Define victory, and explain how we can accomplish this victory militarily. I doubt that your definition can be accomplished by our (or anyone's) military.
Define victory, and explain how we can accomplish this victory militarily. I doubt that your definition can be accomplished by our (or anyone's) military.
I don't think the name calling and back and forth is helpful. I certainly want to see our military succeed and bring some semblance of order to Iraq so that their people can join the modern world - a good result for all of us.
Having said this, I can't escape asdf's conclusion that bringing peace to Iraq in that environment is a bit like squeezing a bag of water. I have long felt this way, and Iraq, a place that has been a violent, disordered and often brutal place for over a 1000 years, gives every indication it is a relatively easy place for our fine military to win a traditional battle but an almost impossible place to unilaterally bring about any meaningful social or structural change.
I think the Bushies should be rightly excoriated for failing to take into account the risks of somehow obtaining the return of a "stable and democratic Iraq", and the Democrats quite frankly should be held equally accountable for voting for the incursion into Iraq (they did so because they did not want to be perceived as soft on terrorism - a rather gutless move) without asking the tough questions as to the likelihood of success and an exit strategy. The latter in particular is not the Democrats way, well, because calling into question the likelihood of success means on has to bring up some rather unpleasant points about the culture in Iraq (inextricably intertwined with struggles within Islam and tribal conflicts), how various groups have been fighting there for centuries, and how they have only responded in general to totalitarian leaders that can brutally place a lid on the inexorable unrest that seems to exist there. These tough points cut against the grain of moral relativism that many liberals favor - out of fear of sounding like Republicans. But no matter in this case, they and everyone else should have raised these tough, unpleasant points, because I don't see an exit strategy over there, even though I suspect our efforts to date have had more success than the media likes to present. But some of the warring factions are more than willing to wait us out until we leave - and that is why any notion of success is so (in my mind) illusory.
So the question remains to me - is how do we affect an exit strategy over there? Some have mentioned a multinational force, but really, unless they have the right mission, that is just a palliative to make the whole operation seem less influenced by America. A three state solution seems extreme, but may be the most viable. Tough choices abound.
oh, of course, silly liberal me... i was taking that video "out of context"! ok, my bad. it's all cool now. cheney obviously wasn't talking about the same iraq that we're in now. all those undesirable consequences he was talking about obviously only applied in 1994. the climate of the region is so different today that those things couldn't possibly... oh, wait...
well, that's water under the bridge. and besides, democrats said they supported the war, see? see?
maybe cheney was just lying in 1994 and didn't really believe what he said. of course, that's hard to swallow since the invasion of iraq has produced exactly the outcome he warned against. hmm, no that can't be it... i guess the other possibility is that he and his cronies lied to get us into a war that he knew full well would be a miserable failure.
you know what the good solution would have been? cheney taking his own advice.
I think we're doing better than we're lead to believe by the media and other sources. That being said I don't think we're doing the most amazing job ever, but I do think no one wants to report the good news that could come out of Iraq. Same way they report about car crashes, bank robberies, and shootings....yet they leave out the good things that have happened on the day.
No one wants to hear good news, sadly true, in all fields not just politics.
The TRUTH is HERE wrote:
Der Spiegel is a flaming, anti-American German magazine. They admit they despise Goerge Bush and opposed the war from day one.
[...]
OK you libs, start whining and crying about things turning around over there and why you hate hearing it.
I'm confused. First you cite a "flaming" liberal magazine which is acknowledging that things may be changing for the better in Iraq. Then you say that liberals won't acknowledge that things may be changing, and will just whine and cry instead.
Isn't the text you cite actually a shining example of a liberal publication being willing to examine the facts rather than just spouting ideological rhetoric? It would sure be nice if some conservative publications -- and, say, the White House -- were also willing to argue based on facts rather than ideology. Maybe then we would have been better prepared for the insurgency, rather than blindly continuing to assert that there was no insurgency and the Iraqis were thrilled to see us.
are you really that obtuse? All this "proves" is that bad intel (or manufactured intel) will f you every time. Yes, it's great Saddam is gone. That could have been accomplished w/o the losses we've seen, and w/o getting US troops stuck in that hellhole.
More examples of the great progress being made:
BAGHDAD - Emergency workers and grieving relatives uncovered dozens of bodies in the wreckage of clay houses in northwest Iraq on Wednesday, sending the death toll from suicide truck bombings of a small Kurdish sect to at least 250 — the war's deadliest attack on a single area.
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A U.S. general said the nearly simultaneous strikes against the Yazidis — who have been attacked by Muslim extremists who consider them infidels — was an act of "ethnic cleansing." An American military spokesman blamed the attack on al-Qaida.
Zayan Othman, the health minister of the nearby autonomous Kurdish region, said the casualty toll had risen to at least 250 killed and 350 wounded as bodies were pulled from the rubble. That surpassed the death toll of 215 people from mortar fire and five car bombs in Baghdad's Shiite Muslim enclave of Sadr City on Nov. 23.
In 2005, an estimated 1,000 Shiite pilgrims were killed in a stampede near a Baghdad shrine after rumors spread that a suicide attacker was among them.
Dakhil Qassim, the mayor of the nearby town of Sinjar, said four trucks approached the town of Qahataniya on dirt roads and exploded within minutes of each other.
"This is an act of ethnic cleansing, if you will, almost genocide, when you consider the fact of the target they attacked, and the fact that these Yazidis are really out in a very remote part of Ninevah province where they're, there is very little security, and really no security required up until this point," Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, the commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, told CNN.
Mixon said last month that he proposed reducing American troop levels in Ninevah and predicted the province would shift to Iraqi government control as early as this month. It was unclear whether that projection would hold after Tuesday's staggering death tolls.
Police said separately that five people were killed in an ambush Wednesday on a minibus carrying civilians near Khalis, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, where suspected al-Qaida militants had set up a fake checkpoint. A 5-year-old was among the dead.
In the main northern city of Mosul, a bomb in a parked car killed a civilian and wounded ten others, police and army officers said. A police patrol appeared to have been the target.
South of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber killed two people and wounded seven, Iraqi police said.
The carnage in Qahataniya dealt a serious blow to U.S. efforts to pacify the country, with just weeks before top U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker are to deliver a pivotal report to Congress amid a fierce debate over whether to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
U.S. officials believe extremists are attempting to regroup across northern Iraq after being driven from strongholds in and around Baghdad, and commanders have warned they expected Sunni insurgents to step up attacks in a bid to upstage the report.
"The car bombs that were used all had the consistent profile of al-Qaida in Iraq violence," U.S. military spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner told reporters in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki issued a statement blaming the bombings on "terrorism powers who seek to fuel sectarian strife and damage our people's national unity."
The Yazidis are a primarily Kurdish religious sect with ancient roots that worships an angel figure considered to be the devil by some Muslims and Christians. Yazidis, who don't believe in hell or evil, deny that.
The Islamic State in Iraq, an al-Qaida front group, distributed leaflets a week ago warning residents near the scene of Tuesday's bombings that an attack was imminent because Yazidis are "anti-Islamic."
The sect has been under fire since some members stoned a Yazidi teenager to death in April. She had converted to Islam and fled her family with a Muslim boyfriend, and police said 18-year-old Duaa Khalil Aswad was killed by relatives who disapproved of the match.
A grainy video showing gruesome scenes of the woman's killing was later posted on Iraqi Web sites. Its authenticity could not be independently verified, but recent attacks on Yazidis have been blamed on al-Qaida-linked Sunni insurgents seeking revenge.
A curfew was in place Wednesday across towns west of Mosul, and U.S. and Iraqi forces were conducting house-to-house searches in response to the bombings, according to Iraqi police and Army officers who spoke on condition of anonymity out of security concerns. Twenty suspects were arrested, they said.
Meanwhile, U.S. troops killed 11 suspected terrorists and detained four others in operations against al-Qaida in central and northern Iraq, the military said in a statement.
Ten thousand U.S. troops and 6,000 Iraqi soldiers are involved in air and ground assaults across Diyala and Salahuddin provinces, both north of Baghdad, in a nationwide offensive against Sunni insurgents with links to al-Qaida and Shiite militiamen.
More than 300 artillery rounds, rockets and bombs were dropped in the Diyala River valley late Monday and early Tuesday, and three suspected al-Qaida gunmen were killed and eight were taken prisoner, the military said. U.S. troops also discovered several roadside bombs rigged to explode.
Yeah, it does get funny when these Bushies who've done nothing but bash "libs" cite a "lib" source...to bash "libs."
But it's nothing but pathetic when they take one bit of news to try and explain away years of disaster that may take decades to recover from, and which does nothing to brigng real stability to Iraq ... and somehow go "take that, libs." Jeez, where do ta even begin?
quantum wrote:
I don't think the name calling and back and forth is helpful. I certainly want to see our military succeed and bring some semblance of order to Iraq so that their people can join the modern world - a good result for all of us.
Having said this, I can't escape asdf's conclusion that bringing peace to Iraq in that environment is a bit like squeezing a bag of water. I have long felt this way, and Iraq, a place that has been a violent, disordered and often brutal place for over a 1000 years, gives every indication it is a relatively easy place for our fine military to win a traditional battle but an almost impossible place to unilaterally bring about any meaningful social or structural change.
I think the Bushies should be rightly excoriated for failing to take into account the risks of somehow obtaining the return of a "stable and democratic Iraq", and the Democrats quite frankly should be held equally accountable for voting for the incursion into Iraq (they did so because they did not want to be perceived as soft on terrorism - a rather gutless move) without asking the tough questions as to the likelihood of success and an exit strategy. The latter in particular is not the Democrats way, well, because calling into question the likelihood of success means on has to bring up some rather unpleasant points about the culture in Iraq (inextricably intertwined with struggles within Islam and tribal conflicts), how various groups have been fighting there for centuries, and how they have only responded in general to totalitarian leaders that can brutally place a lid on the inexorable unrest that seems to exist there. These tough points cut against the grain of moral relativism that many liberals favor - out of fear of sounding like Republicans. But no matter in this case, they and everyone else should have raised these tough, unpleasant points, because I don't see an exit strategy over there, even though I suspect our efforts to date have had more success than the media likes to present. But some of the warring factions are more than willing to wait us out until we leave - and that is why any notion of success is so (in my mind) illusory.
So the question remains to me - is how do we affect an exit strategy over there? Some have mentioned a multinational force, but really, unless they have the right mission, that is just a palliative to make the whole operation seem less influenced by America. A three state solution seems extreme, but may be the most viable. Tough choices abound.
I commend you on some good and balanced analysis. Iraq really only has ever existed as three separate states, strewn together under the rule of repressive, theocratic dictators. Essentially, all the war effort has done has lended some formality to this existence. Even so, there is no way to eradicate terrorism at its most fundamental level unless you are able to provide a good alternative to the vitriol and anti-Westerniztion, anti-globalization, and anti-semitism being preached by the Mullahs in the Arab schools. No one can know for sure if a Democratic Iraq can ever work or not and surely cannot deliver that kind of genuine assessment in a mere four years, no matter the poignancy of the current situation.
I've seen the example on here comparing al-Qaeda and other jihadists to metasticizing cells, broken away from the main tumor, and I think that's about the best analogy I've heard. We can continue to snuff out the rogue cells in response to a 9/11 event, only to inevitably face more malignant cells in the future or we can attempt to extricate the main tumor. How exactly we do that is THE debate.
BS.. first of all Der Spiegel is hardly liberal, it is very much similar to a mixture of Time and Newsweek.
This weeks cover story is Headlined "iraq set to disintegrate"
too bad world leaders aren't looking at this thread for sound advice on how to solve the problem in iraq...
"mooooooooom, susie took my toy!"
"no i didn't- billy took mine!"
oldfart wrote:
BS.. first of all Der Spiegel is hardly liberal, it is very much similar to a mixture of Time and Newsweek.
You do realize the ridiculous contradiction you just penned right? Or, maybe you don't, which reveals why everything you have ever said is ridiculous and inaccurate.
and coincidentally the federalist direction talked about in the der Spiegel article and by the iraq study group as 'the best hope for a secure region' was put forth over two years ago by Joe Biden.
Is this the same Joe Biden that was absolutely clear on WMD?
Joe Biden > August 4, 2002
"First of all, we don't know exactly what he has. It's been five years since inspectors have been in there, number one. Number two, it is clear that he has residual of chemical weapons and biological weapons, number one."
Hey Rush....WMD didn't scare the hell out of america to coax them into war....
No, it was the "smoking gun of a mushroom cloud" that was thought up by those effeminate blood thirsty members of the "office of special plans"
Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfewitz, Richard Perle, you ever see a picture of these guys? Frederick Kagan..William Kristol....lookes like a mommas boy convention. A bloodthirsty momma boys convention.
Condi, the vice president..all talking about that mushroom cloud and that propoganda started with Dougy Feith, Wolfy and the boys in the special plans branch of the defense department.
Chem/Bio wouldn't scare any country into saccepting war....hell Franconia probably has chem/bio..
The Office of Special Plans, brought about by Rummy who is quoted as saying "we will build our own intelligence agency"
Goebbels did it, He did it.
Was it worth their approach? If you still think so, in the words of Bob Herbert, "you are in need of therapy"
and for your response specifically:
Joe Biden > August 4, 2002
"This is a guy who is an extreme danger to the world, and this is a guy who is in every way possible seeking weapons of mass destruction."
Wondering wrote:
Your question should be: Were the Democrats who made all those statements (at least one running for the White House) really that obtuse?
Tell me. How did Bush dupe all those smart, intelligent Democrats in to believing we needed to invade Iraq? I mean, all we hear is how ignorant and stupid he is. How did he do that? Please tell me.
While you're at it, please explain to me why both Clintons, Pelosi, and all those other Democrats believed we needed to invade Iraq, even before Bush was elected.
Either Bush is a lot smarter than you give him credit for, or you Democrats are some really stupid butt wipes.
So, which is it?
I think what happened is Bush went to Congress asking for authority to use military force in Iraq. He said that he needed this authority to pressure Saddam into submitting to weapons inspections. So, the Congress approved. They thought, like many did, that Saddam was a threat as long as he didn't submit to weapons inspectors.
After authorization was approved, Saddam actually did let the weapons inspectors back in. At this point, the UN claimed there was no reason to invade, and many of the Democrats came out against using force at this point. If you were paying attention at the time, many groups were seeking more time for inspections and building a coalition of forces. Bush wasn't really interested in the inspections or a coalition, and so he invaded.
Wow, an article of support by Ralph Peters. I'm totally convinced that your argument is correct. Thanks for bringing this hard hitting piece of journalism courtesy of the New York Post. The Kurds who were blown to bits in Northern Iraq yesterday might think otherwise.
Wondering wrote:
Your question should be: Were the Democrats who made all those statements (at least one running for the White House) really that obtuse?
Tell me. How did Bush dupe all those smart, intelligent Democrats in to believing we needed to invade Iraq? I mean, all we hear is how ignorant and stupid he is. How did he do that? Please tell me.
While you're at it, please explain to me why both Clintons, Pelosi, and all those other Democrats believed we needed to invade Iraq, even before Bush was elected.
Either Bush is a lot smarter than you give him credit for, or you Democrats are some really stupid butt wipes.
So, which is it?
Uh, because the White House fabricated evidence of WMD's, suppressed evidence to the contrary and sold the intelligence of imminent threat? That's not an example of Bush being smart, it's an example of him being really, really stupid.
It is also an example of the Republican and Democratic leadership falling asleep at the wheel.
But I am curious, how does any of this sophomoric drivel help your implied cause that your side is better than their side? The White House got us into a war we cannot win, outspend or outlast. The screwed us and whether you're a Republican or Democrat it time to call out Bush and his cronies.