Posted on 11/13/2006 8:51:39 AM PST by screw boll
As for your comments on Bush, they are not worth responding to.
Hey, when you think about it, he KNOWS they will screw him if they get the chance. We have never screwed him. You never know.
I agree with every word of your post but wasn't smart enough to say it.
"Your way may be a way to win, but it may not be the only way."
We'll never find out.
The President has made is icy clear that he is not ever going to take that route.
So, we will do something else. And lose.
Now, when we lose doing it that way, it remains true that we will have not tried all of the OTHER ways to lose, and so one will still be able to argue that taking sides in the civil war was not the ONLY way to win.
What we've seen so far is "Shock and Awe", conventional warfare, "Give 'em the vote", search-and-destroy, and "stand between the factions to prevent a civil war". None of those strategyies worked.
Right now, we' re seeing "Admonish the Iraqi leaders that we're going to pull out" strategy, which assumes that they have the power to do something we can't. They don't.
When that doesn't work, you're going to see "strategic redeployment" away from Iraq, and a civil war anyway.
The same people - the Shi'ites - are going to win the civil war whether we support them or not.
But the DIFFERENCES between us supporting them or not supporting them are many.
First, they are a heavy majorityy of the country. A Shi'ite Arabist majority government, supported by us, that has subjugated the Sunnis will be dependent on us for equipment, intelligence and support for a long, long time. As such, we will be able to temper their zeal for more warfare, with the Kurds, and absolute control of the whole country. It's in our interest that the Kurds and Shi'ites be in peace and the oil start flowing again.
With us gone, they'll shellack the Sunnis, and then be tempted to turn and bring the Kurds to heel too. Kurds are Sunnis too, after all.
Secondly, the strongest element among the Shi'ites are the (Iranian-)organized militias. These are the fools who are poised to fight the Sunnis, and anybody else who stands in their way. The Shi'ite government right now is not strong enough to be able to turn aside these Shi'ite militias. If we took sides and let the Shi'ites fight the Sunnis (who are blowing them up and committing mass murder), anti-Iranian pr-Arab Shi'ites would have their own armed forces, which would be larger than the couple of Shi'ite pro-Iranian militias. As things stand, we're not letting the Arabist government organize and arm to hammer the Sunnis - we're still preaching that Sunnis need to be given a lot of power and oil (which is NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN) - and so the Iranist Shi'ites are carrying all the fighting, and getting a better and better reputation from the terrorized Shi'ite general population.
But Bush has said we're not going to let the Sunni Arabs get their just deserts. So, Iran will get the country in the end.
Things are a bit more complicated in Iraq then Sunnis vs Shiites.
The fact is that most of Iraq is stable.
What we are hearing about is only the relatively few trouble spots.
It is reasonable that after years of tyranny, forming a stable gov't would be difficult.
If the problems in our cities were reported as they are in Iraq, one would think that the United States was in a state of anarchy.
We need U.S. troops in Iraq to be in position to move against Iran, which is really the key terrorist state.
We need we need we need...
but, you know what?
Our operations over there are build on feet made of clay, resting on sand, because American wars are lost by the collapse of American democratic opinion...Ike ran against Korea and won, Nixon ran against Vietnam and won, the Democrats just campaigned against the Iraq War and won.
With those victories came major redeployments and either a bitter status quo stalemate (Korea), or eventual defate and retreat (Vietnam). We are headed down the Vietnam road again, and for the same reason. The American public will not give any Administration the number of years necessary for a long, slow bleed, to win a war of attrition like we're fighting. It hasn't happened since women got the vote, and it isn't going to start.
So, we either tailor our tactics to grasp the reality that TIME is the one thing we DO NOT HAVE, because of our OWN people, or we don't and lose again.
In Iraq, it doesn't matter that "most is stable". What matters is that the insurgent parts that AREN'T stable - the Sunni triangle especially - have the sort of strong insurgency that can pull down order in the rest of the country if the Americans leave; particularly since Baghdad is a mixed area and the center of everything.
The "relatively few trouble spots" were sufficient to bring down the Republican Congress, and will be sufficient to cause American forces to be pulled out long, long before the mission is completed.
A long term strategy might well win - if we were a monarchy. But we're a democratic republic, and TIME is the one thing that our government does not have the luxury of. THEREFORE, our wars need to be very violent and very equipment heavy. That means civilian casualties, many, many more civilian casualties than we have inflicted, because our people will not give our government the TIME to carefully try to separate sheep from goats. Our people will forgive massive bloodshed (like Dresden or Hamburg or Tokyo or Hiroshima and Nagasaki), but they WON'T forgive a steady, relentless trickle of violence against our troops that goes effectively unanswered.
This is a lesson we should have learned by now. We have 50 years experience repeating the same damned error over and over again. Maybe this time we will. I'm not holding my breath, though.
They did?
Somebody better tell that to Liberman!
What the Democrats want you to believe is that they have a mandate on Iraq, but even in the two cases you cited, Ike and Nixon, the Americans wanted the war to be ended, not for us to retreat.
Nixon spent another four years in Vietnam and Ike had to leak out the notion of using atomic weapons.
Americans want clarity on Iraq, but the one place where someone was running on ending involvement and defeated in the primary a hawkish Democrat, the Democrats lost.
The Democrats had better not misread what the Americans have said on Iraq, Americans have never advocated running from a fight, they just want to know what the fight is about and our plans to win it.
Ain't gonna happen.
Sounds like Hillary gave him an ultimatum. They're looking for HIS vote and nothing more. They spit on him already. He's ready to switch.
Hillary supported Lamont all the way.
Better he is where he is so the Dems would be equal-opportunity nail-biters along with us.
Lets see how he votes for a while before giving him the store to switch.
Leni
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