The OFFICIAL I love W. thread!

If al quaida is left alon What happens? Do they just start growing petunias and singing sixties folk songs? If Al quaida has a place to train Jihaddiis (Like Irag) whill we be safer or more in danger?

We DID INVADE IRAQ!!! let's deal with reality and not what we wish happened. WE ARE IN IRAQ!!! WE ARE NOW FIGHTING AL QUAIDA IN IRAQ. THose are facts!! deal with them and then maybe you can deal with Reality

IF we leave the JIhaddiis wil use it as a staging area and they will grow stronger. We need to stop this from happening. DUH!!!

IF Jihaddiis are dead they don't fight us.....

If they have no staging and training areas they have a harder time organizing and growing.......

1) your crystal ball tells you what would have happened? More training more funding, more institutional support and yet they would be less dangerous? But this isn't logical.

Sir-Dulac seems to believe it is logical that if we leave Iraq and Al-Quaida/jihaddiis take over and can train without interference plan without distraction crush any dissent then we are more safe here at home. If we leave them alone they will come. There doctrine demands world conquest.

I already pretty much just answered you (I didn't see your last reply when I was typing my last post). But I will repeat a few points.

Where did I say to do "nothing" ?? I said don't attempt to invade a country that was not a major threat to us, on the cheap, without an exit strategy, and then F' it up so badly with incidents like Abu Gharaib and rapes and murders of innocents, and have the country become so f'd up that the average citizen actually says that despite hating Saddam, they think life was as least as good if not better with him in power! There is a big difference between doing "nothing" and doing what all of that. And finishing off the job we started in Afghanistan before starting a war of choice against Iraq would have been a nice idea too. Bin Laden and Al Zarwahiri got away, and so did many top Taliban leaders. We should have CERTAINLY focused on that first.

And Saddam actually kept the extreme religious fanatics in check and the jihadis mostly out of his country or under his thumb. He was a murderous tyrant, but fairly secular. But we opened the doors for jihadists to flood in and flourish there. And we f'd up the security for the average Iraqi so badly, we've given these Al Q types recruits to pick from. THAT is creating more terrorists than killing. Even Rummy, the leader of this fiasco, asked out loud in a memo that was released that he wasn't sure whether we were creating more terrorists than we were killing. And if Rummy admitted it might be true, it certainly is true (because he never wanted to admit any failures).

Our soldiers died overthrowing Saddam, attempting to calm the civil strife that ensued, fighting off the Sunni insurgents who didn't want Shiites dominating the gov't, fighting shiite militias that didn't trust us, fighting Al Q elements/sympathizers that came into the country after the war started, and getting in the middle of a civil war. THAT is what they have died for. It was not "protecting us." That may feel good to say, but helping to unleash and then getting caught in the middle of a civil war is not protecting us. They died for Bush's vision of a democratic beacon in the middle of the middle east. Well guess what, it ain't happening. The best we can hope for now is a few more years of civil war, then a divided country dominated by a shiite theocracy dominated by the likes of Moqtada al Sadr(who hates the US as much as Saddam ever did) and who is friendly to our enemey Iran. THAT is what they died for. They died for George Bush's foreign policy fiasco. And yes, it is tragic, tragic, tragic.

1) Terrorists and Jihadists were around before the Iraq War, before 9/11, hell before Clinton.

2) What happened is that the Terrorists got extremely lucky, a one in a million success, with the 9/11 attack.

3) If we tried to attack every Terrorist cell and every muderous ruler we'd never be at peace. In the end terror cells usually lack a strong government backing or support. So they tend to either fizzle out or get killed off by one another.

4) We broke it. We have to fix it. In a nutshell that is what Colin Powell said a few years ago. Right now the situation in Iraq is not going to be fixed with the military. Concessions are going to have to be made on both sides. That is what other past presidents have been good at and what this president fails to understand. You have to feed the devil a lamb to get your steak. That means leaving the Middle East entirely. The Arab masses have no reason to be upset at us if we leave the area and show compassion to BOTH sides of the Israeli situation.

Alan

robert wrote:

Sir-Dulac seems to believe it is logical that if we leave Iraq and Al-Quaida/jihaddiis take over and can train without interference plan without distraction crush any dissent then we are more safe here at home. If we leave them alone they will come. There doctrine demands world conquest.

Look, we've gone on long enough, and I will quit after these comments. All I will say is:

I haven't been talking about what should be done. I have been talking about what HAS been done, and what will be the likely terrible consequences of those terrible decisions. Yeah, it's so easy to say "look, we're there, let's deal with it, no crying over spilled milk, lets not point fingers or play the blame game, etc." when the war you supported (or in Bush's case, started) has gone so horribly wrong. Very easy to want to brush all that under the rug. Of course you and othe war supporters don't walk to talk about the horrible, criminal decisions made, and the mistakes that followed. Yeah, lets just forget all that, and move on, and give Bush a clean slate on all that, right? WRONG. He has cost this country a TRILLION $'s and 1000's and 1000's of dead and injured soldiers, not to mentioned 10,000's of dead Iraqis and millions of refugees. For what? A civil war and a country that will end up being allies with our enemy Iran. It's been a horrible fiasco with negative consequences for years to come, and Bush deserves every criticism he gets for it.

And I've alread said that where we are now , there are no good choices left. We are screwed, and I've never said leave Iraq immediately. But whether we leave or stay, or how long we stay, lives will be lost, millions of $'s will be spent, and the end result will be an unhappy one for us. But you think it was a good move because it stopped you and I from having to fight Al Q in hand to hand combat on our streets. Ok pal, whatever you're smoking, keep smoking it, because at least you must be feeling no pain.

robert wrote:

We DID INVADE IRAQ!!! let's deal with reality and not what we wish happened. WE ARE IN IRAQ!!! WE ARE NOW FIGHTING AL QUAIDA IN IRAQ. THose are facts!! deal with them and then maybe you can deal with Reality

This is a thread about loving W, and since W chose to invade Iraq, like a moron, this is the place to criticize him for it. By destabilizing Iraq, Bush basically created a safe haven for terrorists in Iraq.

Now if you want to shift the discussion to how we should best fight terrorism going forward, we should start by securing our borders. If we had secure borders, we could just pull out of Iraq and laugh our asses off at all the terrorists stuck there. With the saved money, we could increase our intelligence operations and locate more terrorist camps in the middle east and wipe them out with cruise missiles or air attacks. It doesn't require a large, occupying ground force to fight terrorism. In fact, that is probably the least effective way to fight terrorism. These are just random thoughts that are coming to my head. I'm sure there's a much better recommendation in some report from the Pentagon or something.

what is the basis of all your knowledge? did the government tell you all this? you guys have no idea what is really going on, in fact no one does except people of very high ranking.

Suck it libs!

Bush has had his minions kill 600,000+ CIVILIANS in Iraq, so that Iraq could be more unstable than it was before. All this and us fine tax payers have only had to pay about 9999999 zillion dollars. Very impressive GW. You are quite the fiscal conservative and humanitarian.

Bush likes to spend millions of tax payer dollars to blast a pile of rocks from one side of the hill to the other. Shittiest conservative ever he is.

RunDaddy wrote:

Another thing: I don't necessarily agree that Bush has "an unprecedented expansion" of executive power. That seems the popular snap judgment of the day. But if you go back and look at the power Nixon had (and abused terribly) before the Church Committee, it was a lot more than Bush has now. There was no FISA law under Nixon (or before), for example. There was also very little congressional oversight on intelligence activities. The president did not have to issue a 'finding' for covert operations under title 50.

The Patriot act relaxed some restrictions under FISA and EO1233, but it in no way put us back to the way things were before these laws were in place.

I think what is unprecedented about Bush is the assertion that, as Commander in Chief in a 'time of war' (of couse the US hasn't legally been at war since WWII) his actions are not subject to any legal constraints. Under this theory of a 'unitary executive' he feels free to ignore any and all laws, including those he hiimself signs.

we learned it from the bodybags of friends and relatives being shipped home from the hellhole that is Iraq. The fact of the matter is that Bush's leadership has been BEYOND disastrous. We are far more unsafe than we were before the fiasco in Iraq, and the scary thing is, those bloodthirsty chickenhawks now want to go after Iran!! NONE of these neo-conservative hacks have ever served. None of them have seen the true effects of war, and their Rah Rah Rah! bullshit has placed our country in international contempt, created a civil war in Iraq, and resulted in the slaughter of COUNTLESS civilians and thousands of soldiers. If I were president I would be drawing up evacuation plans as we speak, this is just like Vietnam.

Aside from Iraq, Bush's abuse of presidential powers is sickening. Guantanamo Bay's existence is flagrantly unconstituional, and Bush, Cheney and their cronies take pleasure in thumbing their noses at the Constitution and what our nation stands for.

A lot of people overlook that we were LIED to from the start of this quagmire. George Tenet claimed that we had "slam-dunk" intelligence showing Saddam had WMDs. I surely wasn't the only one who believed these lies, as I have been brought up (perhaps naively) to believe in and trust my government. Secret CIA prisons, use of torture, removal of Habeas Corpus, 1984 seems to be just around the corner...

I just pray we can hold it together until we can start to repair this mess in January 2009.

x y and z wrote:

I think what is unprecedented about Bush is the assertion that, as Commander in Chief in a 'time of war' (of couse the US hasn't legally been at war since WWII) his actions are not subject to any legal constraints. Under this theory of a 'unitary executive' he feels free to ignore any and all laws, including those he hiimself signs.

I think this is a bit of an overstatement, but you have a right to that opinion. I too am not comfortable with the James Yoo interpretation of the unitary executive.

But I am curious, what constitutes 'legally at war'? A Declaration of War from the Congress per Article I Section 8?

If that's what you mean, I have to disagree. It is true that the Constitution grants the sole power to declare war against a sovereign power to the Congress. What is not clear is that the Constitution forbids the president from using force to defend the nation without said declaration, per the vesting clause of Article II. In fact, no one can reasonably conclude that it would be practical or even possible that the president should obtain such a declaration to wage war in today's world.

Saddam wasn't going to launch anything anytime soon. We had him relatively contained.

Alan

Yep, Saddam was no threat to us whatsoever, saber-rattling regional menacing fool that he may have been.

Okay, what's next?

Did Bush even listen to Middle East experts or military experts before invading Iraq? I can guarantee you that no military expert advised invading Iraq. That would mean fighting on 2 fronts (Iraq & Afghanistan)...a no-no from a military standpoint.