one of the best explanations i've read of how the american anti-war protests hurt our efforts in Iraq. [rquoter]The reason we need the ordinary Iraqi is that this is the fellow who knows that his neighbor four doors down from him is making a bomb. This is the man who needs to call the American authority and report this. Right now this is not happening. I suspect this is largely because the Iraqi knows that America may be out of Iraq in a year. Then he will be targeted as a "collaborator" and killed. So the left's failure to support this war is helping to alienate the one type of fellow who can help us to win in Iraq. This is our strategic problem.[/rquoter] http://newsbloggers.aol.com/2007/03/19/waiting-for-general-grant/
I think our strategic problem is that we have people like you, people that believe what you quoted, who think they know what the Iraqi "man on the street" thinks about public opinion in the United States. D&D. Finger Food.
are you trying to pass this off as a fact? any surveys or polls conducted on iraqis? is this an explanation or just a theory? or maybe they DO badly want the US to leave.. thats a good "explanation" too..
Basso - why don't you just get the hell out of America if you hate freedom of speech? Or at least get off the internet. You like to express disgust for free speech. Then leave, or at least set an example and shut up. By the way, this phenomenon that your blogger of the day friend came up wth - making potential terrorist sympathizers out of people who can help - is caused by things that you like to marginalize or deny, things like Abu Ghraib, or "get tough" policies, and in general the heinously stupid, badly miscalculated, failed policies of Bush, Cheney, and the rest. You know, the kinds of things that you like to espouse when you put on your spikey hat and pretend like you have a semblance of a clue. Of course your track record of endorsing failed policies for four years doesn't really bold well for this - but aside from that your logic sucks on its own merits.
That post is so simplistic it's not even funny. Anti war protest's are a result of the chaos in Iraq, it's a result of the failure of the administration. It's not the anti war protest that will cause the withdrawal of the troops, that post's argument is faulty. The root of the problem is that the strategy/Intel from the beginning was flawed…the U.S did not realize what they were getting into…
I don't think dissent itself is detrimental to the war effort. I poor planning and people who actively try to harm the effort through ventures such as preventing military recruiters from recruiting are much worse than simple dissent.
The latest motive from our Washington masterminds for the reason we are fighting in Iraq is to give those people freedom of speech and the right to dissent. Btw ~ the war in Iraq has now lasted longer than the war in Korea, WWI, and WWII.
basso, you are pathetically shallow if you really believe that. This ranks up there with the "It's better to fight them in Iraq than here" argument.
If the blogger is correct about the man being afraid that America won't be there the next day or year or whatever is because the whole thing was handeled so badly that we don't really have a choice anymore. It isn't because the anti-war crowd made it so, it is because Bush's inept handling of the situation brought us to the point we are at.
WWI - Nope. 28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918 WWII - Nope. September 1939 - August 1945 Saying dissent impacts the intervention isn't anti-free speech. If I ask dissenters to stop, that does not mean I don't value free speech, or recognize that it has benefits. It means that I recognize it is possible that protests are not the best option on every occasion and that dissent is not always the best course. Absent dissent the intervention could be sustained indefinitely if the administration chose to do so. Claiming dissent can't affect the length of deployment is silly.
Exactly. That's why ShamFisher spent so little time on attempting to rebut basso's point prior to launching into his typical Bush bashing routine. Throw up an argument that sounds true, although has nothing to do with the point at hand, then launch into platitudes ...a true sign of a lost argument... My goodness the liberals are stupid. If they can't acknowledge that their incessant anti-war rhetoric harms the morale and impairs our success, then frankly they are being willfully ignorant.
More and more I think that the republicans would be really happy in the Chinese government. Pro-business and anti-dissent.
The great thing about this country is we even have the freedom of speech to criticize freedom of speech.
I think he was referring to the American involvement in those wars. You are certainly free to your beliefs but others are free to challenge it. Since we all have free speech I would say give us a reason why we shouldn't dissent. True and absent other priorities we could've been colonizing the Moon by now. We live in an inherently political society and you're absolutely right that dissent affects decision that said consider why there is dissent. The argument that many war supporters say regarding dissent is that we should be quiet since it will harm the war effort. Well the whole point of dissent is that we don't agree with the war effort and would like to see either some major changes or it ended.
