actually I'm inviting all our friends to jump in here and have their say.....
Bush is at a NATO summit....met with German Chancellor Merkel...remeber what happened last time?
Wonder what he'll do to embarrass himself...and us...this time?
update: This picture looks like She told him to "Keep his hands to himself"....rofl
He's going to meet with Iraqi President Maliki later on....in Jordan...
IN JORDAN? Is Maliki defecting?
Meanwhile, Al Sadr's Shiia faction has withdrawn from Maliki's Government....ummmm...aren't they THE MAJORITY PARTY?.... http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2991704
Try answering this: There is no doubt we're going to leave Iraq. Do you think we should do it gradually or quickly? Post in comments.
6 comments:
Are we using Marquess of Queensbury rules for this debate?
I'll chime in and risk a black eye.
If Iraq is in a civil war, as many have thought for a very long time (only the media is just waking up to it), clearly we have so thoroughly lost control of so much of the country that an immediate pull out won't make a hill of beans difference in the end result.
I listened to a soldier call in to Brian Lamb on CSpan this morning. He was one of the first over there. He's been back for awhile and expects to have to return to Iraq soon. I heard the anguish in his voice when he talked about how they just weren't able to do what they went there to do in his first tour. He said mistakes were made. He regretted that some of these mistakes were blown up in the media reports. I heard the futility in his voice when he went on to say that we apparently never learned from the mistakes in Vietnam. He says if he goes back, there will be no good deeds left to do. He saw his whole purpose in returning to Iraq as defending his fellow soldiers. That's it. I was eleven when we pulled out of Vietnam but it seems to me defending our soldiers is all we accomplished the last few years of that war, too.
Obviously we have a responsibility to Iraq but what will a slow retreat do for Iraq if things are rather futile now? What will we be buying with the lives of our soldiers if we choose a slow retreat? What's the exchange rate gonna look like and will we be creating new enemies or future terrorists every day we are there?
I say pull the troops out now. There are other ways to be involved in the mess we've created in Iraq that doesn't put our soldiers in harms way in an out of control civil war.
Mel
Sooner rather than later is what I would say. Since this war was a huge blunder from the beginning, and since no one has a plan which works, I see no point in wasting more lives there. I'm not only thinking of American losses but also huge Iraqi loss of life and many casualties among coalition forces.
I tend to agree that getting out fast is the best way to go but how do we answer the question the Neocons like to pose? That is, can we afford to leave behind a "failed State" (nevermind that these jerks are the ones who turned it into a failed state) and perhaps let it become another Afghanistan? How do we prevent that? How do the Iraqi people prevent that?
e
The neocons are about 4 years too late in asking the question "can we afford to leave behind a failed state?"
Before the invasion, all over the internet, people were pointing out how we have never been able to "install democracy" anywhere (back when that was the preferred excuse). Any student of history would say the neocons owned this grave mistake the minute they decided we should invade.
Though the "people" will put up with a surprising amount of hardships and oppresion, the fact is that without a strong (and often ruthless) military, no group of people can be governed without consent. It happened in communist Russia in 1986. It happened in the US in 1776. It's happened in banana republics and empires of all kinds throughout history.
Worse yet, the chimp went in without enough troops to do it right in the first place - once again a failure of the neocons' making. Let them live with it. Let them justify it. We were promised it would be over in 6 months. Have they forgotten that? We should be hearing mea culpas. Instead the neocons are doing everything they can to lay the blame for the fiasco in Iraq at the Dem's feet.
Not to give the maladministration any credit (surely they haven't thought this far out), but hasn't it always been the crucible of conflict that gives a country its leaders?
If it weren't for our Revolutionary War, would we have known who Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington were? Would we have selected them as the people most able and most trustworthy to lead us to a new government.
Iraq has been a dictatorship for so long. With Saddam's people gone, how does any Iraqi know who to trust to lead them. How do they find their Thomas Jeffersons and Benjamin Franklins? Considering what we've done to Iraq, perhaps the crucible of civil war is not the worst case senario.
The minute we leave - whenever we leave - I expect Iraq will fall into a religious civil war. Religious leaders are likely the only "leaders" the people have known for so long besides Saddam and his men. They will naturally fill the leadership void. Seems to me the chimp has been bucking the notion of a religious state all along when it may be the only viable avenue to a stable government.
You know, so many of us "traitorous peace kooks" predicted this outcome before the invasion. We pointed out that we've never been able to install democracy before. We predicted the religious unrest. We said if the invasion wasn't handled correctly we would leave Iraq worse than we found it. We said that if we didn't have the support of the world it would never work. The only thing we didn't expect was that the absolute incompetence of the administration would extend to the military when it came to managing the immediate aftermath of the invasion.
Our only chance to leave behind peace ended when we failed to restore Iraqi people's lives to some semblance of daily order. There will never be peace in a country without electricity, water, schools, jobs and hope.
So now that it's up to the Dems once again to clean up after the cons, seems to me we have little choice. The neocons have botched this to the point that the only thing we can do is leave Iraqis to determine their own way and hope they will still accept some guidance and support from us and the rest of the world. We owe it to them.
Mel
As a "fellow traitorous peacenik" I wholeheartedly agree with you, Mel. I remember having all the same thoughts as you right before our misguided leaders started this war. Thanks for saying it all so well for both of us!
Nice post Mel.....
I'm wondering if either the Sunni or Shiia populations would tolerate Al Queda in their midst. Would a new, independent Iraqi government expell Al Queda or would they embrace them like the Taliban?
True enough.
A new regime will arise from the ashes of the puppet government's demise, but who is the strongest? Will it be the "pro" or "anti" AQ forces?
e
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