional code of Iraq's resurgent tribes that prevails. Foreigners are respected, residents said, if they show respect. Even today, despite anger over the inspections, accentuated by complaints over a lack of salaries and services, some in the crowd brought visitors trays of tea and invited them to lunch. Many in the town boasted that they had accepted in their homes thousands of families fleeing the war.

But the Americans, Saud said, are no longer guests.

"They're going to stay a long time, if they have it their way," he said. "But the people will refuse. They won't tolerate it."

Everyone in the modest room nodded in agreement. "We're not hostile people," he explained. "We don't make any trouble. But if the Americans are hostile to us, we'll be hostile to them."

 

http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/reuters05-29-212324.asp?reg=MIDEAST


Allies help in Iraq less than U.S. expected-report



WASHINGTON, May 30 — The number of peacekeeping troops U.S. allies are pledging to the postwar effort in Iraq has fallen short of Pentagon expectations, USA Today reported on Friday.

Citing unnamed diplomats and military officials, the report said that the United States and Britain have received promises of just 13,000 troops from two dozen countries, far fewer than the tens of thousands of peacekeepers U.S. planners want.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a speech on Tuesday that 39 nations had contributed to the postwar force in Iraq or ''provided other assistance.'' But the Pentagon would not say which nations were contributing troops or how many have been promised, USA Today reported.
A Pentagon spokesman was not immediately available for comment early on Friday.
USA Today reported that the first significant arrivals in Iraq of allied relief forces could come in July.
Pentagon officials had hoped to begin substituting troops from other countries for some U.S. troops as early as next month when they had expected to send home most of the Army's Third Infantry Division, the newspaper reported.

 

Woofer, try finding an article that is POSITIVE on the rebuilding effort. We're trying to find the truth, not elect more Democrats.

 

Careful there, Mr. Clutch. Finding the truth WILL elect more Democrats.

 

Really, you think that if it came out that Bush lied about WMD (rather than exaggerated) that Democrats would start getting elected? I disagree. I think people supported the idea of war for the democratization of Iraq. And why would people elect Democrats if they don't want liars?

And Woofer should still provide more balanced posts on the rebuilding effort.

 

Woofer doesn't represent the fourth estate. It's not his job to fret over balance. And besides, as it is with both sides, there are those of us who believe media coverage is slanted to the extent that we reject conventional wisdom regarding balance. If the best argument against Woofer's articles is that they don't include the administration's preferred slant, it's not much of an argument. If you believe the articles are unfair, why don't you post ones which contradict them? And if you believe 'balance' should be required of all posters, why don't you ask johnheath -- after each of his since disproven smoking gun threads -- to post the articles stating that all his other articles were wrong?

On the other thing, yes, I do believe that Bush's approval right now is due to people feeling good about the war and trusting him. If they come to believe they were misled they will no longer feel as good about it nor will they trust him like they did. The news coming out recently that the Bush admin inflated intel they got from the clearly, inherently biased Iraqi opposition which strengthened a flimsy case for war and buried intel they got from the non-political CIA which weakened it is bad news for the admin. And of course that's ultimately good news for Dems.

You say people supported the war on grounds of liberating Iraq. How convenient. The only reason left that isn't currently being soundly discredited and also the only one that had zero to do with a threat to the US since, as it seems more and more likely, there wasn't one. 53% of Americans believe Saddam had some hand in 9/11. There hasn't been a shred of evidence of this and even those who tried to sell it (aside from some weirdo freaks on this BBS) backed off it a long time ago. But do you seriously think that didn't have anything to do with majority support for the war? Nukes, WMD and terror were the primary reasons people supported this war and they were the primary reasons they were asked to. And it looks more and more like that was basically a sham.

Sure was a short lived victory.

 

You pull many of your posts from thin air MC, if you want balanced posts then find articles that support your position. Woofer has time and time again posted fair-minded articles that support the position of many on this board. People supported the idea of democratization in Iraq? Name some of the other democratic countries in the middle-east, there aren't many. We went to war under the idea that Iraq was a threat to us and our allies, because they had stock-piles of WMD. The news I watched this evening led with the increasing pressure Bush is feeling do to lack of WMD finds and the lies surrounding Private Lynch's rescue. The administration is feeling the pressure to a high degree, we will see how Bush fares at the G8 summit.