. They are nut jobs. Doesn't matter what they want. We are the USA and I mean that sincerely. Al Qaeda was a relatively minor threat compared to previous threats our country has faced. You are still getting crazy and hysterical about their level of threat. You seem to need this type of hysteria for some reason. It might be more personal than just being duped by right wing propaganda. This would just be a harmless obsession, but we just wasted a couple of trillion dollars, maimed or killed thousands of vets and killed a couple of hundred thousand innocent Iraqis and Afghans due to such hysteria. My God still deluded. Nice try, with the anti Semite allusion, but it is your right wing guys who are usually anti-semite nuts. I qualified it to the more nutty Zionists who have your hysteria about Iran. You really should try some nuance and less rigidity. [/QUOTE]
And also it is not all of bush's fault. The guy was a complete and total moron. And was led down a path with all his war lobbying cronies. He was just the figurehead (he did not get the smart genes from dad)
Obama supports these mongrel terrorist, supplies them with weapons & money, then looks the other way when they start slaughtering innocent civilians and beheading Christians. My mother is from Nineveh Provence & we still have some family over there, (I was born in Australia, thank God) & Obama-supplied weapons are now being used to murder the Assyrian community. I hated Bush for starting the war, but what Barak has done is unforgivable...if he was to be hit by a truck, not many people in this world would shed a tear. (Except for the Lefties, tree hugging hippies & Liberal idiots) Thanks Obama.
I feel bad for those that served. It's like Vietnam all over again Americans led to unnecessary conflict with lives thrown away for nothing. The people who served who know that their service, however honorable, was an utter waste of those years of their lives and the lives of their friends. I can understand that a lot of those vets might want us back doing something - it's a sunk costs fallacy in action. If we just could keep doing more all the service and death might mean something. If we could just keep finding ex post facto rationalizations for why we did X and why it justifies a future Y. It's tragic to have life and lives rendered meaningless.
My post was more than we should not have been there. My point, is if we plan on going back/staying, it's going to be for the next 50-100 years. Lets not be short sighted again and think that we can go back for a short period of time to get rid of the militants. The choices are let it all go to hell, or stay there for the forseeable future. Let's not argue about band-aids. They aren't going to work.
Let's hear from a real expert on the Middle East Juan Cole. Not some neo-con who convinced old Dubya that we could have a New American Century, a "Caliphate" or empire if you will in the whole world and especially in the Middle East. This is a part of a longer article and Juancole.com is always good on the Middle East and is not captive to neo-con ideology. He also has several other article on the crisis. I would also point out that the millions of people who demonstrated worldwide to prevent the Iraq War have proven to be right. Next time we might be able to stop the war mongers. *********** http://bbs.clutchfans.net/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=9016128 It is an indictment of the George W. Bush administration, which falsely said it was going into Iraq because of a connection between al-Qaeda and Baghdad. There was none. Ironically, by invading, occupying, weakening and looting Iraq, Bush and Cheney brought al-Qaeda into the country and so weakened it as to allow it actually to take and hold territory in our own time. They put nothing in place of the system they tore down. They destroyed the socialist economy without succeeding in building private firms or commerce. They put in place an electoral system that emphasizes religious and ethnic divisions. They (Bush and Cheney) helped provoke a civil war in 2006-2007, and took credit for its subsiding in 2007-2008, attributing it to a troop escalation of 30,000 men (not very plausible). In fact, the Shiite militias won the civil war on the ground, turning Baghdad into a largely Shiite city and expelling many Sunnis to places like Mosul. There are resentments. Those who will say that the US should have left troops in Iraq do not say how that could have happened. The Iraqi parliament voted against it. There was never any prospect in 2011 of the vote going any other way. Because the US occupation of Iraq was horrible for Iraqis and they resented it. Should the Obama administration have reinvaded and treated the Iraqi parliament the way Gen. Bonaparte treated the French one?
Good post. We should not allow feelings for the waste and frequently ptsd inflicted on those who served to be used or honored as an excuse to repeat these types of horrible mistakes that they experienced. Dubya, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and the rest are doing quite well. Same goes for Kerry, Hillary and many of the Dems who were cynical enough to not block the war, but would not have been stupid enough to start it.
You're still missing the key point that US soldiers subject to Iraqi courts was the sticking point. You've basically side stepped the question to just rant.
You raise an excellent point. War in a democracy is as much more than a military exercise but it is much more a political exercise. No president can go to and maintain a war without the political support. The truth is after 12 years of war the US public doesn't want more war and both Democrats and Republicans were anxious to see the US get out of Iraq and are to see us out of Afghanistan. Many people here like to paint this as partisan issue but consider that the much of the Tea Party and Ron Paul wing of the Republican party are much more critical about the use of US military power than even many Democrats.
Posted after I started typing my reply. Still, the strongest "evidence" that what you say is true is the following... "held out hope" is hardly a concrete plan to renegotiate the SOFA, which is what you seemed to be claiming. Someone here needs to turn their brain on, but it wouldn't appear to be me. Yes, all of the Fauxbots and people with ODS will continue to claim that Obama "lost the Middle East" while those of us who love in reality will continue to see that the Middle East hasn't in my lifetime been under control in any way, making it spectacularly difficult to "lose" in the first place. The entire Iraq cluster***** is Bush's fault, nobody else's. None of your pundits will ever be able to change that one, simple fact. In addition, the invasion of Iraq is what lost Afghanistan, which would place any blame for either war squarely on Bush's shoulders, no matter how desperately you would like that blame to be deserved by Obama. You gave up on intellectual honesty the minute you started believing the garbage spewed by the Fox pundits, who are dramatically more dishonest than I could ever hope to be, even if I tried. You need a course in reading comprehension. You asked who deserved the blame for Vietnam and I named Johnson and Nixon. Both men escalated the war during their presidencies. I'll agree that Johnson deserves the blame for getting us deeply involved in the war and that Nixon deserves credit for withdrawing. However, both men escalated that particular conflict and, as such, deserve a measure of blame. The difference between Vietnam under Eisenhower/Kennedy and Iraq under Bush is that in Vietnam, it was an extremely small advising force until Johnson, who engaged in the full scale invasion. Bush is the one who did the full scale invasion of Iraq and is fully in possession of the "bungler" tag for that conflict.
Good Grief, Juan Cole is not a "Middle East expert". He's a leftist tool who has been an apologist for the islamofascist for decades now. And you've been quoting him for at least the past decade. I remember, glynch.
That was never an insurmountable sticking point. I am guessing you haven't clicked on any of the links I've provided? This has already been explained.
Er, the "con crete plan" was the negotiations themselves, which went nowhere due to lack of direction. EVERYONE involved - our negotiators, the Iraqis, Maliki, the Pentagon - expected the SOFA to be amended or another one to be put into place. Everyone, it seems, but Obama. Believe what you want. Obama is already being skewered over this by such right-wing outfits as CNN. He absolutely WILL be remembered as the one who bungled the war, because he undeniably IS the one who bungled it by withdrawing prematurely. Your derangement aside, the record will bear this out. Bush made the decision to invade, Obama made the decision to retreat. What we are seeing now is a result of the decision to retreat, not the decision to invade. When Bush handed the war over to Obama AQI was decimated, just a handful off these monsters left running free. Now they are carving out their own state. That is on Obama, not Bush. My goodness, you are dense. We are going to lose Afghanistan because we are not willing to invade the Pakistani tribal areas. The Taliban lives on the Pak side of the border, they have since they were ejected in 2001/02. Every winter they spend the season readying for the next year's offensive, the spring offensive starts, at the end of the warm months they slink back across the border to lick their wounds. As long as they have a safe haven they can't be defeated - they just have to wait us out. Iraq had ZERO to do with Afghanistan. Operations in one AO had nothing to do with and no impact on the other AO. We lost Afghanistan simply because we weren't willing to do what was necessary to win. Same as in Iraq, come to think of it... Say, when was the last time an American President lost *TWO* wars on his watch? LOL, I don't even watch TV. Do you see me posting links here to FOX news videos, or do you see me linking articles from the NYT, WaPo, WaTimes, etc? And you accuse me of intellectual dishonesty in this same sentence? You're a joke. And you appear to have utterly missed my entire point - that history remembers not the men who got ius into it, but the men who fuqed it up. I know it probably gives you nightmares to think anyone would think such of your god in the White House, but he WILL be remembered as the man who lost it all. One can only believe that if one ignores the entirety of the history of the conflict. The fact is that Bush handed a situation over to Obama that was *easily* manageable. By January 2009, as I have repeatedly said, AQI was on the ropes. Baghdad was statistically a more peaceful city than Chicago. We were losing more troops to suicides, traffic accidents, and illness than combat. The war was effectively over, it simply required some vigilance and some mopping up here and there. All he had to do was keep a few thousand troops there - a relatively small commitment in the scale of US military global commitments - in order to secure the gains. But he pi$$ed it away in order to fulfill a campaign promise. Domestic politics was more important than ensuring America's national security interests. He had an election to win, consequences be damned. Well, these are the consequences. We are watching in real time the consequences of his abandonment of Iraq play out. It didn't have to be this way, and the fault is ALL Obama's.
